s presentation picnic in the parks presentation picnic in the park r.s.v.p. on our website: ucs.org...

13
Utah’s Award Winning Computer Magazine! www.ucs.org This Month’s Meeting: Wednesday 13th at 7 pm Volume 23, No. 7 July 2005 ISSN 1061-5725 NON-PROFIT ORG. U.S. POSTAGE Permit #7391 SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH Utah Computer Society, Inc. PO Box 510811 S.L.C., UTAH 84151 Address Service Requested Time Value Mail Please Deliver Before July 11 PAID Check Out Reviews: Spy Sweeper on Page 4 & CounterSpy on page 11 This Month’s Presentation Picnic in the Park R.S.V.P. on our Website: UCS.ORG

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Page 1: s Presentation Picnic in the Parks Presentation Picnic in the Park R.S.V.P. on our Website: UCS.ORG Page 2 Blue Chips Magazine —July 2005 y liff illward, ditor cliffm@xmission.com

Utahrsquos Award Winning Computer Magazine

wwwucsorgThis Monthrsquos MeetingWednesday 13th at 7 pm

Vol ume 23 No 7 July 2005

ISSN 1061-5725

NON-PROFIT ORGUS POSTAGE

Permit 7391SALT LAKE CITY UTAH

Utah Computer Society IncPO Box 510811SLC UTAH 84151

Address Service Requested

Time Value MailPlease Deliver Before July 11

PAID

Check Out ReviewsSpy Sweeper on Page 4

ampCounterSpy on page 11

This Monthrsquos Presentation

Picnic in the Park

RSVP on our WebsiteUCSORG

Page 2 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

trade

y liff illward ditorcliffmxmissioncom

We are Read

Our Magazine is Read my Many OthersI received an e-mail from Joe Durham of the Quad Cities

Computer Society about GeoWorks which was in last months edition The following are the contents

I am Joe Durham from the Quad Cities Com-puter Society wwwqcsorg I am also a co-editor of our magazine QBITS

I saw your musings on the web about technology and its direction

I was pleased to see you men-tion Geoworks

ldquoA DOS shell called Geoworks was reputed to be better than Win-dows but IBM refused to bundle it on their systems so it also diedrdquo

They havenrsquot died they are still around I have been using it since 1990 still use it And do our newslet-ter with it The current manifestation of the Geos motif can be found at wwwbreadboxcom A ya-hoo group is devoted to it Geos-talk

I have recently converted two public domain ebooks to the Bookreader format in Ensemble (the new name for GeoWorks)

Like your group we struggle with member-ship issues printing costs and the budget

Good luck with your clubrsquos activities and outreach Have a good week ahead

I have attached a PDF version of our news-letter for your convenience Yes one can pro-duce a PDF version from Geos The page order is not consecutive due to our printerrsquos needs I purchased a Ghostscript driver for Geos from Germany

Joe Durham

From the above you can see that our magazine has a large distribution If you write an article it will be read by many people outside of Utah Therefore I encourage you to obtain one of the products for review and write a review on it so that we can publish it You never know you could be the next Mark Twain

The GovernmentXM radio might be used by the government XM and

Raytheon Co have jointly built a communications sys-tem that would use XMrsquos satellites to relay information to soldiers and emergency responders during a crisis

The Mobile Enhanced Situational Awareness Network known as MESA would get a dedicated channel on XMrsquos satellites that would be accessible only on devices given to emergency person-nel The receivers would be the same as the portable ones available to consum-ers with slight modifications to make them more rugged

Commercial satellite radio receivers are lightweight battery-powered and

cost as little as $99 Their digital transmissions have enough bandwidth to carry maps and other imagery which would be displayed on portable computers that plug into the satellite receivers The system can be pro-grammed to relay information just to specific devices so individual users can get messages appropriate to their regions

In time of war all methods of communication must be explored in case some of them fail

Adobe Premiere Elements Here in AugustAdobe Premiere will be the feature presentation

in August Adobe is mostly know for their flagship program PhotoShop They also produce PageMaker and InDesign InDesign is what is used to produce this magazine

Adobe has long been a supporter of user groups and has been quite generous with review materials

Donrsquot miss this presentation of one or their best photo editing programs Who knows perhaps you might even win a copy with a red ticket or a blue ldquoDouble your Pleasurerdquo ticket

Fineacute

Page 3 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Blue Chips Magazine

Magazine Staff

Editor mdash Cliff Millward 955-9633Review Program Liaison mdash James Alexander 250-2269Review Product Editor mdash Donna Nendell 565-9594 Review EditorProduct Recruiter mdash Don Nendell 565-9594 Photography mdash LeRoy JohnsonProof Reader mdash Larry Lamph Doug Jackson

