28th October 2004 - Microxchange October News Wire

News Wire from Microxchange – Bi-Monthly

October 28th 2004

On this day in 1922 –
Mussolini took control of the Italian government and introduced fascism to Italy


Upgrading Memory for those hungry applications:

With applications becoming more memory intensive it is worthwhile upgrading to larger memory modules in your equipment rather than buying a new machine, but this can be a real pain if you do not know what memory you have and you really don’t want to lug your PC down the high street to a retail outlet, where you will probably be told that they do not have it in stock anyway; there is an easier way! Go to this web link and install the software that will analyse your machine and tell you the memory that you need, you can then buy it from their web shop. http://www.crucial.com/uk/promo/index.asp?prog=desktop


For those MAC Users who also think that they are immune from Viruses!

A new piece of malware written for the Mac OS X operating system attempts to turn off firewall and security software.
Read more about how Mac users should remain vigilant about the virus threat, and not assume only Windows users are under attack.
http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/articles/renepo.html


Your PC may not be as ‘personal’ as you think it is:
Some features for those of you still using old versions of MS Office.

Every MS Office document inserts a hidden electronic fingerprint that enables the document to be traced back to the single person who wrote it, including which computer was used to write the document. This is how it works;

Each network card has a unique MAC address than cannot be changed. This MAC address is embedded into the chipset on the card at the factory. No 2 cards on this planet have the same MAC address. From the MAC address, you, the normal user, can identify the vendor of that NIC. Every vendor, like 3COM and Intel, have a specific vendor identifier assigned to them by the IEEE that they use to generate their own blocks of MAC addresses to be used on their cards.
The MAC address is a 12-digit hex number denoted in the format XX-XX-XX-YY-YY-YY where the first 3 sets of 2-digit numbers identify the vendor (e.g. 3COM NICs always start with 00-01-02) and the last 3 sets identify the NIC itself, the region it was shipped to and perhaps even more specific details. To my knowledge, only government authorities are allowed access to the rest of the 6 digits; where a particular NIC was shipped or sold in the world.

Office 97 and earlier versions included a feature that stamps every document created with a unique GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) that is generated when the Operating System is installed. The GUID is generated from several things that are unique to every machine, like the serial number of the motherboard and the MAC address of the NIC. This stamp, commonly known as the hidden electronic fingerprint is inserted to every document created, but NOT the ones edited or modified.

It was using this method that the virus writer was caught who wrote one of the most famous viruses to sweep the internet. (Unfortunately there is not space in this news letter to explain how you look this information up)

Recommendations; upgrade to a new version of office where this ability to trace has been closed.

When is a Virus not a Virus?

Spyware is getting malicious, hijacking users’ browsers and snooping for personal details.

Spyware – AKA advertising-supported software or adware – has been until recently a fairly benign snooper on your surfing habits. The data it gathers is used to target you with tailored advertising, either in pop-up windows or emails.

The problem is that these software spies are starting to get nasty. Spyware is being written and propagated with the express purpose of recording personal data such as passwords and credit card numbers, or hijacking your browser and bookmarking porn or other undesirable sites, or grabbing your web dialler. Some spyware even features self-updating code so that conventional freeware removal tools have no effect.

And it isn’t a small-scale problem. Research in the US in Spring 2004 showed that 1 in 3 PCs scanned had spyware hidden on its hard drive. A total of 650,000 PCs were scanned, finding more than 18 million spyware tools.

Nor is spyware confined to home users. The average amount of spyware on business machines is similar to home users’ – largely because most companies don't have centralised, managed anti-spyware protection in place. Certain spyware – such as that used by P2P networks like Kazaa – is also bandwidth hungry as it communicates a lot of data between machines, which can be a problem on corporate networks.

It’s becoming such a sizeable problem in the US that the Government voted unanimously in Spring 2004 to approve the first-ever anti-spyware bill. The Securely Protect Yourself Against Cyber Trespass (Spy Act), approved by the US House of Representatives, would levy fines up to $3 million for those who illegally collect personal information, change a browser's default home page or bookmarks, log keystrokes, or steal identities.

Recommendations:
- use freeware tools to audit your PCs and identify what spyware is resident. Try one of these 2 products, both seem to work OK.
http://www.webroot.com/ (this is free)
Or
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html ( works for 30days and then you have to buy it)

Follow up on Microsoft’s Service Pack 2 for Windows XP
At 272mb - and with unpredictable side effects on numerous established applications - the latest Windows update could create a major headache.
Additionally, there are serious concerns that SP2 may adversely affect other software: Microsoft has published a list of over 200 applications that may have problems. The Windows Firewall is enabled by default in the update (not a bad thing in itself, and a change that many users were demanding), so users will have to 'unblock' certain software, including Adobe PageMaker, backup programs and even some of Microsoft's Office applications.



…and lastly;
An international team of scientists has made a new material just one atom thick, by extracting a single plane of carbon from a graphite crystal. Known as graphene, the new fabric effectively exists in just two dimensions, and could pave the way for computers built from single molecules