I was browsing my twitter feed this morning and remembered one of my followers/followees (?) had just spent some time changing their website and thought I would have a look.

Their twitter profile had their website link in it and I duly clicked it and found the landing page for their hosting company – oops.

What had been forgotten was that “www.domain.com” is a different website to “domain.com” they had omitted to make a second entry in their DNS server for “domain.com” easily done in the rush to launch. Some companies actually use it for a second machine for redundancy or extra pages. I have found internal servers using this function and being presented with Microsoft Small Business Server login screens before now, giving access to the local network with some username and password social engineering, not really where you want customers to end up even by mistake.

borrowed this image from SBS Diva’s blog, thank you.

I recently had a big debate with the branding department of a major UK  organisation where they said that “domain.com” looks better in documents than “www.domain.com” they had no idea of the ramifications when they did it on sites that they had no control over.

This made me think of how lazy our web browsing has become, we now use the browser address bar as a search bar:

This means we stop typing http:// or www and just enter the company name. We could end up anywhere !! Mostly Google, Bing etc. show you the right sites (after having noted your search history) but there are a lot of phishing sites out there ready to grab your details and they have been known to sell to you and take your money before you know anything about it.

I am not the only one that thinks this, HMRC has a page on it, all about emails but note the web links lower down

As do Microsoft, note the misspelt links on the page

Google’s search shows over 7m examples when you search for “examples of phishing scams”

The answer is to be very careful about DNS and your use of the search bar when you are surfing somewhere which holds your personal information and when you shorten things for Twitter feeds etc.

This is the Windows 7 version of how to find your local IP address, Vista is similar.

I keep talking people through the process of finding their local IP address, not their internet facing one, just the one issued by their router. This post shows one way of checking it on an XP computer the next one does Windows 7, Vista is somewhere in between.

From the Start Button go to Control Panel
Click Network and Internet Connections
Network Connections
Right Click the live connection, usually " Local Area Connection" or the Wi-Fi Connection and
click status
Click the Support Tab on the top
IP address is in the middle Internet router is the default gateway.

Ever found yourself searching for the way to safely remove the USB stick in Windows 7, it is lost in the status bar?

Getting to this is very picky at times
So the way is to create a desktop shortcut as follows:
Right click the desktop select New then Shortcut In Location "rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll" – it is case sensitive
Give it a nice name
You can give it a nice icon if you want, Right Click the icon and select Properties
Click Change Icon
Browse to shell32.dll and pick your icon
OK and OK
When you double click you get so you can select the device you want to remove.

This tip was inspired from the official Windows Magazine.

At a recent Banbury Tweetup (usually first Thursday of the month at the Inn at Farnborough, next one on the 9th June 2011) we discussed the security issues of broken computers and hard disks. You should always remove the hard disk or use a secure wipe tool to erase all the data otherwise it might turn up in some sort of identity theft scam later in your life.

Just because a drive cannot be read by your computer (USB drives dropped on floor or USB stick/camera SD drive broken in half ) or your mobile phone sims appears duff does not mean someone could not spend time and read your life story or business secrets from it.

Did you know that an awful lot of laser printers also have hard drives/writable flash media in them, saving your documents for possible reprinting later or just caching them.

So no matter what hardware you recycle remember that you need to be careful about any personal/business information still on the hard disk or flash memory installed in them.

Remember this BBC news item, it could still happen today.

There are services that can wipe and dispose of your drives safely.

I fell foul of HP’s part ordering and managed to buy a small server without a DVD drive, lovely box though, an HP Proliant Microserver.

It came with hard disk and various cd’s including Windows Server 2008R2 Foundation edition.

Not wanting to slow things down I tried numerous ways to boot the Windows Install from a USB pen, finally finding the web site below where the simple commands were posted.

Looks like this will work for Windows Vista, Windows 7 as well as Windows Server 2008.

I found that it was relatively easy to create such a tool!

1. Either mount the ISO or insert the DVD for Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 into your computer. Let’s say it’s at D:\
2. Format your USB stick to FAT32 (I used default settings for everything via the Windows format tool). Let’s say it’s at H:\
3. Run the following commands at a command prompt:

d:\boot\bootsect.exe /NT60 h:

xcopy d:\*.* /s /e /f h:\

At this point, you should be able to boot off of your USB stick (pending proper BIOS settings on the machine you’re booting up from) and it will install Windows off of the flash memory! Easy as that!

Thank you to Shane Milton’s Technology Update – Jaxidian Update

I keep running into this issue and found this on this forum

1. End Task on EXPLORER.EXE from Task Manager.

2. Start the Registry Editor

3. Look for the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderTypes\{EF87B4CB-F2CE-4785-8658-4CA6C63E38C6}\TopViews\{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}

4. Rename the key so it looks like the following:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FolderTypes\{EF87B4CB-F2CE-4785-8658-4CA6C63E38C6}\TopViews\{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}.BACKUP

5. From Task Manager click on File | New Task (Run) and type EXPLORER.EXE and hit return.

6. Now try your search from the Start Menu again.

If the above process doesn’t work for you, you can always put it back the way it was by reversing the process above.

I don’t understand exactly what this key is controlling, but hopefully someone else can shed some light on why this works.

I have run into this at least 4 times so far and have no idea why it keeps happening.

I also have no idea why the word wrap on the above works on Firefox but not on IE8.

This should work on Windows 7 and Vista

Right Click the desktop and select New Create Shortcut

Enter the following in the location of the item

mstsc /v:remote

Where “remote” is the computer you want to connect to

Click Next

Name the shortcut something memorable

Click Finish

You should now have an icon on the desktop.

Other parameters:
[for experienced users only]

mstsc.exe {ConnectionFile|/v:server} [/console] [/f] [/w:width /h:height]
mstsc.exe /edit”ConnectionFile”
mstsc.exe /migrate

Parameters:

ConnectionFile : Specifies the name of an .rdp file for the connection.
/v:server : Specifies the remote computer to which you want to connect.
/console : Connects to the console session of the specified Windows 2000 Server.
/admin : Connects to the console session of Windows 2003/2008 servers – note admin replaced console
/f : Starts Remote Desktop connection in full-screen mode.
/w:width /h:height : Specifies the dimensions of the Remote Desktop screen.
/edit : Opens the specified .rdp file for editing.
/migrate : Migrates legacy connection files that were created with Client Connection Manager to new .rdp connection files.

The above information came from the Microsoft TechNet site

Recently I lost the ability to expand zip files as compressed folders in Vista. a quick search of the web and I found this:

1. At the start prompt enter “cmd /c assoc .zip=CompressedFolder”
2. If necessary, Open regedit, navigate to the above path and delete the UserChoice node
   [-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.zip\UserChoice]
3. Restart Windows

remember editing the registry can be dangerous, so always backup first or create a restore point.

Source

One of my clients has just been hit by this phishing virus, purporting to be a UPS Message – beware

Trojan disguised as UPS delivery note
Joy Persaud July 16, 2008
Panda Security is warning email recipients that a series of messages purporting to come from package delivery company UPS may in fact harbour the Agent.JEN trojan.