The sircles.net blog SEO, Copy Writing, Networking and Internet Safety & Security

So now we are looking at eBay scams that are interested in hacking your eBay account so that they can get details or account information.

Here is a typical email - the first thing to do is notice that there is a big button with 'dispute this transaction' which is not normally present. Also notice that the email is originating from outlook.com which is unusual for an eBay email:

Also notice that that if we hover over the 'Dispute this transaction' button we see the following:

So the domain name, although having the rover.ebay.com part in, is actually pointing to t.co which is Twitters forwarding domain (Ooops, that's a bit embarrassing) which then forwards you to http://disputetransactionebaycommunicationreview.com/webapps/a3889/websrc 

This page shows up as PayPal:

You can still see the phantom domain at the top though. This is obviously where they are interested in grabbing your PayPal details so do not.

Report this website address as false as soon as you can.

Forward the email to your ISPs spam service email support.

It should be noted that Outlook.com and Twitter.com are both being hijacked for this so beware as it will more than likely pass your anti spam filters!

OK, so you have your new Computer and you are dying to get cracking on the Internet as your ISP has just made live your new broadband connection. Your computer was pre-installed and appears to have everything that you need including your bonus installation of Norton Antivirus or similar and free downloads for a year. You install your modem and are ready to go so lets go...

Antivirus Questions?

But maybe we should hold on a second. Norton Antivirus wins a lot of awards etc but then it would. It is manufactured by Symantec and they are definitely a leader in corporate antivirus technology and a good supplier to deal with on that level but they will charge you for any support as a home user and charge you to update your signature files after your trial period. A better option is to lose the installed antivirus and get AVG Free Edition from Grisoft which picks up as many viruses as any other home edition antivirus package. Grisoft's solution is available from http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1 and I would urge you to pay for the full edition if you are a business as the extra functionality is worth it. Avast Antivir are also perfectly good examples and are also free. Whatever you do, make sure you have a suitable solution before just surfing unknown pages.

You should also equip yourself with a Firewall. Surfing the internet without a firewall is leaving yourself open to attacks so at the very least make sure you have either the Microsoft XPSP2 firewall or one of these free firewalls: Kerio, Sygate, ZoneAlarm

ALSO: Keep Windows Updated! Many Windows updates are to close holes exploited by malicious programs and simply staying updated will keep a lot of infections off your system.

But what about Spy-ware?

What antispyware system should I use? Well first of all, a lot of decent antivirus solutions get spy-ware as well as ad-ware and viruses as they are all basically the same thing. They are all darn annoying and the primary reason new internet users run into trouble. Most of the anti-spy-ware solutions these days use all of the spy-ware and virus hassles to try and sell themselves - I have people calling me asking how to get spy-axe and spy-ware-killer OFF of their machines. These are not solutions being sold to enrich computer use, they are immature, trip-you-up pieces of software designed for a quick buck and some new users will be caught out. In my experience there is no anti-spy-ware solution - even the ones from Microsoft and the like - that catch most of the ad-ware and irritations that can be removed simply by going into Control Panel in Windows and removing everything you do not use or recognise.

If you are determined to use other means or have tried all of the above you can also run these on-line scans. PandaActivescan Housecall Scan although they require an Active X download which your Firewall may object to.

The following examples are all free also, and can happily coexist on the same computer:
Free Anti-Spyware: MS Antispyware AdAwareSE SpybotSD SpywareBlaster
It is important that your computer is run at minimum functionality. Windows is like a pen-knife - it can do almost anything you need it to - but if you are not hosting a website then make sure that the Web-Hosting features are uninstalled. You can do this in Control Panel under add/remove programs and then by clicking add/remove windows components on the left (Windows XP - the others are similar.) Every bit of unnecessary functionality can be used against you so try and run a tight ship. Make sure you have a reason to keep everything you see in this screen. If you don't use network printing then get rid of it. If you don't use Fax services then get rid of them. Every one you can dump frees memory and so decreases the work your computer is doing to swap out the page-file which equals more speed.

