Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Online Scan - Websites

Infected websites can be sources of driveby infections or hijacks. You only need to go to those infected websites without clicking anything else and your PC will get infected. There are online scanning tools that check websites if they are safe or not. I suppose none of the scanning tools is 100% accurate so it may be good to scan using a few such website scanning tools.

This page aims to list a collection of useful online tools that is able to scan websites, given a specific URL / website address. These scanning tools are useful when you need to check if a website is safe from malware, hijacks, or other types of infection. 

If you are looking for free antivirus that provides online scans of your actual computer / PC, rather than websites, then go to Online Scan - Antivirus

The website helps to decide that a website is safe to visit and share information with.

https://retire.insecurity.today/   EXCELLENT
Check your site for javascript libraries with known vulnerabilities, especially Cross Site Scripting.

Unmask Parasites
This is a from another article ..... Basically the four links are:
*** replace www.example.com with your website


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Detect If Your Web Pages Link to Infected Sites or Serve Malware Themselves
WRITTEN BY AMIT AGARWAL ON NOVEMBER 26, 2008
http://www.labnol.org/internet/detect-webpages-that-serve-malware/5597/

Find Security Holes in your Website
1. Scandoo Google Search – Scandoo is a wrapper around Google Search that adds visual hints in search results so you can easily know if the target page is safe or not.

Here’s how you can use Scandoo to detect problems with your own site. Just type site:domain.com in the search box and it will show the safety rating of every web page on your site. So if I were the owner of warez.com, this is what I would see on my screen:



2. Live Webmaster Tools – You can add your site to Live Webmaster and then use the Crawl Issues section to find out about all pages on your site that are possibly infected with malware. The tool will also help you learn about external links on your site that point to pages hosting malware.



3. McAfee Site Advisor - Type in the address of your website and Site Advisor will prepare a very detailed report of possible issues. You will know if that site points to some bad neighborhood or if there are any links to executables and zip files that are infected with virus or spyware. This tool was developed at MIT and later acquired by McAfee.



4. Google Safe Browsing – Add your own website URL to the Safe Browsing diagnostic page and it will tell you if Google has classified that site under malware. If the site is flagged as suspicious, the best option it fix the pages and request a review of your site using Google Webmaster Tools.



While Google will only tell you if the site is infected, you really need to verify the site with Live Search in order to find out about all the different web pages that are infected or may be linking to bad content.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Tools for Windows


Below is a list of Windows tools. Please let me know if you find other useful ones.

Also here are some sites which feature collection of useful software:
100 Portable Apps for your USB Stick (for Mac and Win)
PortableApps.com - features a collection of program fitted onto a USB stick.
ROEMware - a categorized minimalist set of applications for OEM builders.

System / Memory Scanner - online tool. This is not restricted to Windows. Just go to the website and it will scan your memory configuration and system statistics.

Process Explorer - "Task Manager on steroids". It can replace Task Manager or run side by side with it, but either way it's an absolute must-have for technically savvy users. When you launch Process Explorer, you'll see a tree view of processes; they're nominally organized by which process spawned which, but you can click on the column headers to change the sorting as you please. The top portion of the window has four graphs: CPU usage, commit history, I/O bytes history, and physical memory history. Click on one to bring up a full-sized window view that's akin to the Performance tab in Task Manager -- but with a level of detail and insight into what programs are doing that Task Manager doesn't even come close to providing.



System Information for Windows - lists application license keys, probes installed hardware, fetches device temperatures, catalogs installed multimedia codecs -- the list seems endless.








BlueScreenView - When a BSOD occurs the results are, whenever possible, saved into a dump file that can be examined later. BlueScreenView scans your system for these files and produces a report from them, which you can read within BlueScreenView itself or save to HTML for separate analysis. Each line in the report describes the BSOD's crash code, the time and date of its occurrence, any parameters that might have been passed with the crash (useful for debugging), and a slew of other minor details. The results are searchable, so you can hunt for a particular crash code, driver, or DLL that you think might be present.





Autoruns -- probes your system and dumps out lists of programs and system components that start automatically, without user intervention -- from apps in your Startup folder to scheduled tasks, from services to device drivers, from Sidebar gadgets to codecs. By default it dumps out data pertinent to the current user context, but the program's User menu lets you switch contexts. (You'll need to run the program as Administrator, though.)






 WinDirStat - generates easy-to-understand graphical reports about disk usage, allowing you to see at a glance which individual files or folders hidden deep within a directory tree may be gobbling up dozens of gigabytes.




 Unlocker, Determine which process has a lock on which file, and let you release it either by killing the file handle or the offending process.
OpenedFilesView Determine which process has a lock on which file, and let you release it either by killing the file handle or the offending process.

Thursday, March 04, 2010

How to Secure your Computer

The following list various methods and software*** that can be applied to secure your computer.

1.Use a Firewall - see Firewall Testing (Hardening)
Software: Comodo Firewall, Zone Alarm
To configure firewall, it is useful to know the port numbers of common services. This can be found from IANA in:
www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers
Your own IP address can also be discovered using: http://whatismyipaddress.com


2. Use Anti-Virus software
Software: Avast, Avira, AVG
Testing of antivirus software can be performed using the following tools:
- EICAR - www.eicar.org/anti_virus_test_file.htm - Provides a standardized test file for signature based virus detection software.
- Spycar - www.spycar.org - Spycar is a suite of tools designed to mimic spyware-like behavior, but in a benign form.

