PacMan Game in Google, Only Today and Tomorrow!

30th anniversary of Pac-Man game is apparently very special to  Google as it appears in the Google home page. Today, the Google homepage transformed into the gaming arena. If you happen to pass in front of the computer, there’s no harm in tasting or even nostalgic for the popular game in the 1980s.

Go to Google.com page, then the logo will appear a box game of Pac-Man. Wait for a few seconds before the game ready to play. If you happen to be connected with computer speakers, enjoy a typical oldies music.

Rules of the game Pac-Man : move the yellow circle through a maze of pathways forms word "Google" to take the points that are distributed in several locations. Do not colliding with the ghosts that haunt along the lines if you do not want to die. You can eat the Ghost only if you take a large yellow pills. Even dead, do not worry because the game will restart again. Use the arrow keys to navigate.

You can play even with your friends. If you have friend beside you, ask them to play together. Click the first button on the Insert Coin below the search box. Then ask your friends to use the keys W, A, S, and D to move up, left, down, and right.

Google claims Pac-man mini game is to mark important moments in pop culture influences the world. To commemorate as well as providing a place of nostalgia for the 1980s generation, this special Doodle will be available for 48 hours, Friday and Saturday. So, do not miss this short opportunity. When else?

Steps you can use to Enhance your Windows XP Security

What you do to keep your XP Operating system secure from virus attack? Putting an antivirus? Update antivirus everyday?.

All that steps above can be used to defend your operating system stability, but that’s not all.  To overcome the worst scenario, which is Reinstalling your computer, I’ve compile some steps :

1. Turn “Autorun and Autoplay” function off.

Autorun or autoplay is a function that will instantly offer you to open file when USB disk or CD ROM inserted into it’s place. This function sometimes helpful, but virus often use this function to run their program. So it’s wiser to turn this function off.

To turn this function off, you can use 2 ways, which is using REGEDIT for autorun, and GPEDIT for autoplay. Both has the same function, but with a different way to do so. Find the most suitable for you.

a. With Regedit command.

Open Regedit by clicking start > Run > write “regedit” (without quote) at the box availabe, then > click ok

Follow this string :

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Policies/Explorer

Double click at NoDriveTypeAutoRun and enter number 95 at Value Data.

b. with gpedit.

open gpedit by clicking start > Run > write “gpedit.msc” into box  available > click ok.

Follow this string :

Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System

Double click Turn Off Autoplay and click enabled.

2. Disable Copy Paste function through USB.

Activate USB copy paste function only if needed. This can be set with regedit using string as follow:

a. Click Start > Run > write “regedit” > then click ok.

Click HKEY_LOCALMACHINE > SYSTEM > CurrentControlSet > Control

b. Right click at Control, choose New>Key, Name it “StorageDevicePolicies”.

c. Right click at  StorageDevicePolicies, choose New > DWord Value name it “WriteProtect”.

d. Double click at  WriteProtect tersebut, and change the value data to 1.

e. Then  Restart your computer/Laptop.

If  success, every time you copy and paste file, there will appear a message  : Error Copying File or Folder.

If you want to activate this function again, change the value data to  0.

3. Update Your Antivirus Regularly

The purpose of updating antivirus is to add a new virus data, so antivirus will know if there’s new virus found. Updating can be done by clicking automatic update, if your computer connected to internet, or by manual updating. Just check your antivirus site to do so.

4. Scan your Flash Disk

Scan your  flash disk connected to the computer. Open flash disk files only after they’re scanned and free from virus. Rescan your flash disk after yang terhubung ke komputer. Buka file-file flash disk setelah proses scan selesai dan dinyatakan bersih atau virus yang bercokol di dalam flash disk telah terhapus atau diperbaiki.

5. Recognize Strange File Application

This action is a pre-caution for us not to click or run unrecognized file, except file that we really know what that’s file is. This is because sometimes antivirus can’t detect new version of some virus, for example when we are not update our antivirus yet.

6. Do not save file where Operating system Installed (usually drive C:)

This step is very important, and most people often forget it. Why are we should do this?. When your hard drive got virus, or something happen to your operating system that force you to re-install it, then your data is not lost. So, save your data file in  D:\ or E:\, or another partition. You can use free disk partition software like Easeus Disk Partition or other to make a partition.

