AdNauseam: The Ad Blocker That Fights Back

In a web built on tracking, profiling, and behavioral data, most privacy tools play defense—blocking ads, limiting trackers, and trying to stay invisible. AdNauseam takes a far more aggressive stance. It doesn’t just avoid the system—it actively disrupts it.

Protecting your Android device and your Privacy

Its been a while since I have written about how to protect your self from the prying eyes of government. So if your trying to protect your self against the NSA, GCHQ, or who ever here are some things that you can do to help protect yourself.

How a Cracker breaks wifi and more details, WEP,WPA,WPA2,WPS and more

Attacking wifi tools and how attacks work.
Wifi types are open, wep, wpa1, WPA2, wpa2 enterprise. There are also services on wifi to help people connect for the first time easier.  This service is called wps.  WPS is either active or passive. So here are the bellow

KitKat Android 4.4 Privacy using Privacy guard or AppOps

We all may know that Google removed an essential tool for keeping your self privacy in your control on your device. So here are some ways that you can control that.

Setting up Security Camera with Webcam on Ubuntu

Ever wonder what to do with your old webcams in your house. I mean you don't use them anymore right? You have a smartphone for that now.  Well how about turning them into a surveillance system?

Network security auditing - Subterfuge

For a long time there has been problems with security flaws in consumer grade routers for middle man attacks.  

Protect Your Data from NSA

Recently  there has been a lot of news about how the NSA has been spying on everyone in america and also those from outside america. This was granted to them in the power of the patriot act. So how do you protect your self.

Fighting The Government and Hollywood from Spying on you.

Recently in the world of the internet your privacy means almost nothing. There are companies that want to find out who you are to prevent you from practicing free speech and there are governments out there that don't want you to speak out against them. Privacy on the internet is a major thing to help keep companies and governments in line and honest.

Extra Privacy While Browsing

When browsing the Internet it is important to some people to have some sense of privacy. To achive this privacy there are various different ways of doing this. Each of these have plus and minuses.

Avast Free AntiVirus Results

Avast is a low powered power house when it comes to virus protection. First off I don't know if results are fully accurate as some of the virus links went dead sense the first part of the tests but after adding more it still did well.

Avast performance wise is not that bad as it runs at ~50mbs of ram while idle and does not very much while actually scanning. The software did well when I was surfing the net trying to download viruses using IE8 though on known bad sites the software would block the download of the known viruses not even giving it a chance to get in temp directory to do havoc. On top of that avast redirects you to their page telling you that you just dodged a virus and tries to sell you on upgrading your free version to a version with more bells and whistles. Though on the positive note avast did not allow me to bypass the block like some other virus scanners did when they did warn you about a site.

On scan it did not pick up any viruses which surprised me a little though sense it did block downloads it did not allow many to get a foothold. While in herins boot cd avira did not pickup anything though SAS did pick up 2 variants of a fake antivirus. While malwarebytes did not pickup anything spybot did pickup a pup that every other virus scanner also did not pick up.

Overall avast did well enough to go to round two with the other better virus scanners to go in to more testing. AV-Test.org has their results here if you want more information from their tests.

So far avast has done the best out of the virus scanners both detection rate, prevention, and performance in low memory situations.

Hope this helps and will do more testing later,
Local Tech Repair Admin

Avira Antivir Personal 2011 Review – Benchmark Windows XP

Today I am testing out Avira Antivir Personal and seeing how it holds up compared to other anti-virus suites out there. Avira AntiVir Personal has a fairly simple display and for a free anti-virus it I was hopping for a ok performance both detection rate and also hopefully having a low resource requirement.


I just want to start off by saying that I am not really impressed with how well it works. Avira is the software the company I work for uses for their virus removal off of Hiren's Boot CD. So I figured it be good for a dedicated virus scanner on the windows side.

Results:

While testing Avira with their Guard activated I used IE8 to surf the web to known predetermined websites that hosted a wide verity of bad software. Most the sites that I downloaded viruses from did not get stopped by avira in their active scans I only had 1 active block from an active x virus sense active x was enabled across all websites. Avira only stopped one virus from installing and only one virus from running after it installed. Which total 3 viruses in all during avira's active guard.

