Our news inboxes were lit up this morning with warnings on a new botnet named for the “Chuck Norris” internet meme.  The botnet installs itself onto targeted machines through exploits and pre-existing malware on Windows based computers.   The botnet then tries several different methods of attack on routers and modems within the local network.  When the infection spreads to routers and modems, any computers on the same network will get redirects for facebook and google, etc.  The redirects are most commonly used to install malware, but we can only assume similar methods will be employed over the next few days to create phishing attacks for email, social networking, ecommerce, and banking websites.

Lastly, always heed the warnings of the dying internet meme:

“If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can’t see Chuck Norris you may be only seconds away from death.”

“Chuck Norris Doesn’t sleep.  He waits.”

Mobile world congress is this week, so before we start pondering our next tech toys, we thought it privy to comment on the current state of affairs regarding “SMARTPHONES:”

Before my VCC days, I managed PALM and Windows Mobile implementations all over the state of Iowa. Inside of our roles at VCC, we’ve seen hundreds of devices in dozens of implementations, each with their own intricacies and user experiences. It’s always our goal to remain objective regarding client need within the mobile sphere, but we thought it time to weigh in on “SMART” phones as we’ve been getting more and more questions as to our preferences.

In the past, we have maintained and personally owned ALL of these types of phones:

• Palm
• Windows Mobile
• Apple Iphone
• Blackberry
• Android Devices

All of these phones have their audiences; Palm got an early start with devices like the Treo and recently the WEBOS series of phones. They had GREAT apps for their time on the older versions of the operating system, but don’t have as robust of a download catalog as Apple and Google Android at the moment. Windows Mobile used to be about power but compared to its recent rivals seems sluggish and is prone to the same pseudo-random issues most Windows users are used to. Blackberries are great for the enterprise; they integrate with Exchange REALLY well and have great app integration, but generally suffer from poor keyboards and lack of media support. Our 2 favourite contenders for Smart-phone (and yes, we do have a favourite) are the iPhone and the handful of recent GOOGLE ANDROID releases.

We’ll start with the iPhone. The screen is Great; the responsiveness and UI (That’s user interface to any smart-phone newbies out there) are right where you’d expect them to be. There are THOUSANDS of apps that you can download without ever touching a computer (although the distribution system is highly proprietary and riddled with controversies on stifling advancement). This is THE platform for casual gamers, as many tap and accelerometer based games really shine here.

Our iPhone concerns revolve around the proprietary app distribution system and a lack of multitasking support. While both CAN be circumvented (while simultaneously voiding your warranty) APPLE does NOT allow third-party (unapproved) apps to be installed on your device. That means your small company can not hire a developer to write a simple app and distribute it without Apple’s support.

The lack of multitasking on the iphone initially provided a performance benefit, but with new versions of the phone, and especially the recently announced iPad, critics are wondering why multitasking support was never added. Without daemons running in the background on your phone, for instance, email notifications are delayed, location aware apps will not function, and switching from app to app requires navigating back to a home screen.

That’s where Android comes in; simply put, Android is just an operating system for your phone. It’s free, open-source software (like firefox and openoffice) that doesn’t have any licensing restrictions to hardware manufacturers. You can run it on anything with a processor, and even our small shop has several internal Android installations on devices other than phones. This opens up the mobile space for a myriad of handset developers (motorola, htc, and samsung to name a few) whose only edge over each other will be the hardware features they can build into their mobile phones. Encouraging hardware evolution may be one of the platform’s greatest assets.

Furthermore, Android multi-tasks AND allows third-party app support. While modified iPhones also support these features, having the capability in a warrantied phone is preferable. Multitasking just makes your “smart-phone” smarter. Mine monitors my location by GPS and turns off my ringer when I’m at the movie theater. It tells me when my friends and family are nearby and gives us suggestions of where to meet up. It monitors the time and only allows certain people to call after hours. None of this would be possible if it were only allowed to fire off one application at a time.

Because of the licensing agreements and the open-source community, apps that simply aren’t allowed on iPhones become commonplace. We have apps installed (again without ever touching the computer) that allow for tethering to our laptops for wireless access on the road, Google Voice, and even the entire user interface can be replaced to meet your needs.

There are a few other REALLY cool google-only features at the moment; text-to-speech, enabling your voice to command the keyboard anywhere in the operating system; Google Goggles, which provides google searches based on your camera’s input, and Google Maps integration, with full GPS and free turn-by-turn navigation on most models.

One major downside to the Android platform is a severe lack of addictive games. We have card games, and some brick breaker clones, but have yet to see the big developers come along with puzzle games like Bejeweled and Paper toss.

It’s also likely that big enterprise will move from blackberry/windows mobile world any time soon because of their commitments with Microsoft licensing. While all the phone platforms allow varying degrees of Microsoft Exchange support, Blackberry and Windows Mobile seem to be a little more user friendly when accessing corporate calendars and shared resources.

No matter what you’re trying to do with a smart phone, there’s a good chance we’ve seen it before. Don’t be shy to ask us questions regarding your company’s situation, and we’ll provide you with 10 years of experience in data and phone support to make sure you get your best mobile roll-out possible.

Microsoft’s regular “Patch Tuesday” for February 2010 is recommended for all machines in place at VCC clients.  If you aren’t on our regular security and backup rounds, you can find this update at http://update.microsoft.com/microsoftupdate ; This month’s patches include 13 security bulletins, including several that allow remote attacks.  There are sti quite a few recent vulnerabilities left unpatched, and when they are released, we plan to provide the links here.

