Hopefully you have your Windows machine set to receive updates automatically?  But do you ever check that updates are actually downloaded, and installed and what about third party software?

Well, this tip is an oldie, but still quite good and worth a mention;
Secunia (a very skilled security company) offer several products for evaluating your Software readiness (ranging from corporate products to free online personal scanners).
Check it out at (at the very least do an online scan);
http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/online/

CNet also offers a new product called TechTracker which more or less does the same thing;
http://www.cnet.com/techtracker/?tag=mncol;pm

I have mentioned anti spam methods before (eg. http://www.mailexpire.comand more), these are quite simple methods with witch you can create a forwarding email with a limited lifespan, and thus it does not matter if spammers get hold of the email.

One drawback to this method however has been that you actively need to create this antispam email address in advance or when you need it, with mailexpire.com this requires you to create a new account and validate it before it can be used.  This in some cases can be an inconvenience as you just need a ‘quick’ address here and now.

Well now there is a new player on the marked, and this service has a few very nice advantages.

The new service is called;
www.spamgourmet.com

What is cool about this service is that once you have setup your account you can create new aliases on the fly without logging in or other time consuming steps.  How you ask, well it’s quite easy actually but requires a bit of explaining.

Here is a brief description of the process;

You create an account with www.spamgourmet.com,

to this effect you choose/create your own private alias – as an example we will choose “LUNAR”.  Now you have actually done most of the work and can create new aliases on the fly, this is how;

You visit a site that requires your email to download whatnot software, lets say the site is called www.downloadme.com.  Now you need to create a new disposable email on the fly, and you can do so simply by making up a new sub email address in this format;

<SOMETHING>.<YOUR ALIAS>@SPAMGOURMET.COM

in our example where the site is www.downloadme.com and our alias is LUNAR this address could be;

downloadme.lunar@spamgourmet.com

Let’s say that later you goto a new site www.uploadme.com and again you need a new disposable email address.  This could be;

uploadme.lunar@spamgourmet.com

As you can see is pretty simple to use once it is setup.

What is even more engenius is that the email account you create on the fly will ‘selfdistruct’, it does so by stopping to work after 3 mails have been received (you can via advanced options set it to a different number, but 3 is the default).  Thus if: Downloadme.lunar@spamgourmet.com is suddenly spammed you will receive a maximum of 3 emails, quite clever.

Of cause there are advanced settings, here you can change the default number of emails, setup advanced security and add trusted hosts (plus a lot more), some settings can even be set on the fly aswell – you can thus set the number of mails you want to recieve as part of the email (example. upload.10.lunar@spamgourmet.com will allow 10 emails to be recieved, the maximum number is 20)..

The service appear to be fast and forwards mails within 1-2 minutes, although I have experienced a slight delay from a download page – but this could just as easy be caused by the download site and not spamgourmet.com

Alternatives;
There are numerous alternatives as described in a previous post, I have used MailExpire.com quite a number of times – here you can create accounts with a limited lifespan which you can shorten or extend on the fly.

Spamgourmet.com is however as far as I know the only service that offers dynamically created emails. 

Well this is actually not true as such, there exists another type of service eg. Dispose-A-Mail www.disposeamail.com (there are many services similar to this) – DisposeAMail however works quite differently from Spamgourmet.com.  To use DisposeAMail.com you simply invent an email when ever you need it eg. I-JUST-INVENTED-THIS-MAIL@disposeamail.com and give this to whomever/whatever site requires your email, then you can goto www.disposeamail.com and enter I-JUST-INVENTED-THIS-MAIL@disposeamail.com (or what ever you decided on) in the “Check inbox” and click go..  You can now see whatever mail is received by “I-JUST-INVENTED-THIS-MAIL@disposeamail.com“…  One obvious drawback here is,  everyone else can do this too – there is absolutely NO SECURITY if people can guess the email address you invented they can check it – so OBVIOUSLY you should never use a DisposeAMail for something that involves password or private/personal data etc.

If you run an older version of Mdaemon 10.x (email server) then you may find this “error message” in the SMTP logs; “The date is grossly in the future”, this is caused by a bug in Spamassassin one of the antispam solutions used by Mdaemon, the problem is that this caused the spam score to get rather high and may cause Mdaemon to discard legitimate mails as spam.

You can ofcause upgrade your Mdaemon installation, but if for some reason you prefer not to do so this is the workaround;

The workaround(besides paying for updates), is to edit the rule-set.

C:\MDaemon\SpamAssassin\rules\local.cf

Add the following line score

FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0

Restart Spam Engine

Curtesy of; http://www.ninjahdev.com/node/8

Just found another tip, change the end of this line to the latter (both solutions should work);

MDaemon\SpamAssasin\default_rules\72_active.cf:

{ FH_DATE_PAST_20XX header FH_DATE_PAST_20XX Date =
~ /20[1-9][0-9]/ [if-unset: 2006]

Change to;

 /20[2-9][0-9]

A friend of mine had his MSN account hacked and it was hacked good, thus the security question was obviously changed afterwards 🙁  so there was no way for him to regain access.

It was surprisingly hard but I finally found a link where you can rapport such problems and get assistance;
https://support.live.com/eform.aspx?productKey=wlidvalidation&ct=eformcs&scrx=1

Now this is somewhat clever, I have not yet tried it so I can’t say for sure how good it works but the concept is clever.

You agree with some of your friends that you will use each other as backup-hubs, install Buddy Backupand then define each other as trusted friends, then your data is backed up to your friends computers via P2P (of cause in encrypted format so your friends can’t look at your data)..

It is free and rather clever.

Read their getting started guide here

Download it here  (sadly it is not available right now, a new version should be very close to release – even so close that they removed the old version – I have written to them requesting a release date but not received any yet).

I just learned of a new antivirus/malware cleanup CD/iso, with support for NTFS and more.

Trinity Rescue Kit can be obtained from here;
http://trinityhome.org/Home/index.php?wpid=1&front_id=12 or http://trinityhome.org/

It sounds like a cool CD with numerous cleanup utilities, definitely worth a visit.  I for one is going to download a copy and check it out.

yubikeyI got a newsletter some time ago informing me that www.Yubico.com (or rather one of it’s partners) had added AD integration to the Yubikey, this should allow you to use the Yubikey to login to windows something that could be quite interesting..

Read more here;
http://www.yubico.com/news/100204/

ps.
I also seem to recall stumbling across some PAM and RADIUS implementation, so you might want to check their forum if you are into Yubikeys.
http://forum.yubico.com/

arpgatewayEver heard about ARP spoofing or man in the middle attacks?  If not then this may not be for you, but if on the other hand “Yes” then here is a tool for you..

Our pal Irongeek has released this nifty small util “DecaffeinatID:” that will sit in your tray until it detects something nasty going on (like eg. attempted ARP spoofing of your default gateway) and then raise hell and bells to warn you.

Basically what it does it to monitor the MAC address of your default gateway, if this for some reason changes (which it never should) you will be warned and can take precautions.

Besides this ARP ‘shield’ the util offers a few other nifty security tricks, anyway check it out at;
http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/decaffeinatid-simple-ids-arpwatch-for-windows

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