Like every second Tuesday, the one coming up is Patch Tuesday for Windows operating systems. It will be the biggest ever – there will be 16 updates, 4 of which are critical. A total of 49 vulnerabilities will be patched. Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 are included in some patches.

I found a Trojan fake alert virus today on a client’s PC that was masking itself as Microsoft security essentials, I was unable to distinguish bettween the trojan program and the real thing even though I have the AV on my home PC and am very familiar with it. The client never downloaded the real Microsoft security essentials AV and sure enough, once the virus was removed, there was no trace of essentials.

A big trend in the virus and spyware industry in recent months has been seemingly trustworthy ads for free spyware and virus removal that is in fact malware itself. Trouble is, it looks legitimate to those that don’t know any better, and when the software is downloaded and installed, it ends up finding a lot of critical infections and offers to remove them…for a price. This is what is known as rogue software, and chances are if you’re paid for it, you’re out that money and should consider canceling your credit card.

These days, we must all keep track of our online passwords for work and personal use of everything from email to Facebook. Many people use the same passwords for all of their accounts, and it’s often something that’s easy to remember. In some cases, users will go months (or years) without changing their passwords. There are many excellent reasons to change your password. If your computer is infected with viruses or spyware, they be monitoring your online activity. After the computer has been cleaned, it’s a good idea to change your passwords.

As briefly described in the last post, Microsoft released a record number of patches and updates for Windows yesterday on it’s monthly Patch Tuesday release cycle. In total, 14 patches addressing 34 vulnerabilities, only a few of which are critical, but all should be downloaded and installed via Windows Update. Waiting to update could potentially mean leaving Windows at risk to be infected by viruses specifically designed to take advantage of the flaws in Windows at some point.

One of our Nerds, Talia Johnson sent us this good news…
“This morning David R. asked me if Astaro protected from this type of infection.
I contacted Astaro for confirmation and was informed that Astaro has had protection from this infection for a number of weeks now. If your clients have the Astaro Security Gateway with web and mail filtering they do not need to worry about being infected by this online.

One of our Nerds, Kevin O’Reilly, sent this email out to Nerds worldwide on a phishing scam making the rounds…

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