Firewalls are Today's Necessity

A study from the University of Maryland reported that computers connected to the internet were attacked about every 39 seconds resulting in 2,244 attacks per day. The anti-virus company, Sophos, reports that many of the malware coming into computer systems are now trojans versus viruses which represent a 4-to-1 ratio respectively. Firewalls are now becoming a necessary front in warding off difficult to stop malware.

The first line of defense is protecting the perimeter with a hardware firewall.

Trend Micro Increases U.S. Sales

PC Virus Doctors have long used their virus scanner and now Information Week reports that their sales for security products have increased 11% in 2006 with an expected increase of 15% in 2007. Trend Micro credits the increase in sales partly with their partnership with Best Buy which is currently recommending the security product during in-house sales by "tech experts".

Dallas Data Recovery

Dallas Data Recovery

PC Virus Doctors has teamed up with a major data recovery service to extend our services for customers needing data recovery assistance. PC Virus Doctors can come to your home or establishment in any metroplex, city or town in the United States and retrieve your hard drive to forward to our data recovery partner to assess the drive and determine a cost analysis and determine if the data can be restored. There is NO Charge for assessment and our Data Recovery is Affordable.

Types of Devices to Recover Data:

CD/DVD
Flash Media
Hard Disks/Drives
iPods
Zip Drives
Most any Type Media and Operating System

Most often 96% of the data is recoverable but there is some marginal room for error. Our partner has the latest technology to ensure as much data is retrieved as possible. Under the most extreme difficult situations the hard drive is sent to the "Clean Room" where the most stringent forensic techniques are used to retrieve the data back to its original condition as best possible.

PC Virus Doctors' Data Recovery services the entire Nation and is available 24/7. We can retrieve and recover data from Desktops and laptops and even iPods. Do not hesitate to call and do not continue to use the drive if you have discovered that files are no longer accessible as you may overwrite the files making recovery more difficult.

Dallas Computer Repair can assist with and Dallas data recovery project, large or small.

Boot CD

Dallas Computer Repair Tech Boot CD

The Tech Boot CD© contains all the PC computer diagnostic and repair utilities, over 270 full programs, that will easily boot, repair, and keep Win XP Intel computers and earlier Win operating systems at 100%. The Tech Boot CD© is for novice through expert use that includes over 1500 PC computer repair tips and over 1500 glossary terms to help users have the best PC performance in daily use. Easily boot and repair your computer back to its original state. Any novice can boot this CD!

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The Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) can start a PC computer and perform tests that diagnose and repair problem hardware and system issues for Intel computers (any problems contact PC Virus Doctors' Dallas Computer Repair). The Ultimate Boot CD has 70 tools that can test all the major brand PC computer hard drives, run anti-virus scanning, run memory and RAM tests, check computer systems and file systems, and enable CMOS password recovery. The boot cd can perform hard disk wiping, disk cloning, partitioning, perform benchmarks, repairs and more.

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- KNOPPIX Boot CD 5.0.1 totals more than 900 installed software packages with over 2000 executable user programs, utilities, and games. - KNOPPIX Boot CD does not have to be installed on a hard drive but can be run directly from the disk itself.

- The Boot CD has utilities for data recovery and system repairs, even for other operating systems.

-Full documentation for the Knoppix Boot CD is available from several Knoppix sources.

Dallas Data Recovery | Dallas Computer Repair | Dallas Laptop Repair | Dallas iPod Repair | Computer Virus Removal | Boot CDs

Lock Your Doors for Computer Security

Marc Weber Tobias, an investigative attorney and security specialist out of Sioux Falls, S.D. says the first line of defense in computer security is to make sure the physical access to computers is locked and secure. Tobias who will speaking at the Hack in the Box Security Conference 2007 said that 95% of tumbler locks can be compromised with a blank key and then "bumped" with a mallet or similar instrument that pushes the pins of the lock up where the lock can be opened. A simple procedure where picked locks produce a big cache for thieves.

Dallas Computer Repair urges home owners, office owners and IT staff to buy the most secure locks to ensure their confidential data is not compromised or where computers and laptops may be stolen.

IBM and Cisco Emergency Crisis Management

Cisco and IBM have announced that they are now able to give emergency preparedness teams communications from different platforms that are integrated into their routers. The routers will be able to handle wireless communications from different frequencies and bridge them together to enable more efficient communications in times of emergencies such as Hurricane Katrina, earthquakes and tsunamis that have left communications spread across multiple frequencies.

Dallas Computer Repair is equipped with wireless communications in the amateur radio frequency range that enable them to communicate locally as well as globally to respond in a somewhat sufficient manner but the cross platform routers will be much more efficient so Dallas Computer Repair can patch not only into telephone systems which more often are down but into different local frequencies where we do not have the equipment to run. This will be invaluable for emergency response teams.

