Educating users is a difficult, long term and never ending task… and requires to manage to allocate a budget to this! To me, AV solutions should have some protections against bad decisions from non-techie users and also security rules in the network.

Like or Dislike: 0  1

@grub2

While I don’t dispute the existence of malware that is capable of infecting BIOS and firmware in hardware devices, I do question how prevalent it really is and what its general purpose would be. Typically malware’s primary purpose is monetary. I’ve been using computers for 14+ years on various networks and hardware equipment and have yet to experience any monetary loss or compromise of any kind. Either this type of malware simply didn’t exist on all those networks and equipment or its primary purpose is something other than monetary (espionage by the likes of the CIA/NSA etc.). Logic says the former.

And as to shielding cabling and TEMPEST attacks? Seriously? If you have to go that far, what do you have that is so important and who wants it? Are you trading in national security secrets or something other worldly nefarious? All this stuff sounds like something off Coast to Coast AM. Albeit, a very interesting and entertaining show.

Well-loved. Like or Dislike: 8  2

Scroll up and click to read the user: minime’s post. It was neg repped down to hide it from view but it contains, most certainly, the most important information within this comment page. I’m sure most, if not all of the neg rep votes were from makers or stockholders of commercial antivirus companies.

There’s a deep secret they don’t want you to know: rootkits surviving hard disk drive formats and wipes, on firmware in your AGP and PCI cards and your BIOS. Proprietary firmware being manipulated with rootkits and trojans on connected devices overlooked by most if not all antimalware scanners.

When The Sony BMG rootkit first appeared, it was a rootkit scanner, later to be snatched up by Microsoft, which first detected the infestation, no antivirus or other antimalware scanners could pick this malware up.

Call me a conspiracy theorist as much as you like, and down rep this post to save your conscience from reading this, but I believe there is a vast collusion among antimalware companies to hide the discovery of serious malware infesting the AGP and PCI devices connected to your computer as well as the BIOS itself.

If you search long and hard enough on the web, you’ll discover many individuals puzzled over malware which persists on their computers and people labelling them as crazy or not knowing enough about computers and mocking these individuals.

One site to check is:
tagmeme dot com forwardslash subhack

our computer’s components are wide open to attack from malware, most of it being black box hardware and firmware to start with.

Research the following with Google:

“PCI rootkit”
“PCI rootkits”
“BIOS rootkits”
“BIOS rootkit”
“persistant rootkits”
“network card rootkits”
“network card rootkit”

The above search recommendations do not include, but should include, router rootkits. If you hang around enough black hat discussion forums and read posts and check code, you will come across people discussing how they run attacks against routers, many using simple exploits followed by breaking down the firmware for the router and/or replacing it.

Many network cards on PCs are widely exploitable and capable of much more than you would expect.

Those “in the know” will either down rep this post, attack it to some degree (use the “tinfoil”, “conspiracy”, or “crazy” label), or downplay the issue as nothing to be concerned about.

If you’re not concerned, you should be. Positive rep informative posts like minime’s so the knowledge is not lost because of the few who want this info suppressed.

There is not a single product, free or commercial which scans AGP, PCI cards such as your sound card and graphics card, BIOS, and network cards for these dangerous rootkits. I believe the companies want it this way, so the real malware persists on your network, for whatever dark reason they have for the exploitation. It is a fact many antimalware scanners *whitelist* certain malware, too, for a number of reasons.

Further homework:

* Shielding all cables on your system to prevent against leaks

* Switching from CRT to flatscreen monitors and shielding all cables to prevent against TEMPEST attacks

* Taking readings around your computer to spot and prevent leakage

Beware those who would continue to down rep these informative posts and keep you in the dark.

Once a system’s devices are exploited, no number of formats or wipes will aid you, your system will continue to deploy the infection.

As minime posted, we should not be forced to boot into a livecd like ultimate boot cd and navigate through an ancient text interface to dump and checksum our BIOS/CMOS information to verify whether or not an infection is present.

The papers are out there, written by intelligent people, locate them and treasure the knowledge on protecting your system, as much as you can.

When is the last time you verified your sound card’s firmware?

When is the last time you verified your graphics card’s firmware?

Do you know how? Is this ability hidden from you?

Challenge yourself to know more, by searching for the info I’ve highlighted in this post.

Pay careful attention to posts which are hidden via negative reps, it just might be someone or some people wish to hide from you powerful information on protection of your system, and, like in the dark ages, knowledge.

Hot debate. What do you think? 4  9

There’s a deep secret they don’t want you to know: rootkits surviving hard disk drive formats and wipes, on firmware in your AGP and PCI cards and your BIOS. Proprietary firmware being manipulated with rootkits and trojans on connected devices overlooked by most if not all antimalware scanners.

When The Sony BMG rootkit first appeared, it was a rootkit scanner, later to be snatched up by Microsoft, which first detected the infestation, no antivirus or other antimalware scanners could pick this malware up.

Call me a conspiracy theorist as much as you like, and down rep this post to save your conscience from reading this, but I believe there is a vast collusion among antimalware companies to hide the discovery of serious malware infesting the AGP and PCI devices connected to your computer as well as the BIOS itself.

If you search long and hard enough on the web, you’ll discover many individuals puzzled over malware which persists on their computers and people labelling them as crazy or not knowing enough about computers and mocking these individuals.

One site to check is:
https://tagmeme.com/subhack/

our computer’s components are wide open to attack from malware, most of it being black box hardware and firmware to start with.

