Your Computer can be Infected Easily

From your automobile to your phone, today’s world is dominated by computer technology.  Also important is not only the computing power of an individual piece of hardware but also the connection of all these devices to the Internet so the computers can “talk” to each other.  These innovations have made the modern world a much more efficient and productive place.  Think about how cheaply you can send information in today’s world; from St. Louis I can write a 100 page report and send it electronically to my company’s headquarters in Seattle for free, not to mention that its travel time will probably be a couple of minutes (depending on its file size).  That speed and low-cost would have been inconceivable in the not-to-distant past.

But what this high tech world has to deal with that the low tech world didn’t is: insecurity.  When you grab your mail from the mailbox that was delivered by USPS do you worry that when you open the letter your coffee maker will stop working?  Or your car will not start?  Because that scenario is analogous to the chances you take whenever you open electronic mail, or anything that is downloaded, on your computer.  You may open a link in an email and quietly you download a virus or malware onto your computer that makes your computer stop functioning properly.  Or worse yet you download something onto your computer that doesn’t have any symptoms at all because that virus/malware wants to sneakily take your personal information (e.g. bank passwords) to steal your identity and possibly steal your money.

So what are some threats that are out there right now?  Conflicker was one of the big scares of 2009.  60 Minutes did a feature story on Conflicker.  Well Conflicker is still around lurking on computers that do not have adequate anti-virus software installed.  In March 2009 CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) Coordination Center, located at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, said that:

Simple capture-recapture estimation based on our monitored networks suggests a total population of approximately 2.3 million IP addresses on March 30. We’ve observed between 350,000 to 650,000 addresses online during a given hour of the day, with 13:00-15:00Z being the most active time of day.

It is scary to think that there are things such as Conflicker just floating around out there in Cyberspace looking for vulnerable computers to infect.

Just recently there is the case of the Energizer Duo Charger.  Energizer made a battery charger that you could check the status of the charging from your computer if you downloaded some software onto your computer.  It turns out that the software you could download contained a Trojan.

“The installer for the Energizer Duo software places the file UsbCharger.dll in the application’s directory and Arucer.dll in the Windows system32 directory,” the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team said in an advisory on Friday. “Arucer.dll is a backdoor that allows unauthorized remote system access via accepting connections on 7777/tcp. Its capabilities include the ability to list directories, send and receive files, and execute programs.”

So Energizer has stopped selling the product, but the product and download have been available since 2007.  So how many computers have been affected in that time?

So the moral of this story is to keep your computer’s anti-virus software up-to-date, always install important updates from Microsoft (if you have a PC), and never install software on your computer that you don’t trust.  Don’t click on links in emails that are from people you don’t know.

The modern age is fantastically more efficient than the systems of the past but the technological foundation that the modern system is built upon is very fragile if unprotected.