Cyber Express

Information may not be reliable

The Impact Referrals Chapter of BNI awarded former chapter Vice President and current Cyber Express employee Sam Morris with a Notable Networker certificate in recognition of his leadership October 2009 through September 2010.
Mark Cole of American National Insurance and Fred Marcum of Impact Property Solutions were also awarded for their leadership of Impact Referrals during the past year.

- Maintain an up to date antivirus program. There are many available, and some of the free ones are pretty good. We currently recommend AVG free edition. You need to have one, but one alone. Two antivirus programs will fight each other.
- Keep other programs on your computer to clean up the spyware, etc. that your antivirus misses. We currently use Malware Bytes, Super Anti Spyware, Spybot, and CCleaner.
- Defragment regularly. This is found in the start menu under accessories, system tools. In addition to the built in Windows defag, you can use a free program called Defragger, which can be found at www.defraggler.com
- Install Windows Updates when prompted to do so. In Windows XP, look in Internet Explorer under tools, windows update. In Vista and Windows 7, look in Control Panel for Windows Update.

A couple more things to consider if your computer is running slow:
- How much RAM memory do you have? If you right click on My Computer and click Properties it will show you a number of either MB or GB. If the number is less than 1 GB (which is the same as 1024 MB), an upgrade will probably help you. Cost depends on the type of memory in the computer, but its usually pretty inexpensive.
- How many things are running in the background? Look at the string of icons by the clock at the bottom right corner of your screen. These programs are all running in the background whether youre using them or not. The more programs that are running, the slower your computer will be. Microsoft includes a utility that can be accessed from start/run and typing msconfig that can be used to clean this up. You would uncheck items on the startup tab that you dont want to run in the background. Be careful though, things like antivirus, scanner software, printer software, and more actually may need to run for certain programs/devices to work correctly.
- Just like a car, sometimes your computer just needs a tune up by a qualified professional. Many things you can do yourself when it comes to maintaining your computer, however, sometimes a professional can do a little more, as they know what to look for and will see things you may not.

Cyber Express employee Sam Morris is now a BNI Ambassador in the Eastern Ohio region.
In addition to his duties with Cyber Express, and his BNI Chapter, Impact Referrals, Sam will have the following responsibilities:
- Act as a representative of BNI.

We are no longer using A-Squared. It has been changed to Esmisoft Anti-Malware and is no longer free. We will notify you on this website if we come across another program to use in it’s place. Malware Bytes, Super Anti Spyware, Spybot, and CCleaner continue to do a good job for us.
Also, during the last week or so, we have noticed some computers coming in that haven’t had Malware Bytes updated in a while. On these computers, Malware Bytes will give an error when you try to update it. Simply follow the link to the right and download the new version. This will solve this problem in our experience.
Just a note, it is essential to update these tools before you run them. Without updates, they won’t know to look for the new viruses/spyware that came out since they were last updated.

Chapter President Todd Mayle presented Sam Morris with a Certificate of Appreciation this week at Tuesdays meeting of The Impact Referrals Chapter of BNI in recognition of Sam’s efforts as Vice President of the Chapter.

It’sa new age for computer viruses. It’s no longer the hacker community vying for bragging rights over who can infect the most computers. Now, there are people who make money from infecting computers, as evidenced by the rapid growth of rogue antivirus programs. The motivation is different now. In December of 2009 the FBI reported that the people making these types of viruses have profited to the tune of $150 million to date. Three men were indicted as recently as May 28.
There has also been an evolution in the way they spread. In 2010, viruses spread in completely different ways than they did in 2000. At that time, the primary ways a virus would spread from computer to computer were via floppy disk and email. After a while, floppies became irrelevant and people learned not to open emails from people they didn’t know. If they did open a virus from someone they knew, and got a virus from it, they’d simply call their associate and let them know that they might want to get their computer checked. As this happened, the virus writers thought up a new scheme, which made it harder to track down who actually had the virus. In this scenario, the virus would pick a random name from someone’s address book and send it out saying it was from them. For example: If Sam, Bill, and Justin all have each other’s email address, and Sam gets a virus, his computer will email Justin with the virus saying it’s from Bill. Justin then calls Bill and tells him, but when Bill runs a scan on his computer, it’s clean. Meanwhile, Sam is wondering why his computer doesn’t run very well.
Later, as the online music craze picked up, people would use Kazaa or Limewire or the like, and be downloading from each other. In this case, you are downloading music from another individual’s computer that you don’t know, and don’t know you can trust. They spread this way still. In addition, these programs have been notorious for including “spyware” in their installations. Spyware is a program that, in its pure form, monitors what you do online and sends you pop up advertising appropriate to that. We started seeing realtors getting lots of ads on their computers for mortgage rates, insurance agents getting car insurance advertisements, and more of this type of targeted advertising.
After that, we saw the rise of worms, such as Klez. These are named as such because of the way the “worm their way” through the internet. What these viruses would do is generate a random ip address and go there. In this case, any computer connected to the internet has a chance of being infected, whether or notyou’re actually surfing on it.
The way viruses spread now is entirely different. We have had people tell us that they got a virus while just reading the news. This is common. No longer do you need to be looking at “bad things” to get hit. When you go to a web page that has an advertisement on it, that advertisement is often hosted by another company. These are advertising networks. The advertising networks are owned by large, legitimate companies that are not in the business of spreading viruses. (I choose not to name names, since they are not at fault). The virus writers go after the advertising networks, and when they infect them, the network automatically sends it out to thousands of web pages instantaneously. If you happen to visit one of these pages at the moment it happens to be infected, you got hit. You will at this point often have a rogue antivirus program giving you messages, as well as a Rootkit, a type of virus whose job is to hide from antivirus and antispyware programs, and download more viruses.
It’s not quite as bleak as it sounds.
The programs listed on the right of our page are the ones we use to clean up computers. Prevention is important. You need to have an up to date antivirus program running on your computer at all times. The one we use most often is AVG. It’s a free program that finds just as many viruses as the paid for programs, with an added feature. The “Link Scanner” option in it checks the web pages in your web searches and tells you if the website is not safe to go to at the time you’re about to visit it. Also, there are five antispyware programs listed there. These are the ones you need to run as soon as you get infected (though ideally, you’d run at least a couple of themweekly as general maintenance). Start with CCleaner and Malware Bytes. Also, if you do see one of these alerts come up, if you press ctrl-alt-del all at the same time and go to “task manager”, ending your web browser (iexplore.exe, firefox.exe, safari.exe, chrome.exe), often this will prevent full infection and you’ll still be able to run the cleanup tools before you’re too bad off.

Cyber Express has been nominated for the Town Crier’s “Best of the Best” award for 2010.

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