Hati-hati karena semua itu hanyalah trik orang yang iseng untuk memanfaatkan akun Facebook Anda. Inilah bentuk virus baru di Facebook untuk mencuri data pribadi penggunanya. Jika pelakunya jahat, maka bukan tidak mungkin akun Anda dipakai untuk bermacam penipuan lewat Facebook.

Kalau ditelusuri, Graham Cluley dari perusahaan keamanan internet dan komputer Sophos sudah mengingatkan bahwa penyebaran virus ini sudah berlangsung sejak Agustus 2010. Menurutnya, penyebar virus memang selalu mengubah judul, tetapi semuanya terkait McD. Walau begitu, judul tersebut bisa saja diganti dengan judul menarik apa pun. Facebook pun sudah dihubungi untuk mencegah penyebarannya. Namun, virus itu rupanya masih bisa bocor hingga ke pengguna Indonesia.

Bagaimana sang pelaku mencuri data Facebook Anda? Begini cara kerjanya. Undangan tersebut menyertakan tautan ke alamat situs dengan iming-iming video berisi informasi aneh tentang McDonald. Begitu tautan tersebut diklik, akan muncul aplikasi Facebook dengan nama “Worst McD’s Customer”. Untuk dapat membuka video, halaman tersebut meminta izin Anda untuk mengakses identitas, posting di wall, akses data kapan saja, akses ke informasi kontak, bahkan mengatur halaman di Facebook.

Jika pilihan allow yang diklik, boro-boro dapat video yang diharapkan. Aplikasi tersebut malah mengirimkan secara otomatis undangan yang sama ke semua teman Anda. Bayangkan kalau semua yang diizinkan pengguna dimanfaatkan pelaku. Halaman Facebook Anda bakal diacak-acak.

Jadi, kalau dapat undangan dengan judul terkait McD dan sejenisnya, abaikan saja. Kalau ragu-ragu, cek informasi apa saja yang mereka ingin akses. Jika berlebihan, tinggalkan tautan tersebut. Jangan gadaikan keinginan Anda melihat video aneh-aneh dengan mengorbankan semua akses ke akun Facebook Anda ke orang lain.

Nah, lalu bagaimana kalau Anda telanjur terkena jebakan tersebut? Tenang saja, masih ada cara untuk mengobatinya. Menurut Cluley, hapus semua referensi yang mengarah ke link tersebut, baik di status maupun setting aplikasi. Pastikan tidak ada bagian Facebook Anda yang mengarahkan ke tautan tersebut.

Genital warts can appear at any portion of the body. In the case of sores and blisters that happen in the genital area, they are caused by HPV or the human papillomavirus. HPV is caused by sexual contact. The HPV infection is a common STD or sexually transmitted disease in North America. If the virus is dangerous it can also cause penile or cervical cancer.

According to a survey done by Center for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 50% of the people who are termed as sexually active have been affected by HPV at some time or the other. After the person is infected, the warts may appear within a month or three months after the infection. Although warts are common in this disease, there are some who might not have warts at all. If you feel that you are infected by warts, you should consult the doctor immediately. Genital warts can look like red growths or bumps, or they can take the color of flesh. The bumps generally appear around the vagina or anus, and at times on the cervix. Sometimes they can be extremely painful if the bumps appear on groin, thigh, penis and scrotum.

Sometimes the warts can look like a cauliflower, and at times that are so tiny, that they can be hardly noticed. There can be multiple blisters or a single blister. At times they can appear in clusters. If the person had oral sex with his or her partner, the genital warts can appear inside the throat or the mouth of a person. The main reason behind the spread of HPV is oral, anal or genital sex with an infected partner. At times it is difficult to know if you are affected or not, because like most of the STDs you will never find any visible symptoms. In most women warts are found either on the cervix or inside the vagina. In case of men, they are found on the tip of the penis.

