Life on the Road – Trucking News Blog

Scheduled to do what? Something different than what it’s been doing.

Am I infected? If you read Laptop Security at Life on the Road, you’re not.

It’s almost April 1st, I don’t have time to read! If you’ve turned on Windows Update and are getting regular updates, Microsoft patched this months ago.

This thing has made more headlines than Britney Spears, even a segment on 60 minutes. Even if you have it, nothing will happen to your data. If you really are infected, your PC is a zombie in a bot network. A soldier in an Army of computers used for attacks on websites and it can act as a sender of spam. If you are infected you won’t notice because the owners of Conficker / Downadup (same thing) don’t want you to know. They want to borrow your machines processor and bandwidth.

If you have been running Windows Update automatically, you’re fine. If you want to know for sure go to the Start menu, click on RUN (Vista: Type Run), then type MRT for Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool. If you’re on Vista you will need to run as admin or give it the admin password to run. If you’re on XP you need to be logged into an admin account. If you always run as admin, shame on you and read Laptop Security.

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If you’ve been following this Laptop Security series, your laptop is now secure, protected, up to date and you’ve protected your Admin account while you’re online.  If not, catch up by reading the Laptop Security Category.

Do you know where you’re really surfing to on the Internet? Every single website on the Internet is assigned a number. No one (there are exceptions to this) types in the IP address to get to a website and because a lot of websites can share one IP address, you need an even longer number to get to the website.

DNS – Domain Name Service acts like a giant phone book for the Internet. You type a website’s name in your browser’s address bar and hit enter. Your browser stops at the nearest DNS server and looks up the number for the website you entered before it knows where to go.

Normal people don’t worry about this step because it’s always done automatically and it always works, until recently.

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Your laptop is secured, password protected, backed-up, and up to date, you’re almost ready to go online.

One of the biggest reasons why every other operating system is more secure than Windows is user access. Mac OS and Linux/Unix have strict user controls. While Windows defaults to a user with administrator rights able to do anything and everything, other operating systems learned long ago that’s not such a good idea.

If I’m the only person on my computer, shouldn’t I be able to do anything and everything? When you’re online, your browser is your window to the internet. It’s also a window back into your PC.

If you’re logged into your system as an Administrator, so is anyone else that gets access to your system via “Drive-by-downloads“, ClickJacking or any other really nasty techniques. Any program that comes in as Administrator can turn off Windows Firewall and any Anti-Virus program. Still want to be online as Administrator?

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Was your PC one of the 9 million? If you were following my advice and updating your Windows operating system on a regular basis, you would have been completely protected. The patch for this exploit came out in October.

You may not even know you’ve been affected. Back in the old days, virus’ and worms were written to be destructive, usually erasing your hard drive or corrupting system files so you couldn’t boot. Now the bad guys only want to use your computer without you knowing. There are keystroke loggers that will record your keystrokes, especially passwords and send them back to their evil headquarters and you won’t even know it until your bank account has been emptied into some offshore account.

You computer might be drafted into a zombie army of computers to perform evil deeds when the bad guys send a command. This is how sites like Amazon and Yahoo can be taken down, by using the processing power of thousands of computers. Read the rest of this entry »

Most truckers with laptops are online A LOT. After reading Life on the Road there are tons of things to do and people to communicate with in dozens if not hundreds of ways. From chats, VOIP, email, myspace, facebook, myspace sites just for truckers, your documents, photos, videos and files can all be online. Face it, if you’re not online you’re in the dark ages.

One of the best protections against all of the bad people that want your identity or that want to hijack your computer for evil deeds, or just place a bunch of crap on your computer is to keep all of your software up to date.

Microsoft Windows Updates

Microsoft comes out with operating system updates about once a week, critical updates get pushed out as soon as they’re ready. If you don’t have Automatic Updates turned on, you’re putting your computer at risk. Most of the updates are some type of security updates. If a vulnerability isn’t known by every hacker in the world, when Microsoft puts out an update, every hacker in the world now knows about it and will exploit that particular problem against people that are slow updating their system.

If you’re not sure about your updates go to your Start button, then Right Click on My Computer, or go to your My Computer icon and Right Click, click on Properties, then click on the Automatic Updates tab and this is what you see.

At the very least, be notified of updates and you can download them when you’re going to be online for a while.  On your desktop, there’s no reason why Automatic can’t be checked.

Or you can go to the Windows Update site to check for and download any updates, you have to use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to go to Microsoft Update.