Research the following with Google:

“PCI rootkit”
“PCI rootkits”
“BIOS rootkits”
“BIOS rootkit”
“persistant rootkits”
“network card rootkits”
“network card rootkit”

The above search recommendations do not include, but should include, router rootkits. If you hang around enough black hat discussion forums and read posts and check code, you will come across people discussing how they run attacks against routers, many using simple exploits followed by breaking down the firmware for the router and/or replacing it.

Many network cards on PCs are widely exploitable and capable of much more than you would expect.

Those “in the know” will either down rep this post, attack it to some degree (use the “tinfoil”, “conspiracy”, or “crazy” label), or downplay the issue as nothing to be concerned about.

If you’re not concerned, you should be. Positive rep informative posts like minime’s so the knowledge is not lost because of the few who want this info suppressed.

There is not a single product, free or commercial which scans AGP, PCI cards such as your sound card and graphics card, BIOS, and network cards for these dangerous rootkits. I believe the companies want it this way, so the real malware persists on your network, for whatever dark reason they have for the exploitation. It is a fact many antimalware scanners *whitelist* certain malware, too, for a number of reasons.

Further homework:

* Shielding all cables on your system to prevent against leaks

* Switching from CRT to flatscreen monitors and shielding all cables to prevent against TEMPEST attacks

* Taking readings around your computer to spot and prevent leakage

Beware those who would continue to down rep these informative posts and keep you in the dark.

Once a system’s devices are exploited, no number of formats or wipes will aid you, your system will continue to deploy the infection.

As minime posted, we should not be forced to boot into a livecd like ultimate boot cd and navigate through an ancient text interface to dump and checksum our BIOS/CMOS information to verify whether or not an infection is present.

The papers are out there, written by intelligent people, locate them and treasure the knowledge on protecting your system, as much as you can.

When is the last time you verified your sound card’s firmware?

When is the last time you verified your graphics card’s firmware?

Do you know how? Is this ability hidden from you?

Challenge yourself to know more, by searching for the info I’ve highlighted in this post.

Pay careful attention to posts which are hidden via negative reps, it just might be someone or some people wish to hide from you powerful information on protection of your system, and, like in the dark ages, knowledge.

Like or Dislike: 2  3

I have had various irritating issues with Puppy, but finally reached the understanding which often happens with software, of avoiding the dangerous features. I would guess that fully 98 percent of my Puppy time consists of working in Firefox (like now).

Many of the problems I had at first were tied to the optical writer and type of disk I used. I tried the recommended CD-R’s for a while, with occasional disasters, and then various types of disk. In the end, I found DVD+RW’s to be much more reliable, at least in my systems, and, of course, re-usable as well. DVD+RW’s probably do require a later DVD writer design or firmware update than DVD-R’s, but my 3-year-old laptop uses them fine.

In my case, I have found it important to avoid the semiautomatic end-of-session DVD update, even if update is needed. Something about that seems to not handle my writers, which then damages the data on the disk. The work-around is to just say No at the end of each session, and use the Save button on the desktop for saving changes (which then causes an error on boot, which we can ignore). It is best to save a session soon after startup anyway. But the Save button is not available on the first session, so that just has to work and it is good not to get in too deep before trying it. I do try to wait for the DVD writer to find the disk and settle down before writing.

“Firefox died while trying to upgrade from 3.6.3 to 3.6.4 (3.6.6 recently available) on my puppy.”

OK, that is a disaster, but you can start over from scratch using the original .iso. You can download it into Temp and then burn a new start from Puppy. Also download the latest Firefox .pet you can find, and start there and upgrade. After an hour, maybe two, you should be back in charge.

Part of the disaster feeling probably is a loss of hard-won configuration. Personally, I make a text list of normally-open tabs using the Copy All URL’s add-on. With Edit / Copy All Url’s / copy the text is formed on the clipboard which I save in a LastPass Secure Note. Copying that text from the note and pasting it with Edit / Copy All URL’s / Paste will open and recover the tabs. This is lighweight bookmarking for recovery purposes. For real bookmarking I use Google bookmarks.

The larger issue may be that of collecting the lost add-ons, which can be a long list. There are tools for this: the add-on FEBE comes to mind but I do not like it. Some of the sync add-ons may do that also, and might be a good idea if not too intrusive. Currently, I just do it by hand. I first save the list of add-ons by using the Extension List Dumper add-on and saving the text as another LastPass Secure Note. That gives me the list of add-ons I need to recover by hand. That can take an hour or so.

“Upgraded fine on Windows but am stuck on 3.6.3 on puppy so I’m back to banking on Windows though I’ve yet to try SeaMonkey or puppy’s own browser.”

Start over. Set it up again. I know Firefox updating works in general, because it has worked for me many times. But Puppy is obviously not nearly commercial quality software, and users may have some trouble until they see what works. I wish there were a better alternative to recommend, but the ability to update the boot DVD is both extremely important and completely unique, as far as I know.

One advantage of using the Firefox platform for system-level activities (like configure and recover) is that most add-ons work both on Microsoft Windows and Puppy. That can make transitioning to Puppy much easier.

Hope that helps!

Like or Dislike: 2  5

However, the problem with every protection program, whether it is a firewall, AV, Sandboxie, or anything else, is that you have no way of knowing whether you have sufficient security unless: either the program catches something and logs in the threat or notifies you; or you find your machine compromised, if something eludes your security. If your computer(s) are never attacked, you will never know.

Like or Dislike: 1  1