Although genital warts are common, they are perfectly curable and there are some viruses that may lead to cervical cancer. Women should have annual pap tests in order to know if there are any abnormalities. During pregnancy genital warts can become prominent. If they are near the vaginal opening, they may cause complications during childbirth. There are people who can shun themselves from any contact with the outside world if they are detected with HPV. It is better not to stigmatize yourself with anyone and create opportunities for dialogue and dating. There are millions of people living with HPV and Herpes looking to meet other people living with the virus.

Computer viruses are everywhere! This guide will show you how to stay alert and how to avoid getting infections on your computer. Having an updated virus scanner is only a small part of this, there are many ways that you can prevent having viruses other than a virus scanner, as it will not always save you.

Types of viruses
There are many type of viruses. Typical viruses are simply programs or scripts that will do various damage to your computer, such as corrupting files, copying itself into files, slowly deleting all your hard drive etc. This depends on the virus. Most viruses also mail themselves to other people in the address book. This way they spread really fast and appear at others’ inboxes as too many people still fall for these. Most viruses will try to convince you to open the attachment, but I have never got one that tricked me. In fact, I found myself emailing people just to make sure they really did send me something. It does not hurt to be safe.

Worms
Worms are different type of viruses, but the same idea, but they are usually designed to copy themselves a lot over a network and usually try to eat up as much bandwidth as possible by sending commands to servers to try to get in. The code red worm is a good example of this. This worm breaks in a security hole in Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Server) in which is a badly coded http server that, despite the security risks, a lot of people use it. When the worm successfully gets in, it will try to go into other servers from there. When IceTeks was run on a dedicated server at my house, there was about 10 or so attempts per day, but because we ran Apache, the attempts did not do anything but waste bandwidth and not much as I had it fixed a special way. Some worms such as the SQL slammer will simply send themselves over and over so many times that they will clog up networks, and sometimes all of the internet. Worms usually affect servers more than home users, but again, this depends on what worm it is. It is suspected that most worms are efforts from the RIAA to try to stop piracy, so they try to clog up networks that could contain files. Unfortunately, the RIAA have the authority to do these damages and even if caught, nothing can be done.

Trojans
Trojans are another type of virus. They are simply like a server in which enables hackers to get into and control the computer. A trojan such as Subseven can enable a hacker to do various things such as control the mouse, eject the cd-rom drive, delete/download/upload files and much more.

MBR virues
Boot sector viruses are another type, they are similar to file viruses, but instead they go in the boot sector and can cause serious damage when the computer is booted, some can easily format your drive simply by booting your computer. These are hard to remove.

Most viruses have various characteristics. For example, a worm can also be a trojan and also infect the boot sector. It all depends on how the virus is written and what it is designed to do. That’s why there are not really strong structured categories, as they can easily mix one in the other.

Know the potentially dangerous files
Like any other files, viruses must be opened in order to do something. Most viruses come through e-mail as an attachment. Some will make it look like it’s someone you know, and it will try to convince you to open an attachment. Never open attachments at any cost! Some viruses will infect files in programs, so opening a program will actually open the virus, maybe the same one, or another part of it.

All files have what is called an extension; This is the 3 last letters after the last period. For example, setup.exe has a file extension of .exe.

Extensions to watch out for are .exe .com .bat .scr .pif .vbs and others, but these are the most seen. .exe .com .bat .pif and .scr are valid extensions for executables. A virus writer will simply rename it to one of these and it will work the same way. .pif is a shortcut to an ms-dos program and will have the ms dos icon, but will still execute whatever code is in it, so an .exe can be renamed to .pif and be run the same way. .bat is a batch file, which can contain instructions to do various file activities, but again, a .exe can be renamed to .bat and it will execute it! .vbs is a visual basic script. For some reason, Microsoft provides this scripting language along with the scripting host to make it more convenient to design and write viruses quickly and easily, I’ve never seen another use for this scripting language other than for writing viruses. There are programs that are written with that language, but it is compiled into an exe. Exe is the usual extension for programs, you would not have a software CD install a bunch of vbs files all over!