Chinese Hackers

Dallas Computer News: Symantec is reporting that Chinese hackers are stealing online identities of people gaming online. The players targeted are playing Lineage and World of War Craft where their identities are stolen and then sold to less apt gamers where they gain prestige appearing as an upper level player. The hackers are having a bit of fun while creating a market where they can gain financially.

Symantec reports that the US leads malicious cyber activity about 30% followed by China 10% and Germany 7%. China is now becoming a powerhouse, according to the Information Week article, for viruses, phishing scams and botnets. Also to note is that China has been launching 0-day exploits at the US military installations.

Take note people and secure your computer through Dallas Computer Repair.

Google Pack and Norton Anti-Virus

Dallas Computer Repair downloaded Norton Anti-virus as a partial Google Pack download along with Google Earth. Google Earth was the slowest download experienced on the internet in quiet some time. Are Google's servers really that slow? Apparently, the servers are in the Googlebot mode and are busy servicing the search engines rather than allowing for expedient downloads if indeed the download came from Google's servers.

The Norton Anti-virus downloaded much easier, however, the version was from March of 2006 which took forever and a day to update. Is it really that hard for Norton to update their download version for Google? Apparently so as PC Virus Doctors are seeing this as a trend from other anti-virus vendors.

Dallas Computer Repair ran a scan that went fairly quickly as the internet was being used by the computer and the scan ran well without noticing any much of interference from the scan and the scan came clean but we expected adware or spyware at least (if not something worst) to show up if something not nastier since the particular computer has been behaving sluggish with the mouse suspecting some type of logging.

Mozilla Firefox Release 2.0.0.2

Well finally, Mozilla Firefox has announced that it is going to start releasing updated-patched version of Firefox as flaws and vulnerabilities are discovered. The first releases will be available to beta testers and then shortly after the releases will be available to the public according to Dallas Computer Repair. It appears that users will have to download the full version where the bookmarks will be imported to the new updated browser upon installation rather than just patching the browser.

Tech Support from India

Indian tech support is so lousy and the large corporations are eventually going to get it figured out later versus sooner. Who wants to do tech support after waiting for hours to be cold shouldered by some ignoramus who couldn't find their way out of a shoe box.

Keep it up boys and girls in the overseas tech help, you are driving business back to the states.

Daylight Savings-time and Windows and Government Incompetency

Dallas Computer Repair was attempting to check the new time and to ensure the computers were timed correctly when the phone and an atomic clock were noted to be one hour ahead today, Sunday, March 11, 2007. One would suppose after the US Congress voted 5 years ago to have the spring time, daylight savings-time which goes forward one hour to at least be honored by its own government run time servers. But once again the government screwed that up and it is now 9:41 PM in Dallas, TX but the time server time-a.nist.gov still reports 8:41 PM, as well as time.nist.gov and time.windows.com that is built into Windows. What could possibly be so difficult or overseen as to make sure the adjustments at the government institutions would reflect the proper time and that Bill Gates huge corporation were also so incompetent as to screw this up.

Here is the big question...How much is this going to cost us taxpayers.

Apple Flaw in QuickTime

Secunia.com has reported that QuickTime has a buffer overflow problem that allows malicious computer users to compromise systems. Apple has assured users that it has been resolved through the new release; so everyone update your quicktime to avoid hacking, according to Dallas Computer Repair.

Gmail

Gmail has stepped up security finally asking those who receive emails from security companies touting stocks that allegedly are hot. The estimates of email solicited campaigns for stock solicitations is 100 million per month. Report these guys and lets end this bogus reporting crap.

HckPk- the Latest and Greatest

Like we at Dallas Computer Repair don't have enough malware to recognize and neutralize, now there is a new technique employed to hide the old mainstay malware with masks that make them appear as unique or new when they are simply disguising who they really are.

A few weeks ago while laboring over a laptop repair, PC Virus Doctors could not find any malware although all the malicious software symptoms were present. Many scanners were employed, including online scanners and nothing was showing up. A rootkit was then suspected, however, no rootkit scanners were picking anything up.

The authors of Dref and Dorf have used several masks to hide their viruses and they can morf the masks into thousands of variations, according to Information Week's latest article. HckPk, the masking piece of malware, accounted for over half of malware seen in February's infections with over 6,000 variations. When the worm Storm hit the internet it morphed over 1,500 times the first weekend according to the ant-virus vendor Sophos.

As HckPk is able to mask and hide itself within conventional malware and be tweaked and tuned by virus writers it will leave anti-virus vendors with a hefty workload trying to figure out how to put a stop to the problem Not only is the unlimited morphing an issue but each morphed version must first have its code unraveled.

The solution to this new problem will no doubtedly bring a new module of anti-virus scanning to the heuristic model. That being said, with the morphing appears to have no set limits on how it changes so it looks like the anti-virus engineers will have their work cut out for the for quite some time.

The big boy vendors like McAfee and Norton, reputedly sequester their anti-virus teams until they can identify the malware and provide a "fix", may be in for a long-haul.

Break out the coffee pots boys and girls. It's going to be a long picnic.