If your still on Windows 98 or anything else before XP, you’re putting everything on your computer at risk.  If you’re computer is too old or doesn’t have enough processor power or enough memory for at least XP, there are several things you can do. The single biggest bang for the buck upgrade is RAM/Memory and hard drives are getting dirt cheap. Or you can switch to Linux, but that’s a whole ‘nother series. Read the rest of this entry »

Your physical security was compromised and your laptop or desktop are gone, but you’re not worried because your important data was encrypted, but now what? If you were backing up your data, you buy your new computer, restore your data and continue like nothing happened.

Backing up your data even on a desktop is essential and it’s one of those things everyone knows they should do, but no one does. People usually wish they would have backed after something happens. Because most humans are lazy, especially about backups, the best backup solutions have the least amount of human involvement. The best backup system is the one you will use, consistently and can restore your data easily.

Thumb Drives

Flash drives, also known as thumb drives or USB drives can be connected to your laptop in seconds. If your laptop has a built in card reader you can also use SD or Compact Flash memory as a drive.

For backing up to another hard drive or flash drives, I like Syncback from 2BrightSparks. There are several versions of Syncback, including a completely free version. For something that’s as important as your data, you need something reliable and easy to use. It’s extremely flexible and will allow you to backup to any kind of drive, including FTP (more on that later). You can choose to backup or synchronize directories on different computers like home and laptop. You can automate backups using Syncback with several different options, including any time a file is changed, it gets backed up.

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If the physical security for your laptop was bypassed, cut, picked or you didn’t think you needed it and your laptop is gone. The next level of security is putting a password on your BIOS.

BIOS Passwords

When your laptop (or any computer) is first turned on or restarted it goes through what’s called the POST – Power On Self Test. While your RAM and other things are tested, you may see instructions on what key to press to enter the BIOS settings. Computer manufactures have their own unique key combination and key to enter the BIOS aren’t on the screen, here’s a list of possibilities by manufacturer. If you don’t know what your doing this could be a dangerous area to start changing things, so just enter a password, save and exit.

Make this password easy for you to remember. If you forget this password depending on the computer (actually the motherboard / bios maker) it could be something you will need to have professionally recovered.  Toshiba laptops have  a separate security chip that can only be professionally replaced. Others can be reset by a jumper on the motherboard or taking out the CMOS battery, it just depends.

Windows Passwords

Basically a waste of time. If you want your XP to automatically logon or no password at all, there are a couple of ways to do it. You probably should have some sort of Windows password but it’s too easy to crack to put too much faith into it. Google cracking windows passwords and there are free utilities and even keyboard combinations that will crack or bypass Windows passwords easily.

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In the next few weeks I’m going to be going over some important security tips for your laptops. Some we have gone over before, but they are worth going over again in more detail. I want to cover both physical security, network security and being secure while your surfing the web.

Physical security is self-explanatory. Don’t leave your laptop unattended. Ever since WIFI, I hardly ever take my laptop into the truck stop. I’ve seen guys get up and leave their laptop on the table while they go to the buffet or even the restroom. Not me, I have too much stuff on my laptop and even though a thief wouldn’t get my personal data (more on that later), they still have a laptop they could replace the hard drive and be good as new.

There is really only one way available to secure your laptop while your in the truck stop and that’s with a Kensington lock. Kensington was the first, but other manufacturers are making the same style of lock nowadays. Almost all laptops sold in recent history have a slot for a Kensington lock. It’s basically a steel cable you connect to your laptop and wrap the cable around something solid. There could be a lock at one end with a loop or some kind of lock on both ends.

Given enough time, cables can be cut, locks can be picked, but hopefully in a crowded truck stop that kind of behavior would be noticed and someone would say something.

Another option is a laptop alarm. If the cable is cut or the USB connection is pulled out the alarm sounds.

If after your two minute restroom break you come back and you alarm didn’t go off, your cable was cut and your lock was picked and now your laptop is gone, now what?

Since your Lojack for Laptops is installed, no worries. If your laptop is stolen, call the Computrace center and report it stolen. The next time your laptop connects to the internet, Computrace calls the authorities with the location of your stolen laptop. The thief will have to replace or format the hard drive to erase the Lojack software, but if you have a computer bios with a piece of the Lojack software, it reinstalls itself and alerts the monitoring center.

There are similar systems out there that will show their location when the laptop or desktop connects to the internet. One that doesn’t require police intervention is Laptop Cop. The next time your laptop goes online not only does it broadcast its location, but you have access to your laptop so you can erase sensitive files.

Links:

Kensington Locks at Amazon

Belkin USB Laptop Security Alarm at Amazon

Lojack for Laptops

Laptop Cop