Fortinet, a network security company, recently issued a Zombie Awareness Month Computer Survival Guide to help users defend against a zombie invasion. According to the guide, “the most likely way a computer becomes infected is by [its user] landing on a malicious link.”

Short, cryptic messages telling users to watch a video clip (or asking “Is this you in this video?“) and containing a shortened or obfuscated link that hides the true destination URL have plagued Facebook and other social networks.

Even after clicking on the malicious link, you may be unaware that your PC has been compromised or infected. The invader will try to send the same message with the same cryptic video link to your contacts, but your friends may think that the message is suspicious and wonder why you would send a video link.

As the Fortinet guide explains: “A smart friend will ping you and ask, ‘Why did you send this video to me?’ If you know you didn’t send a video link to your friend, you can pretty much bet you’ve become infected or that your account is compromised.“

Step by Step Installation

1. Download and unzip the plugin.

http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/exploit-scanner.0.5.zip
or

http://ocaoimh.ie/exploit-scanner/

2. Copy the exploit-scanner directory into your plugins folder.

3. Visit your Plugins page and activate the plugin.

4. A new menu item called “Exploit Scanner” will be made off the Dashboard.

How do I fix the out of memory error?

Scanning your website can take quite a bit of memory. The plugin tries to allocate 128MB but sometimes that’s not enough. You can allocate more by editing wp-config.php and adding the following line before the wp-settings.php require command. This code allocates 256MB of memory. Adjust the “256″ figure to suit your needs.

define( ‘mr911_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’256M’ );

In 2003, President Bush signed the “Can Spam” bill, in December of 2003 which is the first national standards around bulk unsolicited commercial e-mail. The bill, approved by the Senate by a vote of 97 to 0, prohibits senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail from using false return addresses to disguise their identity (spoofing) and the use of dictionaries to generate such mailers. In addition, it prohibits the use of misleading subject lines and requires that emails include and opt-out mechanism. The legislation also prohibits senders from harvesting addresses off Web sites. Violations constitute a misdemeanor crime subject to up to one year in jail.
One major point that needs to be discussed about this: spam is now coming from other countries in ever-greater numbers. These emails are harder to fight, because they come from outside our country’s laws and regulations. Because the Internet opens borders and thinks globally, these laws are fine and good, but do not stop the problem.

So what do you do about this? Her are the top 5 Rules to do to protect from spam.

Number 1: Do what you can to avoid having your email address out on the net.
There are products called “spam spiders” that search the Internet for email addresses to send email to. If you are interested, do a search on “spam spider” and you will be amazed at what you get back. Interestingly, there is a site, WebPoison.org, which is an open source project geared to fight Internet “spambots” and “spam spiders”, by giving them bogus HTML web pages, which contain bogus email addresses
A couple suggestions for you: a) use form emails, which can hide addresses or also b) use addresses like sales@company.com instead of your full address to help battle the problem. c) There are also programs that encode your email, like jsGuard, which encodes your email address on web pages so that while spam spiders find it difficult or impossible to read your email address.

Number 2: Get spam blocking software. There are many programs out there for this. (go to www.cloudmark.com or www.mailwasher.net for example). You may also buy a professional version. Whatever you do, get the software. It will save you time. The software is not foolproof, but they really do help. You usually have to do some manual set up to block certain types of email.

Number 3: Use the multiple email address approach.
There are a lot of free email addresses to be had. If you must subscribe to newsletters, then have a “back-up” email address. It would be like giving your sell phone number to your best friends and the business number to everyone else.

Number 4: Attachments from people you don’t know are BAD, BAD, BAD.
A common problem with spam is that they have attachments and attachments can have viruses. Corporations often have filters that don’t let such things pass to you. Personal email is far more “open country” for spamers. General rule of thumb: if you do not know who is sending you something, DO NOT OPEN THE ATTACHMENT. Secondly, look for services that offer filtering. Firewall vendors offer this type of service as well.

Number 5: Email services now have “bulk-mail” baskets. If what you use currently does not support this, think about moving to a new vender. The concept is simple. If you know someone, they can send you emails. If you don’t know them, put them in the bulk email pile and then “choose” to allow them into your circle. Spam Blocking software has this concept as well, but having extra layers seems critical these days, so it is worth looking into.

If you are already an owner of a license feel yourself free to tell others
about this license giveaway and benefits of the program. How you can do it?
* Send an invite to get the license to your friends
* Write about this giveaway on your favorite forum
* Send a tip to your favorite blog’s author(s)

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