Advertising Rates

Ad costs 1 month 3 months 6 months 12 months2 Page Spread $150 $400 $700 $1200Full Page $100 $275 $500 $900Half Page $50 $130 $250 $450Quarter Page $25 $70 $130 $225Business Card $15 $30 $60 $120

Full page size is 71frasl2 x 10 inches All other page sizes are based on a 7 x 10 inch page in order to conform to editorial style Half-page ads may be 7 x 5 inches or 31frasl2 x 10 inches Quarter-page ads are 31frasl2 x 5 inches Business card ads are 31frasl2 x 21frasl2 inches

Classified Advertising Utah Blue Chips members may place personal classified ads at no charge Maximum ad size is 7 lines 35 characters per line

Submissions Members are encouraged to submit text articles for pub li ca tion in ASCII text only Photos in TIF or JPG format only Line graphics tables in almost any vector or TIF format Do not imbed graphics or tables in text files All articles must be received by the 15th of the month preceding the month of publication All articles become the property of the Utah Computer Society and by submitting an article the author gives per mis sion for the Blue Chips Magazine Staff to edit the submission The author also gives permission for republication in other users groupsrsquo communications

Permission to Copy Permission is granted to other nonprofit PC user groups to reproduce any article published in this newsletter provided credit is given Blue Chips Mag a zine and the author (s) of the reproduced materials Re print ed articles are subject to the terms of their respective copyright holders

ldquoUtahrsquos Award Winning Pub li ca tionrdquo

Charter Member of theAssociation of PC User Groups

MONTHLY MEETING LOCATION2nd Wednesday of every month

University of UtahEngineering amp Mines Classroom Bldg

Room 104 700 pm

Officers and Trustees Eve Phone E-mailPresident Rick Gregory 582-7783 rfggtemailnetVice President Sean Wolsey 489-3819 seanwucsorgSecretary Lowell Kenedy 278-3035 lkenedynetworldcomTreasurer John Witzel 296-1390 witzeljnetscapenetStuart Gygi 576-1891 sgygixmissioncom Frank Herriott 943-7765 frank1pcstarnetcomDoug Jackson 322-2337 cjackson104hotmailcomLeRoy Johnson 581-1348 leroyjohnson2comcastnetLarry Lamph 571-2908 larrylynnsisnacom

InformationPersons or companies may join or renew at the meeting or by sending a check payable to the Utah Computer Society to

Utah Computer SocietyMembership SecretaryPO Box 510811Salt Lake City UT 84151

Individual memberships are $25year Business Memberships are $3500 a yearCorporate sponsorships are available at two levels Corporate Sponsors enjoy all benefits of mem ber ship including multiple individual membership and prepaid advertising coverage Contact a Board Member for more information $10year memberships without the magazine are available for students other family and Senior Citizen Center members

Other important informationMeeting Information httpwwwucsorgGroup Business (James Alexander) 250-2269Magazine (Cliff Millward) 955-9633Program Coordinator (James Alexander) 250-2269Web Site httpwwwucsorgWebMaster 272-8949Membership (evenings) (Bob) 262-6045

Donrsquot Miss the Picnic

This Month

Page 4 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Windows ReviewSpy Sweeper 40Block Spyware to Your ComputerReviewed by Don Nendell

ManufacturerWebroot Software IncPO Box 198162560 55th StreetBoulder Colorado 80308-2816 USAPh Toll Free (800) 7729383Web Site lthttpwwwwebrootcomgtFAX (303) 4423846 Outside the USA +1 (303) 4423823E-mail Tech Support lthttp

wwwwebrootcomsupportgtCorporate Sales amp SupportPh (800) 8708102One year of updates and support for only

$2995

Minimum System RequirementsWindows 98SE 2K ME or XP300 Mhz Processor25 MB Hard Drive SpaceSupports Internet Explorer

Last month I did a very favorable re-view on Pandarsquos TruPrevent Personal 2005 (See June 2005 UBC Magazine Archives at ltwwwucsorggt) where I wrote

ldquoSome Opening lsquoEye-Openingrsquo Thoughts on the Subject [of Spyware]

Almost everyone has anti-virus and anti-spyware software installed on their PC network and ISP or they definitely should Shame on anyone if they havenrsquot Regard-less malicious software viruses spyware and hacker attempts continue to slip through all too easily Why Why indeedrdquo