On the other hand during the scanning Avira did pick up one more virus in a 14min scan. This is not the best seeing that the computer still has many more viruses installed and spyware and spamware. So lets compare this to others to see how much they truly did miss.

Hiren's Boot CD
avira: 0
superantispyware: 3
normal mode:
comodofix: to many to count over 20
malwarebytes: 1
spybot S&D: 1
Sophos: 0


Conclusion:
Avira did protect against some of the more nasty viruses on the list though did miss many adware and rootkits and fake anti-virus software. Though sense it was able to pick up active x viruses and stop a few of them it is on the same level as AVG but with out a any warning on the web for if your going to a bad website or not. Still this is still better than what we have on our low end of clamwin.

Thanks for reading,
Local Tech Repair Admin

AVG Internet Security 2011 Review for Windows XP

AVG is a popular anti-virus software along with others like Norton and McAfee. So I decided to see how well it did compared so some other anti-virus software. I decided to test the AVG Internet Security 2011 instead of the free version because they gave a free 90 day trial to see how well it works and I wanted to see if it worked. I will go back and try again later with the free version to see the difference between the two.

If you have not read the first review check out it here:
http://localtechrepair.blogspot.com/2011/07/clamwin-and-clam-sentinel-review-on.html
this gives detail on what links I used for the malware.

Performance:
I just wanted to start out by saying that AVG Internet Security 2011 did not pick up every virus and malware so even the paid version still needs help by other things like spybot, malwarebytes, or/and superantispyware. But it did do a lot better than clam did to say the least.

AVG has some nice features like integration into the web browser to help warn people of virus infected sites. This should help some of the less techy people out there see a visual sign that something is wrong. Though only one of the sites did it not let me at all go to the site where the others gave me an option to bypass the warning.

AVG was able to block some of the applications from installing in the first place with is good for prevention though it did not prevent all of them. It was only able to block 4 while they where trying to install. This is better than nothing but not perfect either. It was able to detect running processes after some of the viruses where installed (5 of them). This is nice but I would rather of had it block it before it was installed but still did not make me have to scan for them.

While scanning it did a whole system scan and was able to find 1 infected file and 4 warnings which where corrupted exe from viruses that tried to download. The scan for a 10 gb hard drive took ~13mins.
AVG gives you the option of the priority that you want the scan to go I left it at the default for the scan though giving it high priority would probably speed up the time but make it less likely for the user to work on the computer while scanning.

Though AVG did not pick up everything and could not uninstall everything.

While running in Hiren Boot CD I ran different tests to see what it missed.
Superantispyware was able to find 4 adware and 1 rootkit and remove them.
Avira was able to find 5 infections.
Normal mode:
Malwarebytes found 12+2 = 14
Spybot Search & Destory found 1


AVG Internet Security 2011 missed a total of ~24 malware/virus and possible more that the programs above did not find.



Conclusion
AVG did a fairly good job and probably would have don't a lot better if we listened to the warnings that they gave while on the Internet we may have been in a better place. Though this still has room to grow in its protection of viruses sense the internet is not the only one place that can give you viruses. The performance of the scan speed was not bad at all compared to that of clam. Though on the performance of the the software on the ram side while idle the software was using 230MB of ram while scanning on default mode it was using 334MB of ram and while on High Priority scan it used 375MB. For a slow computer this may be acceptable but it depends on the users. Though for a windows xp computer with a half a GB of ram this and other things starting up this may be little to ram heavy for those computers.


Thanks for Reading,
Local Tech Repair Admin

ClamWin and Clam Sentinel Review on Windows XP

Clamwin is a version of ClamAV for windows. Though clam does not have active protection this is where clam sentinel comes in providing active protection for the clam definition database. So trying out clam to see if it really holds up to some of the things that viruses can throw at it we will see if it is worth even trying.