7. Do a Operating System Backup using application like Ghost.

This will help you to avoid reinstalling operating system when it crash or broken by virus. Actually, ghost is similar to reinstalling, but it’s simpler and faster because all of your computer setting were saved in Ghost image file, you you just put back the files and everything (including softwares you previously install) will be appear as if there’s nothing happen. Besides Ghost (most popular is Norton Ghost), you can use Easeus Ghost maker.

Well, that’s a steps you can do to increase your computer security. Who will aware about our computer if not ourselves?

Please comment and add your experiences in increasing your own computer security.

The Virus Storyline

When did viruses, Trojans and worms begin to pose a threat?

Most histories of viruses start with the Brain virus, written in 1986. That was just the first virus for a Microsoft PC, though. Programs with all the characteristics of viruses date back much further.

Here’s a timeline showing key moments in virus history.

1949 Self-reproducing “cellular automata”
John von Neumann, the father of cybernetics, published a paper suggesting that a computer program could reproduce itself.

1959 Core Wars
H Douglas McIlroy, Victor Vysottsky, and Robert P Morris of Bell Labs developed a computer game called Core Wars, in which programs called
organisms competed for computer processing time.

1960 “Rabbit” programs
Programmers began to write placeholders for mainframe computers. If no jobs were waiting, these programs added a copy of themselves to the end of the queue. They were nicknamed “rabbits” because they multiplied, using up
system resources.

1971 The first worm
Bob Thomas, a developer working on ARPANET, a precursor to the internet, wrote a program called Creeper that passed from computer to computer, displaying a message.

1975 Replicating code
A K Dewdney wrote Pervade as a sub-routine for a game run on computers using the UNIVAC 1100 system. When any user played the game, it silently copied the latest version of itself into every accessible directory, including
shared directories, consequently spreading throughout the network.

1978 The Vampire worm
John Shoch and Jon Hupp at Xerox PARC began experimenting with worms designed to perform helpful tasks. The Vampire worm was idle during the day,
but at night it assigned tasks to under-used computers.

1981 Apple virus
Joe Dellinger, a student at Texas A&M University, modified the operating system on Apple II diskettes so that it would behave as a virus. As the virus had unintended side‑effects, it was never released, but further versions were written and allowed to spread.

1982 Apple virus with side effects
Rich Skrenta, a 15-year-old, wrote Elk Cloner for the Apple II operating system. Elk Cloner ran whenever a computer was started from an infected floppy disk,
and would infect any other floppy put into the disk drive. It displayed a message every 50 times the computer was started.

1985 Mail Trojan
The EGABTR Trojan horse was distributed via mailboxes, posing as a program designed to improve graphics display. However, once run, it deleted all files on the hard disk and displayed a message.

1986 The first virus for PCs
The first virus for IBM PCs, Brain, was allegedly written by two brothers in Pakistan, when they noticed that people were copying their software. The virus put a copy of itself and a copyright message on any floppy disk copies
their customers made.

1987 The Christmas tree worm
This was an email Christmas card that included program code. If the user ran it, it drew a Christmas tree as promised, but also forwarded itself to everyone
in the user’s address book. The traffic paralyzed the IBM worldwide network.

1988 The Internet Worm
Robert Morris, a 23-year-old student, released a worm on the US DARPA internet. It spread to thousands of computers and, due to an error, kept reinfecting
computers many times, causing them to crash.

1989 Trojan demands ransom
The AIDS Trojan horse came on a floppy disk that offered information about AIDS and HIV. The Trojan encrypted the computer’s hard disk and demanded payment in exchange for the password.

1991 The first polymorphic virus
Tequila was the first widespread polymorphic virus. Polymorphic viruses make detection difficult for virus scanners by changing their appearance with each
new infection.

1992 The Michelangelo panic
The Michelangelo virus was designed to erase computer hard disks each year on March 6 (Michelangelo’s birthday). After two companies accidentally distributed infected disks and PCs, there was worldwide panic, but few computers were infected.

