Facebook Dislike Button Scam »

Facebook users beware! A scam making the rounds on Facebook says that one of your friends has downloaded the new Facebook Dislike Button and gives you a link to download it. However, the link will only download the scammer’s personal Facebook application which will give them access to your complete profile and allow them to spam all of your friends by sending messages from your account.
For the record there is no official Dislike button option from Facebook. So don’t fall for it . But, if you really want that function and you use the Firefox web browser, you can install a 3rd party addon from FaceMod which will give you the Dislike button functionality, although I have not personally tested it.
Here is a link to FaceMod’s website where you can get the details.

Automatically Check Your Level of Privacy on Facebook »

Our friend Richard over at Akira Media found a great link to a site that will let you see how much of your personal information is visible to strangers through Facebook.

If you are concerned about your Facebook Privacy, go to the Reclaim Privacy website and follow the steps to check. It is super easy and very enlightening and might just prevent you from letting everyone on the planet know some of your personal information.

Perform Your Automatic Windows Update »

If we had a nickel for every time we see the Windows Update Shield icon in the system tray of a client’s computer, we would be retired by now. That little icon means you must take action to protect your computer with the latest updates from Windows.
Microsoft releases security patches on the second Tuesday of each month (called Patch Tuesday) so make sure you are performing Windows updates at that time. A good indication that you need to apply a patch is the little, yellow icon you see in the lower right corner of your screen. If you see that, click it and follow the prompts.
This month’s patch Tuesday sees Microsoft releasing a Security Update addressing 12 vulnerabilities and one of which is a patch for a Zero-Day issue in Internet Explorer. Check it out and if you see the little yellow icon, click it! It is there for a reason
Another step you can take is telling Windows to apply the security updates automatically. Then, you will not even see the Update icon in the system tray. The updates will be applied and you will not even know, which is handy if you have ever said, “Hmm. What does that little Yellow Shield mean? Oh well. It is probably nothing important.”
So, if you are a Microsoft Vista user and want to setup Automatic Updates, here is the information to get you going with that. If you are still on Windows XP, here is the information for checking your Update status.

Fake Firefox Adobe Flash Player »

File this under the ‘Yikes’ category: According to a post on Sophos website, there is a Firefox plugin masquerading as a legitimate Adobe Flash Player add on.

Recently, Sophos analysts have discovered a piece of malware masquerading itself as a flash player plugin for the Firefox browser (detected by Sophos as Troj/FFSpy-A).
When the file runs, it pretends to install the adobe flash player for your browser.

However, instead of giving you a Flash Player, you get a piece of malware that spies on your Google searches, sends that data to a remote server and then displays ads into what you are viewing based on the keywords you entered.
According to the post on Sophos’ website, this malware seems to be spreading via Internet forums.  You probably won’t have to worry about things like this if you download any plugins directly from Mozilla’s website (but you should still be cautious).
On Sophos’ website, there are some screenshots that illustrate the difficulty you would have trying to determine whether or not you were installing a legit plugin versus one containing some type of malware.
If you want to test your installed version of Flash, you can visit the test page setup on Adobe’s website and you can download the current version of Flash from Adobe’s website as well.

Google Malware Warning System Glitch? »

Ok, maybe it was just me, but earlier today any search through Google displayed the malware warning below the returned result.

First, my wife and I were searching for Petsmart and my wife noticed this warning:

I thought that was odd, but large sites have been hacked before.  So maybe they were having some problems.  However, as we searched for other things, we saw that same warning below every listing in Google, no matter what the search phrase was.  We even searched for “google maps” through Google’s search and here is what we got:

If we attempted to click on any of the returned search results, including the one that would take us to google.com, we got this warning:

In the process of doing more troubleshooting, it seems that the glitch worked itself out.  I wonder if anyone else noticed these issues.  Shout back if you have a second.

I am guessing that the errors we saw were a result of one of these situations:

1 – Google Malware Reporting was experiencing some type of glitch and was erroneously flagging every site as potentially dangerous.

2 – I have gotten some type of virus that is somehow playing around with something hidden in someplace I have yet to discover.

3 – Every site on the Internet (including google.com) was briefly infected with some type of malware and Google was dutifully warning everyone.

Hmm.  Thinking.  Thinking.

I am hoping it was #1