The list of viruses are from the following links.
-----WARNING REAL VIRUSES-----
adeliminator.net
http://www.thevalidatecheck.com/fr_ipd3/MjAxMTA3MTAtNzYuMTE1LjI0OC4xNjk=/index.php?web_id=CD4099&muid=MT-4e1a64ed4d383-3659
http://www.anti-spyware-101.com/download-sph
http://www.top20free.com/wallpaper.html
http://www.keygenguru.com/
http://spywarezapper.com/
http://www.rocketdownload.com/program/serial-keys-recover-215490.html
http://www.topwallpapers.com/
freevirusprotection.org/
www.free-antivirus.info/anti-virus/avg-antivirus-free-edition.html
www.newfreedownloads.com/find/adware-removal.html
www.freechristmasscreensavers.com/animatedsavers.htm
www.ihateadware.com/
www.freechristmassavers.com/
www.fasterpccleanclean.com/remove-rootkit-win32-agent-pp
http://www.reimage.com/lp/nhome/dyn.php?tracking=ga1&banner=6.1_Content_US&adgroup=Malware&ads_name=728x90_spyware_new_lp8&keyword=Spyware&lpx=LP-8
www.handyarchive.com/free/rootkit-web-bug-worm-eliminator/
---------WARNING REAL VIRUSES DON'T GO TO--------------


So while visiting these sites and and allowing the active x to run all these sites. I never received any popups warning me of possible infections or any warnings on a default install. This could possibly been fixed if I turned on warn on suspicious activity though this is not turned on by default. After trying to run in normal mode spybot, malwarebytes, and superantispyware and all of them being killed by the viruses I decided to try safe mode to see if it made any difference. And it did not.

Detection Rate for Default mode for clamwin is 0%


To see if clam will pick up any off them I tried to run it under hirens boot CD to see if the definitions would work. While in Hirens Boot CD Clamwin was able to find 1 virus after a ~31min scan of a 10GB hard drive. Where by comparison avira picked up 5 in 9 mins from hiren boot cd. And superantispyware found 5 more on top of that in 14mins. ClamWin is a non effective virus protection it could not prevent any viruses from being installed and it could barely find any when there was some.

My Rating of this small virus scanner is a complete fail for both boot scanning and active windows scanning.

The Best Free Anti-Virus Comparison - Clamwin VS McAfee VS Norton VS Avira VS AVG and More

I have always wondered if clamav is really that bad of a virus scanner compared to others in the industry. Researching on the web I hear a lot of people bashing their definitions database saying that it is worthless but I could never find any comparison between it and other virus scanners. When virus scanners are compared I normally look at av-test.org to see which one is the best for the year. But they don't test clam in their tests. So I figured I do my own test.

So here is what I am doing. I have a virtual machine with windows xp fully updated to the current updates (7-10-11). I will have one antivirus on the OS with nothing else. So it is only the virus scanner and the OS fully updated. I will be using IE for getting the viruses and then doing a virus scan with the virus scanner and seeing how many it picks up and how many it actively blocks. Then I will delete the Virtual Hard drive and start over with a new .vdi (I am using Virtual machine for the VM).

The First Anti Virus I will be testing is Clamwin with clam sentinel for the active scanner sense clamwin does not have a real time scanner. After that I will test it against some of the most common free anti-virus software out there so the free version of AVG, Avira, McAfee, Norton, and More (Post a link to one if you want it tested). After all the tests I will write a conclusion article summarizing the statistical information. All virus tests will also have the same viruses installed (or tried to be installed.)

If you have any suggestions let me know and I will try to do what I can. Each Anti-virus scanner will get their own post with their results.

Looking forward to your commons,
Local Tech Repair Admin


Test Results:
Avira
AVG
ClamWin and Clam Sentinel

How to Secure Your Wireless

If you have a home wireless you want to make sure that you secure it well. If someone has access to your wireless they are able to gain valuable information about you and your personal life. Not only that but they can use your internet connection to do things that are illegal like copy right infringement which may come back and bit you.

There are some simple guidelines that you can follow which will make it almost impossible for someone to crack your wireless.

First thing you can do have your wireless router set to open or WEP encryption. Both of these will leave you open the first being that it has no protection. The second is that it is severely weak (meaning anyone that can push a button can get in within a min).
Cracking WEP
So what is left if not leaving the router open and encrypting it with WEP? Well the only other choice is to WPA or WPA2 both of these encryption for your wireless is a lot more secure and has not been compromised like WEP has been.