1994 The first email virus hoax
The first email hoax warned of a malicious virus that would erase an entire hard drive just by opening an email with the subject line “Good Times”.

1995 The first document virus
The first document or “macro” virus, Concept, appeared. It spread by exploiting the macros in Microsoft Word.

1998 The first virus to affect hardware
CIH or Chernobyl became the first virus to paralyze computer hardware. The virus attacked the BIOS, which is needed to boot up the computer.

1999 Email viruses
Melissa, a virus that forwards itself by email, spread worldwide.

Bubbleboy, the first virus to infect a computer when email is viewed, appeared.

2000 Denial-of-service attacks
“Distributed denial-of-service” attacks by hackers put Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, and other high profile websites offline for several hours.

Love Bug became the most successful email virus yet.

2000 Palm virus
The first virus appeared for the Palm operating system, although no users were infected.

2001 Viruses spread via websites or network shares

Malicious programs began to exploit vulnerabilities in software, so that they could spread without user intervention. Nimda infected users who simply
browsed a website. Sircam used its own email program to spread, and also spread via network shares.

2004 IRC bots
Malicious IRC (Internet Relay Chat) bots were developed. Trojans could place the bot on a computer, where it would connect to an IRC channel without the user’s knowledge and give control of the computer to hackers.

2003 Zombie, Phishing
The Sobig worm gave control of the PC to hackers, so that it became a “zombie”, which could be used to send spam.
The Mimail worm posed as an email from Paypal, asking users to confirm credit card information.

2005 Rootkits
Sony’s DRM copy protection system, included on music CDs, installed a “rootkit” on users’ PCs, hiding files so that they could not be duplicated. Hackers wrote Trojans to exploit this security weakness and install a hidden “back door”.

2006 Share price scams
Spam mail hyping shares in small companies (“pump-and-dump” spam) became common.

2006 Ransomware
The Zippo and Archiveus Trojan horse programs, which encrypted users’ files and demanded payment in exchange for the password, were early examples of ransomware.

2008 Fake anti-virus software
Scaremongering tactics encourage people to hand over credit card details for fake anti-virus products like AntiVirus 2008.

2009 Conficker hits the headlines
Conficker, a worm that initially infects via unpatched machines, creates a media storm across the world.

2009 Polymorphic viruses rise again
Complex viruses return with avengance, including Scribble, a virus which mutates its appearance on each infection and used multiple vectors of attack.

SOURCE : SOPHOS A-Z COMPUTER AND DATA SECURITY THREAD

Google Advanced Syntax Query

It can be denied, that google is the most popular search engine. Their search result is more complete compared to yahoo or bing, for example.  It’s argue-able, of course, but the news that yahoo and microsoft ready to work together to compete with google is a good proof for this.

I often found that my friend complaining about google search result, they said that google return result which is not they looking for. Actually there’s a little trick to increase your google result filtering. And here’s some of them:

[ intitle: ]
The “intitle:” syntax helps Google restrict the search results to pages containing that word in the title. For
example, “intitle: login password” (without quotes) will return links to those pages that has the word
"login" in their title, and the word "password" anywhere in the page.

Similarly, if one has to query for more than one word in the page title then in that case “allintitle:” can be
used instead of “intitle” to get the list of pages containing all those words in its title. For example using
“intitle: login intitle: password” is same as querying “allintitle: login password”.

[ inurl: ]
The “inurl:” syntax restricts the search results to those URLs containing the search keyword. For
example: “inurl: passwd” (without quotes) will return only links to those pages that have "passwd" in the
URL.

Similarly, if one has to query for more than one word in an URL then in that case “allinurl:” can be used
instead of “inurl” to get the list of URLs containing all those search keywords in it. For example: “allinurl:
etc/passwd“ will look for the URLs containing “etc” and “passwd”. The slash (“/”) between the words will
be ignored by Google.

[ site: ]
The “site:” syntax restricts Google to query for certain keywords in a particular site or domain. For
example: “exploits site:hackingspirits.com” (without quotes) will look for the keyword “exploits” in those
pages present in all the links of the domain “hackingspirits.com”. There should not be any space between
“site:” and the “domain name”.