3. Use Anti-Spyware
Software:  Spybot Search and Destroy, SuperAntiSpyware

4. DNS Routing and protection - setup your DNS to be routed over a DNS provider with filtering and protection.
OpenDNS

5. Use a password manager to manage multiple passwords
Software: KeePass
Testing passwords can be accomplished using these tools:
SecurityStats - http://securitystats.com/tools/password.php

6. Browser Plugin Protection
Software: Web of Trust, McAfee Site Advisor

7. Encrypt your files on your computer.
Software: TrueCrypt

8. Securing your websites.
Using SSL: How to implement SSL in IIS
Testing Tools:
Goolag Scanner (www.goolag.org) provides one more tool for web site owners to patch up their online properties. It is powered by Google to help see if your sites are vulnerable to a hacking attempt. By typing in a domain name it may return site vulnerabilities. The tool makes “it easy for unskilled users to track down vulnerabilities and sensitive information on specific Web sites or broad Web domains.” The tool uses the Google Custom Search engine and has a detailed specification (http://www.goolag.org/specifications.html) on how it works.


9. Disable Autorun to prevent attack from infected USB or other removable drives.

Click the Start button, then Run and enter “gpedit.msc” without the quotes
Go to Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System
Scroll down to “Turn off Autoplay” and double click on it
Click on the “Enabled” radio button, then for “Turn off Autoplay on” select “All drives”

10. Use portable Linux which runs entirely from the CD or DVD without accessing the hard drive. The distributions are:

Google Chrome OS - developed by Google. Intended to run on Netbook and allow user to interact with web applications. The standalone DVD is available to use as a standalone OS without installation

Lightweight Portable Security (LSP) - developed by the USA's Department of Defence, is a small Linux live CD focusing on privacy and security, for  this reason, it boots from a CD and executes from RAM, providing a web browser, a file manager and some interesing tools. LPS-Public turns an untrusted system into a trusted network client.

11. Check various alert service websites:
Stay Smart Online

12. How to Lock Down Linux - short article with a few basic essentials to secure Linux.

*** This article, writer and blog does not recommend the use of the software above and is not liable for anything. The list of software is represents the authors personal opinions.

13. To check suspicious behaviour, there is a range of tools, collectively called Sysinternals, which is now available from Microsoft. Here is a presentation on how to use Sysinternals by its creator Mark Russinovich, entitled:
Malware Hunting with the Sysinternals Tools
Date: June 12, 2012 from 3:15PM to 4:30PM

14. Security on USB.

Ghost USB honeypot (http://www.honeynet.org/node/871)
This is currently a research project to identify malware on a PC that tries to infect any connected USB. Here is a description from its website.
----------------
"Ghost is a honeypot for malware that uses USB storage devices for propagation. It is able to capture such malware without any further knowledge - especially, it doesn't need signatures or the like to accomplish its task.
Detection is achieved by emulating a USB flash drive on Windows systems and observing the emulated device. The assumption is that on an infected machine the malware will eventually copy itself to the removable device."

15. Social Network
For Facebook and Twitter and perhaps some other social networking sites, there are profile scanners available to scan links, newsfeeds, messages, such as the free one from Eset https://socialmediascanner.eset.com/.




How to Capture Picture Perfect Photos

This is a summary of the article from PCAuthority, Mar 2010.

1. Turn off flash for indoor photographs, otherwise the subject will look artificially bright. An alternative is to use a flash filters.
2. Turn on flash outdoors, so that the surrounding lights will not overwhelm the light on the subject.
3. Try out the scenes modes. Most modern digital cameras come with various pre-configured scene modes. Experiment with it a little to see which suits the conditions.
4. Edit the photo with software. The two highly recommended software which are free, are:
     - Paint.Net : http://www.getpaint.net/
     - GIMP: http://www.gimp.org/

The following combination of steps in photo editing helps improve most photos.
a) Levels and Curves
    GIMP: select Colours | Levels.  Adjust the Input Levels Histogram.
    Paint.Net: select Adjustment | Levels.
b) Color Adjustment
    GIMP: select Colours | Hue-Saturation. Adjust the Saturation to 10-20.
    Paint.Net: select Adjustment | Hue-Saturation.
c) Sharpening
    GIMP: select Filters | Enhance | Unsharp Mask. Try 0.1, 1.0, 0.0 for Radius, Amount and Threshold respectively.
    Paint.Net: select Effects | Photo | Sharpen.

There is a whole list of effects available in most editing software, but try the ones above first to make the photo look really good.


Added 20 Dec 2014

Photo editing tips for photos taken with bad lighting
1. Use Unsharp Mask or similar feature
2. Then choose Gamma Correction for either underexposure or overexposure
3. If there is no Gamma Correction, or no good results, choose Brightness/Contrast instead.
4. Color Balancing used to fix colors problems like skin tones.
5. To reduce pixelation, use Noise Filter - Edge Preserving Smooth
6. Then increase Saturation to restore vibrant colors.