But that alone is not enough the beautiful thing about wireless routers and computers is once you enter the password on the computer you don't have to remember it or enter it in all the time so you can help make your router more secure by making it very complex. don't ever use a wood or a phone number as the password.
I personally would suggest having a 25 character password that is alphanumerical with a few symbols in it. A sight like this will help
http://www.thebitmill.com/tools/password.html

next thing you can do is not use a common SSID. A SSID is what your router identifies itself as to the rest of the world. So your netgear or linksys that you see on your computer is someone that just left their wifi SSID as the default for the router. There have been hackers out there that have made rainbow tables of the most common SSID names so that people can easily rack into them.
http://www.renderlab.net/projects/WPA-tables/

Use something different like a street name of your street and maybe add a number to it. The whole point of not using a common SSID name is with WPA it uses the SSID to salt the hash of the password making each SSID have a different hash for the same password. This makes it a lot harder for someone that wants to crack your wireless password. Using programs like pyrit.
Cracking with Pyrit

Though if you don't care about securing your wireless you may just be helping another family out or a kid that wants to look at porn not on his dads wireless.

thanks for reading,
Local Tech Repair Admin

Have any other advice or have a question leave a comment.



*update*
You should also turn off WPS if you can. There is a major flaw in the design that causes wpa to be cracked easily.

Google Adsense has an Ad preference manager now.

Google has recently started changing their ads for their adsense program to better serve viewers of the ads. So for instance when you visit this site you get ads targeted to you and what not. Though unlike other advertising companies google allows you to opt out of their interest categories or demographics based on their cookie harvesting or cookie tracking.

If your interested in this then please visit their manager and either opt out or customize it so that you can get less spam and more actual useful ads.
Google Ads Preferences

What I noticed about my self is that the ad preferences that are there are pretty accurate though it assumed that I was older than I was but that is probably because I keep up on a lot of news and topics of interest of me. This hopefully will give web viewers less spam and something that actually interest because I personally am not interested in ads for women or ads that have anything to do with sports, though it is refreshing getting ads that are more along news and computer software and websites that I can later go and review.

Hope you guys check this out,
Local Tech Repair Admin

Thin Operating Systems - Cloud Computing

In recent years a lot of people have been talking about Cloud computing or thin OS computers. For those that do not know what cloud computing is I will let you know. cloud computing is the process of using a very stripped down OS on a computer and then using the internet connection to connect to a server which has an application on it that you use to do your heavy lifting for the computer processing. For instance using a tablet computer connecting to a server with video or photo editing software that requires lots of ram, hard drive space, and graphic processing to do. This server would do all the heavy lifting for the computer allowing the tablet to do the editing with out lagging. The only problem is security.

so one of the major reasons why people are starting to use cloud computing is because it does have some advantages in the area of security. If your computer gets compromised normally you may loss your data from a virus infection. Though with the cloud you can have that data some where not on your computer so that a virus could not get a hold of it to destroy it.

Though I am a strong believer against cloud computing. Let me explain why I think it is bad.
For one cloud computing requires you to be connected to the internet all the time. This alone has its own problems meaning if you ever don't have internet you can't access your work data or personal applications. Another thing bad with having a constant internet connection is that it means your computer is connected always to the internet and in doing so is always open up for attack.

Second reason is that thin computers don't give any more security. These thin computers are still vulnerable to viruses, worms, rootkits, and malware. Thin computers do give a false sense of security because they paint them as being more secure than normal. For instance

third reason is that your relying on someone else to keep your best interest as their best interest. For instance people trust Facebook with their personal life but Facebook has shown that it leaks or sells your personal information away. They allow apps to collect information about you with out telling you what information they are gathering.

fourth reason is you are relying on someone else to protect your information. Most people rely on someone else to protect your important information like email. Though many times people get hacked and their information is stolen and their email account sends out viruses or spam about Viagra . Or a company gets hack like Sony and they loss personal information and credit card information and they don't let their customers know right away.

