I heard that the botnet master of the Zeus Botnet flipped the kill switch on more than 100,000 bots. I guess they have plenty of info to harvest before some of these users get their systems back up and running. I also heard that another controller may have hijacked the Botnet and bsod'd the Botnet.

It is pretty funny that during the course of my travels across the electronic wastelands of this digital life I have seen an increase in "fake virus" alerts taking to systems. I just took care of three similar attacks and from what I have learn from the experience is that if you wait too long to repair this problem... Just like a cancer... This attack spawns new dimensions of infections.

KNOW WHAT YOUR ANTIVIRUS LOOKS LIKE! All too many times someone sees "the message". It usually states that the virus scanner found a great number of infections and it needs you to fix it. Now the funny thing is either you bought your antivirus or it is free.. Like AVG and etc. What do you know.. Now it is asking you to purchase it. Since you want this god awful infection gone, you quickly reach for your wallet or purse so that you can get this wrapped up quickly before you loose your family pictures to the void of a zero filled drive if by chance this virus decides now is the time.

Too many times we hit the "panic button" but we need to stop for a moment and analyze what is happening. Things like you using Symantec's (Norton) Antivirus but the alerts are coming from a program called "Mr. Antivirus". I have also seen emails claiming to be from institutions or ISPs but on inspection of the header (email to and from information) displayed conflicting information. It is one thing to get scam mail from bank "A" when you do your banking at bank "B" but what happens when you get the magic email that matches your account type?

A person I know uses SBC Global for her ISP and it just so happens that a scam mail that she received was from SBC Global claiming that her account had a virus and her login information was needed in order for the company to run a virus scan on her account and if she did not comply her account would be shut down. She is not completely tech savvy but luckily she knew something was fishy (no pun intended on this fishing scam). Upon review of the header.. It was supposed to be from SBC Global but the email that it came from was a wacked out name @yahoo.com. This is a first step in detecting the false creds in a email. Sometimes this can be difficult if the smtp origin address has been forged. At this point you will have to look for other clues like the route but we will leave that one for another day.

Simple enough to say and another thing to do but if you feel that something isn't right like misspelled words or crazy requests... Stop and check out what you have in front of you.

Maybe this is the reason that this printer was sitting to the side all by its lonesome! I have read so many different places that this type a printer sucks and I was like "nooo", We will get it rolling. Needless to say, it goes.... slowly and sometimes with errors. Since one person is primarily using this printer, I will just put the old fashion USB to it and get it out of the way. I have not been able to concentrate on that due to higher powers and now that I have the chance...

This is FYI in case someone in need of information comes across this...
At one of the companies that I work for is an HP Color LaserJet (3600) that I installed on a small business server as a share for a few of the workers. Well... you would think that these guys were tree killers from all the paper the print jobs was wasting during the print sessions. I guess the issue was an error:

PCL XL error
Subsystem: KERNAL
Error: Missing Data
Operator: VendorUnique
Position: XXX

This Error would happen during the print job and would stop the current print. Sometimes it would even restart it to try again which would again fail... what a hairpull! After doing some research I found out that the drivers that goes with that printer are pcl6 and nothing else. The printer is also Host based. This was the problem. I will have to admit it is a really good printer but it is as good as a brick if people cannot print to it properly. As I investigated further I found out from a post that there is a pcl5 BETA driver out for the Host based 3500 version. It was said that using this driver would resolve the known issues of the PCL-XL Errors. I guess this is also an issue with other HP Series. Oh well... These things happen. I decided to give it a shot and so far it has cleared it up. If not you will hear from me soon!

You can get the driver from here: HP LaserJet BETA Software . Look for the "PCL-XL Error Fix" header. Of course it is not digitally signed... it's BETA you know.

NOTE: A theft Recovery system that ships on various laptops like HP, Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, Gateway, Asus and Panasonic has been found to be a BIOS Rootkit that allows a hacker to hijack and control that machine. It is said that this affects atleast 60% of total laptops from these manufactures. This sounds like an issue to me. If you want to read more about this, head over to this link:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=3828&tag=nl.e550http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=3828&tag=nl.e550