Bottom line is, if you don’t know what a file is just don’t open it. Some viruses will sometimes be named a way as to mask the real file extension to make it look like a harmless file such as a image file. This is easily noticed, but can still be missed. Simply don’t open unexpected files.

If you get something that appears like something legit, just ask the person it came from if they sent it. Most viruses use a friend’s address to make it look like it comes from them. The virus does this by using the person’s address when sending itself to the address book contacts.

Downloads
Email is not the only way to get viruses; P2P (file sharing programs such as kazaa, winmx, direct connect etc) is also another way to get viruses.

When downloading programs, the main thing to watch out for is the file size. If you are downloading a program that you expect to be rather large such as a game, don’t grab a file that is 10KB, since it’s most likely a virus. However, I’ve been caught with a virus even with large files, so file size is not the only thing to watch, as an exe is still valid even if junk is added at the end, so a 64KB virus will still function even if it is turned into 650MB.

Icons are something to look for too, fortunately, virus writers don’t take time to put icons. If your download should be a setup file, you should see the icon of a setup file. If it’s just the blank icon that typical plain or corrupted exes have, don’t open it.

Another thing to do, which should be obvious, is to scan the file for viruses using updated virus definitions. But don’t rely on only your virus scanner, as they are not perfect, and if the virus has not been reported to them yet, they won’t know to create a definition for it!

Changing settings to stay safe
If you do open a virus, you want to avoid it going to all your friends. The simplest thing to do is to NOT use the windows address book. It is easy for viruses to get through and Microsoft is not doing anything about it. Just don’t use it. Put them in spreadsheet or even better write them down somewhere. Don’t use the address book.

Another “feature” to avoid is the auto preview. Some viruses can attempt to open themselves just by opening the email. There are security holes in Microsoft mail programs that allow this. In Microsoft Outlook, click on the view menu and remove auto preview. You need to do this for every folder, but the inbox is most important. In Outlook Express, click on the view menu and go to layout. In the dialog box, you will see a check box for show preview pane. Uncheck it and click ok.

Another thing you should change, especially if you download a lot, is the option that allows you to view the file extension. In Win98, go in any folder, click on view then folder options and choose the view tab and where it says hide file extension for known types, uncheck it. In win2k, it is the same process, but instead, go in the control panel and open the folder options icon.

Avoiding server worms
Some viruses, mostly worms, can exploit through servers and affect other servers from servers that have been infected. A good example is the SQL slammer. This was a worm that affected SQL servers run by Microsoft IIS and Microsoft SQL Server. Once the worm gets in, that particular server starts trying to find more exploitable driving internet connections to a halt in the process. Servers running Apache were unaffected by that, except for the many hits to try to get in. IceTeks received about 100 hits per day when it was run on a dedicated home server. Most hits came from major ISPs and other big websites that had no clue they were still affected.

The simple solution to avoid these types of viruses is to NOT use Microsoft based server software for your server, especially if it is a public server. The operating system is also crucial, but the actual server software is much more. Apache, which is free, is much more secure than Microsoft based server programs such as IIS. IIS may be easier to understand and administer, but it saves a lot of hassle to learn how to use Apache. IIS has a large number of vulnerabilities, such as the ability to gain access to cmd.exe and basically delete the whole drive by doing a ../ request in the address bar. These don’t require viruses, but simply commands, but there are worms written to automatically make these commands. The code red does this.

Removing a virus
The best way to do this is to do a clean install. However, depending on how bad the virus is, a simple clean install won’t remove it. So to be extra sure, you’ll want to do a low level format. This is especially true of you got a boot sector virus, as even repartitioning and formatting won’t quite remove it, but sometimes you can get away with an fdisk /mbr, but not all the time. here are various removal tools for viruses, it is good to use them and see if they work, but proceeding with the clean install is recommended. You never know if the virus is completely removed by deleting files you suspect are infected. Some viruses such as the Bugbear will close anti virus programs and other programs to make it hard and annoying to figure out what to do. A clean install is the best way to ensure that it’s gone for good.

