Smith's Technology Blog

Wow. What a couple of weeks it’s been. We have done a lot of traveling, and some strange camping. My oldest son is a big Detroit Lions Fan (I don’t understand ether), and his greatest football hero is Berry Sanders. There was an autograph signing in the Dallas area a couple of weeks ago and he asked us (his parents) to come wait in line with him to get a few things signed. Ok, a chance to visit, not a big deal. However, the waiting in line would begin Friday morning and the signing would be Saturday morning; a little over 24 hours waiting. Well, not too big of a deal. We left on Thursday evening, drove into the worst snowstorm in 100 years, and camped out in Dallas in one foot of snow; now it is a big deal. We did it and I will relish the memories for the rest of my life. It was quite an event. So what does that have to do with technology? Absolutely nothing, unless you consider that it was like stepping back 100 years or so and braving the winter. I just thought I would share with you and hopefully explain some of why it has been a while since the last update.

Now for the technology. This week at the university where I work we had an incident involving malware that came through Facebook. Social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twiter, etc. are extremely dangerous places when it comes to exposure to viruses and worms. The lady that was in charge of the Facebook group for the university linked in a video, which she though was of an event at the university, only to discover a few minutes later that it was not, and it had a worm embedded in it. Because it was a group, the notification was sent throughout campus and several users clicked on the video before we could get it removed from the site. The work is known as the “koobface” worm. It has been around for about a year and a half, but it is the type of worm that morphs itself so it has been able to stick around for a while. After a bit of investigation and research we finally came up with a fix to clean up the machine if it has been infected. If you want to check to see if you may have the worm, simply go to some security software site such as www.avg.com or www.symantec.com. If your browser will not open the site, you have the worm. Here is a link to instruction on how to clean up your machine. It is part of the university Facebook group, and feel free to join if you like.
This particular worm has been around a while and indications are that it will soon be showing up on Twiter as well. Please take a moment to run updates on your computer and make sure your anti virus is up to date. Feel free to post to this site if you have questions on recovering from attacks like this one.