I believe that cloud computing is going to be the future for main stream non computer users. Though I do not believe that we will be more secure for it. I am just waiting for larger of numbers of people losing their passwords and accounts to hackers at coffee shops waiting for that constant connection that is required for you to use your applications and stealing your credentials.

hope you enjoyed this,
local tech repair admin

further reading
(Un)Trusting the Cloud

Website Security

Recently today I was searching my email address on google to see what information there is out there about me and what not. This is a good practice to do to keep track of what you have out on the internet. But I ran across a website that I had bought from before that had a large chunk of their client emails and some staff emails out in the open.

I was horrified that the company (a tech company) was not taking my privacy to the utmost respect and had a what I consider a major security hole. Granted that the only information out there was email addresses but the problem is that if I was a black hat (evil hacker) and wanted to just see out of the thousand emails that I could do to get some fun information from them.

There are many different kinds of approaches a black hat could take in what they wanted to do with the information. There are many different social engineering attacks they could do. For instance sense they had internal emails of staff it opened up the attacker of impersonating one of the coworkers in an attack to infect a workers computer with a trojan so that the hacker could get access to the internal network and from there do a lot greater damage.

The black hat could use the other emails to send out personalized emails to the customers trying to get them to login to a fake site or use some form of XSS to help him gather usernames and passwords and from there maybe even more information like addresses and credit card information. Maybe the black hat is impersonating the company and their website and offering a free mp3 player coupon for being a loyal customer of the company. All you need to do is update your information and pay for shipping and handling (to get credit card).

There are 2 lessons that we can learn from this.

1. check what information is out there on the internet and always double check the addresses that people send you over email.

2. If your a website never let the public see anything more than they have to see. everything else needs to be protected.


Hope you check your stuff on google.
local tech repair admin

Want To Trust a Website?

Have you ever gone to a website to find out that what they had was horrible ads on the site or that the site information that you found on the site was not accurate or trustworthy? Well the web is not a very safe place and a lot of times you can't trust what people write on the web. so how to fix this?

If your running Firefox web browser there is a plugin for the browser called Web of Trust which is a plugin that users rate websites on 4 different things: trustworthiness, Privacy, Child Safety, and Vender Reliability.

I would suggest that everyone get this for their Firefox browser as it is an amazing plugin that helps you see if a site is good or not before you even get to the site. For instance if i am googling local tech repair the plugin will automatically check each link on google and show either green, yellow, or red depending on how safe the website is.

You can also set the plugin to warn you if your going to an untrusted website or a site that you have given a poor rating to.

I hope every one of you go out and get this application as it is a wonderful safety tool and helps you better research when your on the web by automatically showing which sites are good or not.

thanks,
local tech repair admin

ps. I hope we can earn a good rating for our users. If you are concerned by anything you can always let us know.

Basic Repairing of a Virus Infected Computer

So I have been working at a computer repair shop recently and fixing computers with lots of different problems. when we get a computer with a virus for service we throw in a free diagnostic in with it to make sure the computer it self is running fine. So let me take you through the process of how we fix most computers in the store.

The first thing that you will need is something called a hiren's bootcd which can be found this link
http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

Once you have that burned to a cd or USB you then start the computer your fixing up and open the boot menu (normally Esc or F12) from there we go in the the windows xp mini. We mostly use software that is easy to use and that does not take someone extremely knowledgeable about computers to run. This is why we use windows instead of linux and command-line.

so next once the hiren's menu opens up we got to testing and then we use a program called S&M Stress Test to make sure that the computer's hard ware checks out. for instance does not have a bad stick of ram.

then from there after that passes we go and use Avira AntiVir Personal and SuperAntispyware and you need to make sure they are updated. then after that you will find a few problems most of them will be tracking cookies which aren't really viruses.

From there we restart the computer and then start it up in safe mode. And run the avira, superantispyware, and Malwarebytes. After all that checks out we restart the computer in normally and then run the last 3 virus scanners again.(malwarebytes is most effective in normal).

We then run CCleaner and Registry Mechanic to clean up the computer.

we then update windows using the windows update manager. We then check to make sure that the user has some form of anti virus protection if they do not we install avira for them or AVG

That is a simple way of fixing a lot of your virus problems.


hope this helps,
local tech repair admin