Viruses are out there, don’t be one of the many infected ones! Stay alert and stay safe! Don’t open unexpected files, regularly update your virus definitions and scan downloaded files!

It has been over a month since we heard much about Conficker, but the worm has reappeared with a vengeance over the past seven days. According to Finnish security company F-Secure, more than one million PCs have been infected with the worm (also known as Kido or Downadup) in the past 24 hours, with a total of 3.52 million machines infected worldwide. According to F-Secure, that 3.52 million is a conservative estimate.

The problem isn’t so much with the older version of Conficker (now known as Conficker.A) but with a new flavor, dubbed Conficker.B. Ars spoke with Roger Halbheer, Chief Security Advisor of Microsoft’s EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa); he’s been monitoring (and writing) about the current spread of infections. The skyrocketing infection rate is actually being caused by several factors; Roger describes Conficker.B as a “beast,” and Microsoft has built the following diagram to demonstrate how the worm functions.

Once run or given access to an unprotected machine, Conficker.B begins searching for other systems or shares within the local network that it can infect. Shared systems, removable drives, or unpatched systems are all eligible targets, as are machines with weak passwords. This last bit is an important new feature of Conficker.B; a complete list of the passwords it checks for can be found here. If Conficker.B manages to successfully guess a password, it moves in and continues hunting for new targets. Microsoft summarizes the new strain as follows:

Worm:Win32/Conficker.B is a worm that infects other computers across a network by exploiting a vulnerability in the Windows Server service (SVCHOST.EXE). If the vulnerability is successfully exploited, it could allow remote code execution when file sharing is enabled. It may also spread via removable drives and weak administrator passwords. It disables several important system services and security products.

Roger confirmed that the Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) has checked for and removed Conficker.B since December 29, 2008, but it’s not possible to access any Microsoft website once Conficker.B has infected a system; the worm blocks access to multiple domains based on string identification. If you’ve got a system that’s infected, you’ll need to download the latest MSRT from Microsoft on a clean system and run it manually.

Not all AV scanners currently detect Conficker.B, even if they’ve been updated to detect Conficker.A-I don’t have a list of specific solutions that can’t currently catch the new worm, but all of Microsoft’s antimalware/antivirus products-Forefront, OneCare, and the Online Safety Scanner-will find Conficker.B if it’s present (and you somehow haven’t noticed). If there’s a scrap of good news in all this, it’s that Conficker.B is not a subtle worm.

Roger has provided some additional coverage on the worm that may be useful. First and foremost, he recommends installing MS08-067-this will not remove an existing infection, but it will guard against attack from either version of the agent, provided you aren’t using weak passwords.

When Conficker.A first appeared, we raised the question of whether or not Microsoft should force updates in certain situations, and what those situations might be. In this case, even unilaterally enforced updates wouldn’t solve the problem of weak passwords, but it would have undoubtedly cut the number of new infections we are seeing today. The size of that reduction would be the point on which the value of forced updates would turn, and of course, that’s the one thing we can’t predict; there are holes in existing AV products that would allow Conficker.B through, and the worm will attack and infect machines using weak passwords. Depending on how you view the situation; this second strain could reinforce the need for mandatory updates or blow a hole in the argument.

Part of the reason for the problem, however, must inevitably come back upon the users, IT administrators, or managers that opted not to install the patch. As Roger writes: “If you decide not to roll out a security update which is so critical that we decide to go out of band, you play Russian Roulette with your network…The same is actually true if you do not run and maintain an appropriate Anti-Malware solution…Now, if we look at Conficker.B: This is really an ugly beast: You need just one infected machine in your network in order to have it spread across your network fast and aggressively. You can get it even through a USB-stick…it just needs one unpatched/infected machine.”

Indeed. Based on the characteristics of a worm such as this, even mandatory updates would only be one facet of prevention.