Earlier this afternoon (Monday Sept 10, 2012) GoDaddy acknowledged via their Godaddy Twitter site that they are experiencing a major outage. GoDaddy-registered web sites are offline. At around 4pm (EST) they tweeted the following:
GoDaddy Update: Still working on it, but we’re making progress. Some service has already been restored. Stick with us.
As far as I can tell, this outage does not affect any sites that are just using GoDaddy’s SSL certificates.
Microsoft’s Windows Defender Offline (WDO) product should be in the toolkit for every I.T. technician. If you are trying to run this on a very old Windows XP computer with less than 768KB of memory, WDO will display error 0x80508007 when starting up.
The error message displayed does not tell you what’s wrong, but the cause is not enough memory. WDO requires a minimum of 768KB of memory.
Microsoft’s article KB 2520970 includes a list of error codes you may encounter.
You know the drill – someone calls you in a panic because their computer won’t reboot. You ask if they’ve been experiencing problems recently. And they go on to tell you how the computer had been crashing more frequently of late, and that sometimes they have to reboot it several times, etc, etc, etc!
I had a neighbor who stopped me and said “You’re the computer guy, aren’t you?”. Long story short, his computer had been acting up and finally would not boot. He had two different people/places take a look at the drive and declared that the drive was dead and the data was not recoverable. One of those people said that he had a vast array of expensive tools at his disposal, and could not do anything with the drive.
I asked if I could take a look at it. I brought the drive back to my workbench, hooked it up to a computer, and ran my trusty GetDataBack utility from Runtime Software. Sure, it took 4 hours to run, but once it did, it located over 800 documents, photos and music files!
Don’t let the $79 price scare you away. Unlike a lot of software, this is a one time $79 price with free lifetime updates! If you’re an I.T. technician, you should have this in your I,.T. toolkit!
Yes, I have also heard of the trick of putting the drive in a sealed air-tight bag and put it in the freezer for 15 minutes. I’ve tried that several times, without success.
Finally, my good MVP buddy Mick from Down Under suggested looking at some of the freeware offered by MiniTool. I’ll write more about those in another blog post.
I have Microsoft Windows Home Server (WHS) installed in the majority of my customers, both business and residential. WHS is great as a full image backup solution for these environments. Restoring a computer whose disk has crashed, or has been overrun with malware/viruses, is usually a piece of cake.
But there are certain steps required, especially if the workstation you are restoring is running a 64 bit version of Windows O/S (Win 7/64, Vista/64)
Download Restore Folder to USB thumb drive:
Obtain 32-bit NIC card drivers:
Example:
Boot from WHS Restore CD:
Detect Hardware:
Proceed with Restore:
Good luck!
Here’s a link to another web site showing the step-by-step screenshots of restoring a computer using WHS:
http://www.howtogeek.com/?post_type=post&p=12642
Note: This is a slightly revised and updated version of my blog post from 4/23/2012
There have been many reports that on July 9, 2012 there is the possibility of a widespread Internet blackout due to the FBI shutting down several rogue Internet DNS servers. When that happens, any computer previously infected from these rogue servers will lose access to the Internet. You can read more about the details of threat and the cause at the FBI website.
There’s good news and even more good news.
The first good news is that the FBI identified this threat late last year and immediate took steps to clean up and lock this threat from doing any real damage. And, as long as you keep your computer up-to-date with virus & malware protection, you should be good.
The second good news is that you can do an immediate test to see if your computer is infected with this rogue software! Just click on this website link below to perform a quick check your computer:
Please note – the website listed above may be heavily accessed this weekend. If you get a “page cannot be displayed”, press the “Refresh” button on your browser, or try again in a few minutes.
No software is installed and no changes to your computer is made. You will get either an immediate Green (good) or Red (infected) message.
If you are infected, the website will explain how to fix it, or you can contact me for assistance.
Please do not take this lightly!
LinkedIn reported today (June 6, 2012) that a list containing 6.5 million encrypted passwords of LinkedIn users was stolen and posted to the Internet. They say hackers are busy trying to unencrypt these passwords.
I strongly encourage you to go to LinkedIn’s website and change your password ASAP. For more information, please read this PCWorld article on the security breach.
Microsoft recently released Windows Defender Offline (WDO), which is a standalone CD/USB bootable rootkit/malware scanner program. If you have a computer that will not start up properly because of malware, try WDO.
WDO is essentially the new name for the Microsoft’s Standalone System Sweeper (MSSS).
There are separate versions of WDO for scanning 32-bit and 64-bit systems. From a “good” computer, download the appropriate version of WDO and run the executable. It will prompt you to install it on a CD, create an ISO image, or create a bootable USB stick. You can then use the CD/USB on the infected computer.
WDO can be used to scan Windows XP (SP3), Vista, and Windows 7 systems.
My recommendation for I.T. technicians is to grab two USB sticks, and install the 32 bit version on one, and the 64 bit version on the other, and keep them in your toolkit.
One nice thing with WDO is that if the infected computer does have internet access, when you boot up WDO, it will go out and look for updated definition files.
Finally, you may find Microsoft Resources and Guidance for Removal of Malware and Viruses helpful.
I will keep it simple, without a lot of detail. On July 9, 2012 there is the possibility of a widespread Internet blackout due to a malicious piece of software that is lying dormant on many computers. You can read more about it at the FBI website: http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/november/malware_110911.
The good news is that you can do an immediate test to see if your computer is infected with this rogue software! Click on this website link: (http://www.dns-ok.us/) to quickly check your computer. No software is installed and no changes to your computer is made. You will get either an immediate Green (good) or Red (infected) message. If you are infected, the website will explain how to fix it, or you can contact me for assistance.
I have alerted my customers several times in the past few months to be on guard against fake emails. These fake emails appear to come from your bank, from the IRS, from PayPal, from FedEx, or one of your credit cards.
Generally these emails are telling you that a payment you just made is being processed. Here’s an example of one I received today.
One way to tell if it’s a fake email is to hover your mouse over one of the links. The popup window should display the “real” location of where it will take you if you click on the link.
Two things in the example below:
(1) You would think that an email from Paypal would be taking you to a PayPal.com web site, but not in this case! Take a close look – it’s taking me to a website “air-maxes-shop.com”.
(2) the URL displayed in the box is not even using an https protected address, but an unprotected http site.
So, please be vigilant! The best suggestion I can make is that if you cannot tell if the email is real or fake, then do NOT click on any links within the email. You can always call the company (IRS, FedEx, Bank, etc.) and speak to someone to clarify if this is a real or fake email.
For those of you who use MalwareBytes, you should be aware they just came out with a new version (1.60.xx) and a new database definition naming convention. I’ve installed it on several systems with no problems.
But tonight I was working on a system, and did the regular in place upgrade of MalwareBytes. However, upon completion of the update process, MalwareByrt crashed on start up. Rebooting the computer did not help. So I uninstalled MalwareBytes, rebooted and then installed it clean. It still crashed on startup.
Fortunately, a quick Internet search identified that several other people had encountered this same issue with the new version of MalwareBytes. Fortunately, someone had a fix to the problem. I was not aware that MalwareBytes had their own standalone uninstall/cleanup utility program. So I downloaded it, ran it, rebooted, reinstalled MalwareBytes and now it starts up fine.
Here’s the link to the cleanup utility, straight from MalwareBytes’ web site:
http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam-clean.exe.