As always, if you have a problem when installing security patches, you can get ahold of us on our contact page.

We ran into a problem onsite last week that doesn’t have good documentation on the internet so we’re doing our part to give back.

The problem was that we had installed a bluetooth USB dongle to communicate with a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, but the bluetooth manager was not activated within the windows XP control panel.  Our device manager correctly recognized the device, and we knew it worked on another machine- just not it’s new host.

Probing for drivers revealed that bluetooth support is patched into Service Pack 2, Microsoft’s only advice to us was to use the control panel app, but without a shortcut, we were at a standstill.  A few minutes of reverse-engineering the Microsoft logic brought us to a conclusion and we discovered the fix:  It’s a service.

The only thing you need to do if you don’t have a bluetooth icon in your control panel is turn it on in services.  Click start, run, “services.exe”, ok, navigate to bluetooth and change it from “disabled” to “automatic,” and start it up.  If the remainder of your experience is anything like ours, you’ll be back on track within a few minutes.

We’ve seen a few calls this week from home users who are getting pop ups telling them that AVG has recently updated and will no longer be supporting their previous versions.  Several users have had a hard time tracking down the latest update executable, so as a reminder, it can be found on our tools page.  We’ve taken the latest version through testing and are quite satisfied.  Updating to 9.0 is strongly encouraged.

Microsoft today released six security patches, 3 of which are ranked “Critical,” the highest security level that Microsoft acknowledges.  All versions of the Windows Operating System, Microsoft Office, and Internet Explorer have been patched for several vulnerabilities and the fixes are on the Microsoft Servers today.  VanceCoffman reccomends using your favorite method to get all your operating system and office updates, and running a vulnerability scanner against your system.

Several flaws have hit other common applications in the last few weeks; I just listened to a fascinating talk about broken security in Adobe Flash (installed on most machines for using interactive websites and videos) AND Mac OSX, Apple of Cuppertino’s “crash-free” operating system.

Linux servers this week were also handed a few important updates; VCC managed boxes will be automatically patched, and if you need advice, we’re always available at 515.309.2532

These vulnerabilites have been known in hacker communities for some time, so patching quickly may save you a BIG headache.  Good Luck!

-TJ

More information: ARS TECHNICA

I’ve spent countless hours in my years here at VCC tending to squealing, clicking, and dying harddrives.  Modern desktop harddrives spin at 7200 RPM (to put that into context, old 45’s were named so for their 45 rotations per minute; discman CD players require 500 rotations per minute to maintain CD audio.)  Considering the sheer speed of which these harddrives spin, it’s usually only a matter of time before the motor inside the drive fails. VanceCoffman Computing has several reccomendations to make sure to keep your data safe:

Make a Backup!

Making a simple backup, while it seems trivial, has saved our clients countless hours and a lot of money.  VCC does offer affordable offsite backup, but if that is not an option, your first line of defense is your intra-company backup policy.  Having an employee make a weekly CD backup of your accounting database, for example, is better than nothing in case of an emergency.

It is also crucial, in event of fire, flood, theft, etc. that your company keeps an offsite backup of anything business-critical.  I often tell the story of one particular client who preferred to backup on a tape system and had neglected to switch the tapes since we sent his equiptment (he was out of state.)  I had urged the client several times, after seeing that our monitoring software realized there was a problem, to simply switch the tape and maintain an offsite backup copy.  Several months went by, and eventually I relented on my crusade about his backup system.  No more than a month later, a major storm hit his area and the machine, along with the only tape to have ever had a backup, were lost in a flood.  The client called me several days later, asking what could be done to recover the information, but the magnetic tape was unrelenting and a half year’s accounting data had to be reentered from reciepts.

Having an offsite backup does protect your company in several important aspects; there are several different styles of backup, and here at VCC, we do our best to reccomend a style based on your budget (heck, they are all far cheaper than repaying your employees for a few days work.)

Swap it!

Several onsite specialists in the area reccomend swapping harddrives at regular intervals- we’ve heard anywhere from a year to three- and there are significant benefits to this type of plan:

-Byte-for-byte copy to a new harddrive won’t lose any of your data
-Hard Drives increase in size and drop in price.  This means you’ll store more information for far less money.
-Replacing an aging drive could speed up your computer.
-The old harddrive serves as a backup, or a year-end snapshot
-VanceCoffman uses only high quality drives; whereas some of the big retailers will do anything to save a buck (Dude, I got a HITACHI!), VCC prefers to have quality equipment to work with in the field.

Too Late?

In the words of The Great Douglas Adams, “Don’t Panic.”  If you think you have a problem, turn off the machine, and give us a call.   We’d be glad to hear your concern and give you a clear-cut roadmap to recovering your data as swiftly as possible.

Our technicians have recently devised a new way to recover your data more effectively (and cheaper!) than ever before using only open-source software and a few hours with your machine.  Using our new data recovery workflow has helped us restore several dozen harddrives, including some personal ones of mine that I squirrelled away years ago on the chance of coming up with newer methods.

It’s always a possibility that the drive has too many faults to recover.  In such cases, our options are to limited to sending to an expensive specialist, or junking the drive and starting over.  We’ve seen no more than 4 harddrives that would not yield data to our methods in the last five years.  And all 4 of those drives’ owners turned into loyal VCC offsite backup customers.

Wether you manage a small backup yourself, or pay for managed services, the end of the year is always a good time to grab a backup.  Holiday family photos, your end of year accounting, and those documents you’ll be relying on for next year’s big project are all too important to squander for a few less minutes in front of a monitor.

-TJ Vance