Postcard Virus, The followup.
Postcard Virus. <=== Previus post about the postcard virus
Is it real, or is it a hoax? Well…
The postcard Virus is real. But it does not “burn” or “blow up” your hard drive. That is just made up.
As you know, (maybe) this virus spreads itself as a postcard email attachment. Once run, It infects your computer and goes through your contact on your computer. The postcard virus then takes all your contacts on your computer and emails them from there. With the attachment postcard.exe. It comes from Hallmark.
I had a client this week, that had trouble with their computer. Their Internet Explorer would not stay open, kept on closing everytime it went to a different website. If it did not close it came up with a message saying that the website is unsecure and you are going to get a virus if you view it. I doubt that google.com and yahoo.com and microsoft.com have the same virus
But the first thing I noticed was that the background had an active desktop recovery screen. I have not seen one of those in about 3 years.
Most of the services stopped working. I could not open my computer, I could not use ctrl+alt+Del, Msconfig would not work, regedit would not open. AVG was close and could not start, Aswell as Norton’s.
I then learnt that the postcard virus kills all those services that have the following strings in: AVG, Norton, defender, and basically all the known anti virus protection programs.
I did find out how exactly the virus works. but have lost the website. As soon as I find it , I will post it and let you know.
After hours of struggling, I eventually had to format the computer and reinstall.
I did believe that this virus was a hoax, But after this experience, I changed my mind. This is one of the most severe viruses I’ve dealt with in a very long time.
I hope that this answers your questions and explains some things to you.
Robert
what is spam?
Are you getting emails that try and sell you all sorts of stuff? do you have a blog, and you are getting 400+ comments a day on your blog with a whole bunch of links to some website?
I think you are suffering from Spam my friend. So, what is spam
Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send — most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender.
There are two main types of spam, and they have different effects on Internet users. Cancellable Usenet spam is a single message sent to 20 or more Usenet newsgroups. (Through long experience, Usenet users have found that any message posted to so many newsgroups is often not relevant to most or all of them.) Usenet spam is aimed at “lurkers”, people who read newsgroups but rarely or never post and give their address away. Usenet spam robs users of the utility of the newsgroups by overwhelming them with a barrage of advertising or other irrelevant posts. Furthermore, Usenet spam subverts the ability of system administrators and owners to manage the topics they accept on their systems.Email spam targets individual users with direct mail messages. Email spam lists are often created by scanning Usenet postings, stealing Internet mailing lists, or searching the Web for addresses. Email spams typically cost users money out-of-pocket to receive. Many people - anyone with measured phone service - read or receive their mail while the meter is running, so to speak. Spam costs them additional money. On top of that, it costs money for ISPs and online services to transmit spam, and these costs are transmitted directly to subscribers.
One particularly nasty variant of email spam is sending spam to mailing lists (public or private email discussion forums.) Because many mailing lists limit activity to their subscribers, spammers will use automated tools to subscribe to as many mailing lists as possible, so that they can grab the lists of addresses, or use the mailing list as a direct target for their attacks.
Wonderfull world of Firewalls
Firewalls make it possible to filter incoming and outgoing traffic that flows through your system. A firewall can use one or more sets of “rules” to inspect the network packets as they come in or go out of your network connections and either allows the traffic through or blocks it. The rules of a firewall can inspect one or more characteristics of the packets, including but not limited to the protocol type, the source or destination host address, and the source or destination port.
Firewalls can filter traffic and block anything you don’t want on your network. you can block Spam Sites, Facebook, dodgy sites, it can even pick up on the pictures on websites and block those for you aswell. You can also set up a firewall to only allow traffic to certain sites. So you could block EVERYTHING and only allow the computers on your network to access your company website.
I use a firewall called Clarckconnect. With that I can monitor the bandwidth usage on my network, I can see who visited what websites, and How much data was used on that website. I also use my Firewall as an FTP server to store data on, sothat I can get to that data from anywhere. I can set up remote access to my firewall and do work on my computer at home while I’m sitting in mug and bean.
Is it still safe then? yes. Firewalls use https protocols witch means its a secure protocol where you have to log into. Even more, The firewall uses a specific port (set by user). so Without knowing what your DNS name is or the public I P address for your firewall and not knowing what port to use. No one is able to get into your firewall or network.
Some points to what A firewall can do.
In practice, many firewalls use two or more of these techniques in parallel