[ filetype: ]
This “filetype:” syntax restricts Google search for files on internet with particular extensions (i.e. doc, pdf
or ppt etc). For example: “filetype:doc site:gov confidential” (without quotes) will look for files with “.doc”
extension in all government domains with “.gov” extension and containing the word “confidential” either in
the pages or in the “.doc” file. i.e. the result will contain the links to all confidential word document files on
the government sites.

[ link: ]
“link:” syntax will list down webpages that have links to the specified webpage. For Example:
“link:www.securityfocus.com” will list webpages that have links pointing to the SecurityFocus homepage.
Note there can be no space between the "link:" and the web page url.

[ related: ]
The “related:” will list web pages that are "similar" to a specified web page. For Example:
“related:www.securityfocus.com” will list web pages that are similar to the Securityfocus homepage. Note
there can be no space between the "related:" and the web page url.

[ cache: ]
The query “cache:” will show the version of the web page that Google has in its cache. For Example:
“cache:www.hackingspirits.com” will show Google’s cache of the Google homepage. Note there can be
no space between the "cache:" and the web page url.
If you include other words in the query, Google will highlight those words within the cached document. For
Example: “cache:www.hackingspirits.com guest” will show the cached content with the word "guest"
highlighted.

[ intext: ]
The “intext:” syntax searches for words in a particular website. It ignores links or URLs and page titles.
For example: “intext:exploits” (without quotes) will return only links to those web pages that has the
search keyword "exploits" in its webpage.

[ phonebook: ]
“phonebook” searches for U.S. street address and phone number information. For Example:
“phonebook:Lisa+CA” will list down all names of person having “Lisa” in their names and located in
“California (CA)”. This can be used as a great tool for hackers incase someone want to do dig personal
information for social engineering.

Addition

This is a little trick that work for me:

If you want a sentence to be search instead of part of their string, then put the sentence in double quote. For example, you want to search ENGINEERING EBOOKS, then you should write : “engineering ebooks”.

To expand this knowledge, suppose you want to search google adsense books only  from rapidshare.com, you can write something like this GOOGLE ADSENSE “rapidshare.com/files”. All this work for any site. The most important is, try to find unique pattern from a search.

Happy searching…

Open PDF File Faster with Adobe PDF Lite

Nowadays, PDF Reader Application Program (program to read PDF Document), has become very important program in our computer, such as Office program. We often you Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is the most complete Free PDF Reader that support newest features.

Unfortunately, Adobe Reader getting crowded with added features / plugins which, sometimes we not need it, and in turn, it makes this application load longer.

These features (plugins), such as auto update, autorun, running in background, actually not so important for us, but consume our hard drive space, memory and our computer CPU, and of course load slower than it should.

Alternatively, we can use other PDF Reader available online, such as Foxit Reader or Sumatra PDF, which is lightweight and fast, but sometimes for complex document, they can render perfectly.

To overcome this problem, some people has make a Lite version of Adobe Reader, that they call it Adobe Reader Lite. They call it Lite, because in this version, they only include more important features, and remove any un-needed features without sacrifying it’s ability.

Adobe Reader Lite Feature

• Remove dekstop shortcut  and autorun function
• Shortcut in start menu converted without any ad
• Some features commonly un-needed, was removed.
• Remove Agreement license pop-up
• Remove Auto Update feature
• AcroRd32Info.exe was removed without log error message
• Form Disertakan fitur Pengisian Form
• Dialog ( button for online ) in toolbar was removed  (”help make Adobe Reader better” and Create PDF using Acrobat.com” )
• Changing some interface (v9.1)

Installation file for Adobe Reader Lite 9.1.0.26 only about 18.29 MB, far more smaller compared to  Adobe Reader 9.1 which has size about  41.1 MB. Installation process is far more faster, besides disk space needed which is 60% less. Check the picture below for detail :

Download

You can check newest version of Adobe Reader Lite from majorgeeks.com. Alternatively, you can download from  softpedia.com.

– Download Adobe Reader Lite ( majorgeeks.com )
– Download Adobe Reader Lite ( Softpedia.com )