Once you have spy-ware/ad-ware or a virus infesting your system it will be taking you to an undesirable website or you will be getting pop-ups of some kind or whatever. Do not go running to the first advert you see. Your friends are the other people who have had the problem. Do a search on the Internet for a description of the symptoms and have a read of some articles that do not get money off of you for your custom. Forums and the like. There will be instructions. If you cannot get to a website other than the one to which you are unwittingly directed, go into control panel and add/remove programs, and get rid of anything with an incomplete name (I mean uninstall it by get rid of) or anything that you do not knowingly use. If you are unsure, then have a look in the documentation for the software name in question. Do not just uninstall everything you do not recognise, check the system again at each uninstall to see if the problem is cured so you know for sure which application was causing the problem.

Many viruses and the like kick-off their processes at boot up. There are many places in the Registry (a set of files that do a lot to tell Windows how it should behave) that these processes can give themselves shortcuts to start-up. If you go to the start button on your task bar and choose run and then type regedit into the box which appears, you will be presented with the registry editor. Beware!!!! The Registry is critical to Windows and if you mess about with it you can stop Windows booting up altogether so do not change anything without verifying the information from at least two sources!!! If you look at HKey_Local_Machine -> Software -> Microsoft -> Windows -> CurrentVersion -> Run and Runonce etc. you will see something like that below:

Many of the processes aggravating you or your computer are to be found here or other similar places in the Windows Registry. Note that in a lot of articles it is common to substitute HKLM for HKey_Local_Machine and that there are as many trouble causers as do-gooders so try and find a good source of information and verify it. Once you have found a source to be good more than a few times you can start to trust the information you find there.

With issues like SpyAxe where the product repeats that you have a virus, remember a few things. If the product it is asking you to install is not already installed then how can the computer know it has a virus? 

Please feel free to submit any other spy-ware problems at http://forum.sircles.net for us to have a look at. If you wish to try an anti-spy-ware application to help clear up your PC, have a look at the anti-spy-ware review site for a decent opinion of which one works best as we prefer companies to be inspired to make a good product rather than just hard-selling via cheap viruses and ad-ware; if they keep trying to hard-sell you things, tell us, and we will find a better link.

If you are, like me, a very boring web user who doesn't go to many unknown websites or watch lots of unsubscribed videos etc. then you might be feeling a little annoyed with the new 'compulsory real-time monitor' arrangement that Windows 10 suffers from. It is, of course, a sign that your computer hard disk drive is now performing two or three times the work for many operations compared to how it was functioning on Windows 7. Real-time scanning (as the word real-time is supposed to explain) means that every file your computer needs to open is examined in advance by a proprietary process before the system comes into contact with it. Now there are two reasons why I don't like this thinking. The first is the obvious performance problem (and whether that wastes more time, energy and money than all the viruses in the world put together is another question.) The second is that Windows 10 downloads so many updates of such unbelievable magnitude that they kill the performance of your machine and the internet and so what is the point of Windows Defender anyway? This is further compounded by the fact that Windows Update, like Windows Defender, now appears to be compulsory.

OK so let’ shave a look at all of the components and how we can disable them as Microsoft have recently started to run scheduled tasks to make sure that the most performance hungry Windows processes are restarted and re-enabled at regular intervals such as Sharepoint Sync in Microsoft Office and Defender in Windows 10.

So we will begin by using the simplest and safest way to disable the Windows Defender Components, using the registry editor.

If you press the Windows key and type 'regedit' and press enter you will be presented with the registry editor and you will need to navigate to the following area:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows Defender

This means that under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE you expand the folders (called keys in registry editor, even though they lok the same - they are not folders, they are completely different - )

When you find the correct key, you highlight it on the left and then right click on the right hand side, below the (Default) value and select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value 

Give the DWORD the name DisableAntiSpyWare and once it has been created, double click the DWORD and enter the value '1' and press OK so that you have the below:

Now let's try restarting Windows 10....

OK so according to the above view from the taskbar, the Windows Defender application is not running. Let's have a check under the services running by clikcing the start buton and typing services.msc. 

OK excellent, the service has been stopped and is now set to manual. This is going to speed us up nicely. But now how do we stop the automatic updates from hogging all of the bandwidth and disk speed?

Well there are many sites telling me to use metered connections or policies to disable this function, but the Windows update feature can be disabled by opening up the services.msc applet and disabling the service by finding it as follows:

NB This service has already been disabled but your will not have been.

Now double-click the update service and choose the start-up type:

Once it is set to disabled then click OK to confirm.

Now we are back in control of our Windows 10 PC and our Ineternet connection, RAM, Hard Disk and CPU are all our own again.