Viruses should be a concern for Mac users

Earlier this month Sophos released a free version of their product for the Mac, Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition. Since then, they have been gathering data from their users. They recently released some statistics from the clients on their Naked Security Blog and found that users should be concerned about what might be hiding on their hard drive.


So far Sophos says that they have 150,000 Mac users and of those users nearly 50,000 have already reported finding malware on the computer. Interestingly enough the most common malware that the software detected was Mal/ASFDldr-A, a malware targeted at Windows machines. Mal/ASDFDldr-A takes advantage of a flaw in Windows Media Player which allows the infected media file to open a malicious web page rather than display the desired content.

They found though that the majority of attacks detected were Java exploits which are cross platform and were typically found in the internet cache on users computers. But lower on the list they did find some OS X specific pieces of malware OSX/Jahlav-C and OSX/DNSCha-E. OSX/Jahlav-C is a variant of OSX/DNSCha-E which happens to be a piece of malware that known as a DNS changer. When a DNS changer hijacks your computers DNS settings your web surfing can be almost completely compromised. Even if it looks like you are at Google.com and the page looks like Google's home page your DNS settings may have sent you to a server in China where malicious code is being executed in your browser.

The results show that the majority of files are more dangerous on Windows than on a Mac but that doesn't mean the virus goes away. If you plan to share files with a Windows computer it would be a good idea to maintain some sort of anti-virus protection just to be sure you are not spreading a virus to a more vulnerable operating system.
 

Source: http://www.neowin.net/news/viruses-should-be-a-concern-for-mac-users

A Free Utility to Backup all your Windows Drivers

When you buy a new PC, the vendor will almost always provide you with a “driver CD” that has the device drivers for all the hardware that’s inside your new machine. The CD comes handy when you are reinstalling Windows from scratch or are trying to recover your machine to its original state after, say, a system crash.

There are however two drawbacks with the driver CD.

First, you need to remember the physical location where you placed that CD months ago and second, it may have outdated device drivers. Hardware vendors continuously release new and improved versions of drivers but if you are restoring drivers from an old CD, you are bound to install the old and outdated versions which may be both slow and buggy.

An easy solution to this problem would be that you take a backup of all the device drivers that are currently installed on your system and put them on a CD or another drive. Double Driver is a free utility that can help you with this process.

Double Driver scans your Windows system and creates a listing of every since device driver that’s installed on the system. When you click the “backup” button, the tool will place all the drivers in separate folders – the modem drivers will be in one folder while the display related drivers will be in another one and so on.

This will make it easier for you to restore the relevant drivers without having to remember any of the file names and other technical details.

Double Drivers is available for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 and is compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit edition of Windows.

Important: Double Driver is portable and requires no installation. However, if you are using it under Windows 7 or Vista, make sure you run the tool as an administrator (Shift + Right-click) or see this screencast.

நன்றி : Amit Agarwal, www.labnol.org

Five Firefox Tips You May Not Know About

The thing I like best about Firefox is that just when you think you know everything there is to know about the browser, something new comes along and surprises you.
I discovered five new Firefox tips today. Maybe these are old hat and you know them already. Or maybe like me, you had no idea these could be done.
1. Quick search – without going to a search engine first.
Are you reading a website and you subsequently discover a word or phrase that you want to put into a search engine? Up until now, I would just open a new tab, type in the URL for Google and manually type the word or phrase in. But it seems there is a faster easier way.
Just highlight the word or phrase with your mouse’s left-click button. Then drag the highlighted text into the address bar in the browser. Then press “enter”. Firefox will now perform a “Are you feeling lucky?” Google search for you.
2. Delete visited URL’s
When you drop down the box underneath the address bar, you can see your recent browsing history. But what if you want to remove one URL from that list? Maybe you’ve been looking at a naughty site and you don’t want your girfriend to know? Or maybe you’ve been shopping for your loved one online and you want to keep it a secret?
Just drop down the URL box, highlight the URL you want to zap then press the “delete” button on your keyboard. The URL will then be removed from the list.
3. Navigate to browser tabs using the keyboard
Instead of using the mouse to click on a tab, why not use the keyboard instead? Pressing CTRL + TAB together will bounce you from tab to tab, starting from the one in the far left and working its way along. Or if you want to go to a specifc tab straight away, you can do that too. CTRL + 2 will take you directly to the second tab from the left. CTRL + 5 will take you to the fifth tab from the left.
4. Start downloads instantly
Instead of right-clicking on a download link, choosing “save to target” and pressing enter, just drag the download link to the “downloads icon” in the toolbar. The download will start automatically.
5. Grab files off webpages, even protected webpages
Have you ever wanted a picture, file or video off a webpage but you can’t, because it’s been protected? Just right-click on the page, choose “View Page Info” then the “media” tab. Find the file you’re looking for from the list and click on “save”. (note : this doesn’t work for everything but I have still had a pretty high success rate nonetheless).

thanks to www.makeuseof.com