Articles

Kneber Botnet

A new type of virus, known as Kneber, is estimated to have created a 75,000 machine strong botnet before being discovered by Netwitness last week. The Kneber botnet aims to gather login details for social and corporate networks. It is estimated that over 3,500 Facebook accounts were compromised as well as over 2,500 Yahoo accounts.

The discovery has led to much speculation on the increasing occurance of under the radar botnets, particularly within Corporate computing environments. It is also further evidence of the increased organisation behind cyber-criminals.

The key lesson of all this though seems to be that there are still a lot of companies and people playing fast and loose with their computer security. The botnet relies on the Zeus Trojan among others. Zeus has been detectable by many internet security packages for over a year so the key lesson here is to have a good anti-virus package and keep it up to date.

If you wish to turn off Buzz, the good news is that it’s very simple to do.  Just look at the bottom of your gmail page and you’ll see “turn off buzz”.   Clicking on it will grant your wish and turn it off.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

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In the last few weeks we have seen a sudden, marked increase in the number of calls we’ve been receiving about virus infections. There seems to be one main culprit – Internet Security 2010, a rogue anti-virus programme which appears more invasive than normal. We haven’t been able to work out a source yet. The bad news appears to be that many of the off the shelf internet security packages damage critical system files during their repair, often leaving the use facing a blank, un-responsive desktop when they log in.
For those who have been infected and still have a working desktop, we recommend using a combination of rkill.com, a command file and malwarebytes as the first steps in a clean up.

If you have a blank desktop left, specialist assistance will be required and you should contact Home Helptech who can arrange nationwide pickup, cleanup and delivery.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

| Lo-Call 1890 219 219 (Ireland) | Freefone 0808-CALHELP (UK) |

| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00 |

Today, February 9th, is Safer Internet Day. Given the number of malicious computer attacks we see here at Home Helptech, it’s a concept we strongly support. One thing that really caught our eye today was work by the CEOP in the UK to produce a cartoon called “Lee and Kim’s Adventures – Animal Magic” aimed at 5 to 7 year olds warning them about the dangers lurking online.

It looks like a really good effort and I think CEOP are to be commended for their work here. Find details at: https://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/5_7/leeandkim/default.aspx

In cases where you have an old McAfee backup disk but no longer have McAfee, don’t despair. McAfee provide a free tool which allows you to recover your data from a McAfee backup disk. It is located at https://us.mcafee.com/root/eol_mback.asp though at the moment it doesn’t appear to support Windows 7, so you’ll need to use a machine with either Windows XP or Vista.

Download the tool and install it. You might also have to install Microsoft .Net Framework 1.1 if you don’t already have it.

Then pop your backup disk in the your DVD drive and start it up. By default it will scan the DVD automatically and show you the difference between your system and the files that are backed up.

Be careful here, if you are restoring to a new machine, it will map the previous users path to your current path. So if your old path was, for example “Ted\My Music” and you do a restore to the “Simon” account, then the restored music files will appear in “Simon\My Music” unless you change the settings. Nevertheless, at least you get your files back…  So tick the boxes next to the files you wish to restore,  press  the “Restore” button and watch your files flood back in.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

| Lo-Call 1890 219 219 (Ireland) | Freefone 0808-CALHELP (UK) |

| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00 |

From time to time, we get questions on the best package to generate an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) file. What many people don’t know is that Microsoft provide a simple “Save to PDF and XPS” add-in for their Office suite of software. This options is not turned on by default. Instead, you need to download it from the microsoft website at: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F1FC413C-6D89-4F15-991B-63B07BA5F2E5&displaylang=en

Once you’ve downloaded the software, run it and click on the  licence agreement.

Click Continue and the add-in will install.

Click OK once the installation is complete.

If you now go into Word or any other Office application, you should see a new option under the Save As menu which allows you to save PDF or XPS files.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

| Lo-Call 1890 219 219 (Ireland) | Freefone 0808-CALHELP (UK) |

| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00 |

On installing Windows 7 RC 1 on my PC the other day I  installed LogMeIn Free with no problems. On trying to access my home PC from a computer outside my network it denied me access even tho the password was the same.

It eventually locked me out.

after a while I finally discovered what the issue was:

Usually with Windows XP and Windows Vista you only need your Login name and Password for that machine to gain remote control of that machine. But with Windows 7 you need to enter your “computername”/”user name” as your username for it to work for example look at the screenshot below

Username : Homehelptech-PC/David

Password: Letmein  (dont even try… its not my real password)

after this you should be able to access your Windows 7 machine. Good Luck!!

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

| Lo-Call 1890 219 219 (Ireland) | Freefone 0808-CALHELP (UK) |

| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00 |

Dear Customer, We care about what you thought of the service you got from Home Helptech. So if you have used our service, we invite you to post your feedback here so that both we and our customers can benefit from knowing about your experience of using our service. Please write your comments accompanied by your name and location. We will not share your email address but require it and the “CAPCTHA” code for validation. Simon Martin Managing Director, Home Helptech Ltd Note: 9/2/2013 – Apologies to our customers – we have temporarily suspended feedback due to a high volume of spam.

A windows update pushed out this week for Windows Vista is causing the blue screen of death on certain machines. The update, KB973879,  is aimed at resolving another issue caused by installing Vista Service Pack 2. The blue screen caused by this update is pictured below – picture provided by a customer who had the presence of mind when it occured. It causes a STOP: 0x0000007E or a STOP: 0x00000050

See:  https://support.microsoft.com/kb/973879/us

To rectify the problem, go into safe mode and remove this patch from Add or Remove Programs applet in the Control Panel. View updates by clicking on “View Installed Updates”. Select update KB973879 and click Uninstall.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

| Lo-Call 1890 219 219 (Ireland) | Freefone 0808-CALHELP (UK) |

| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00 |

For those customers in Ireland who use the Netgear DG834G v4, the most recent firmware version v5.01.14 claims to resolve a DSL problem specifically related to Irish connections. We recently upgraded a router to this version of firmware and it completely disrupted SIP based VOIP calls over the network concerned. The symptom is that you are unable to hear the person at the other end of the phone, even though they can hear you. There are also reports that it breaks skype. So if you use Skype or SIP based telephony, be wary of upgrading to this version of firmware.

Downgrading back to version 5.01.09 resolved our telephony problems.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

| Lo-Call 1890 219 219 (Ireland) | Freefone 0808-CALHELP (UK) |

| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00 |