This month through the auspices of Webroot and their first quarterly STATE OF SPYWARE Q1 2005 report to the world I will share with you their phenomenally ac-curate and timely answer to my above pro-posed question ldquoWhy indeedrdquo I strongly suggest you get ldquoand share with everyonerdquo your own FREE copy of this fabulous eye-opening 75-page expose immediately if not sooner You can get it by going to lthttpwwwwebrootcomstateofspywaregt It is chocked full of startling facts of the - all-to-soon to reach your computer - up and coming invasion and full-blown epidemic (my words) of insidious Spyware A great many of those facts I share with you herein and now

I met the wonderful folks of Webroot at the Networld + Interop 2005 ShowStoppers Media event and boy am I glad I did - I think you will be too Later in the review (before I install Spy Sweeper) I want to go to their web site with this very machine (a Toshiba Satellite A75-S229 connected to the Internet through my ever-faithful D-Link WiFi Ac-

cess Point) while sitting comfortably in my living room and test it with their voluntary Webroot Consumer SpyAudit FYI My Lap-top has only Pandarsquos wonderful Platinum 2005 Internet Security Suite installed on it This machine will thenceforth become another statistic for their quarterly report information gathering through their Spy-Audit program and subsequent reporting Very Interesting But first things first

STATE OF SPYWARE Q1 2005 Re-port (SOS)

The report is a concise hard-hitting eye-opening in-depth review and analysis of the impact of spyware adware and unwanted software on consumers and corporations Here are a few important extracts

ldquoIn the late winter and early spring of 2004 a series of events hastened the public awareness of spyware as a clear and present danger to both consumers and enterprises In February the New York Times used its editorial page to call for legislation against an emerging software threat called spyware In March PC Magazine published the first comprehensive overview of anti-spyware software and featured the growing scourge on its cover pulling this new security issue out of the chat rooms and into the bright light of mainstream technology media Finally in April the Federal Trade Commission hosted a workshop on spyware attracting industry leaders opinion makers and even apologists to Washington to debate the legislative impli-cations of tiny pieces of software infiltrating unwitting computers and transmitting data to third parties without the consent of the informationrsquos owner Spyware had officially arrived

By yearrsquos end we knew that 90 of consumer computers had some form of spyware Rest assured that if 2004 was the year we discovered spyware then in 2005 we are going to find out how hard it is to beat But we can also be sure that the more we all know[] the better equipped we are to fight [what] we know we have ahead of usrdquo

During Q1 2005 the Webroot SpyAudit found more than 25 instances of spyware in each ldquoinfected consumer machinerdquo they tested With cookies excluded the number of infections averaged out at 72 per machine This is a significant statistic as it actually turns out because the subtle distinctions between the various forms of spyware are lost on most consumers and businesses

By now we need a clear definition of what we mean by ldquospywarerdquo because cur-rently the term spyware is broken up into

four (4) broad categories System Mon-itors Trojan H o r s e s Adware and Cookies The SOS report obligingly de-fines spyware thusly

ldquo The definition of spyware is all programs install-ing themselves onto a userrsquos computer by stealth subterfuge andor social engineer-ing and whose purpose is to redirect a userrsquos activities or record those activities in a way that reduces a userrsquos privacy protection or peace of mind Adware is often labeled as a subcategory of spyware mainly due to the overt ways that adware vendors initially used to install their software on end userrsquos ma-chines with little regard for the user As the spyware definition debate heats up several industry groups including one sponsored by the Center for Democracy and Technology are forming to address this issuerdquo

The State of Spyware 2005The SOS reports that an annual $2

Billion(US) - and growing rapidly - industry feeds off spyware infestations 2004 appears to be the year that concerns over spyware began to exceed anxiety over any other cyber security threat Stories of lost data and stolen accounts became more preva-lent as more hackers sought quick profit And these events are not anomalies SOS reports The SOS goes on to tell us that in Q4 2004 alone in more than 90 percent of the Webroot Consumer SpyAudit scans they uncovered at least one instance of the four major categories for which it scanned At the same time the National Cyber Secu-rity Alliance and AOL found that 89 percent of participants had no idea that they even had spyware on their PC The SOS goes on to warn us ldquo it is

Page 5 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

clear that the problem of spyware is neither abating nor is its impact well understood by PC users [and then goes on to add] the first quarter of 2005 saw an increase in high-severity security incidents involving spywarerdquo

And right on cue as if the SOS was portending such a dark future ahead of us on June 20 2005 we were shocked with the ldquo40 million credit cards exposedrdquo headlines on MSNBCcom This breach of secu-rity with spyware most certainly at its core will most certainly join the vaunted pages of The Guinness Book of Records itrsquos that big

Note Webroot intends to up-date the SOS quarterly Please visit Webrootrsquos web site to view (and ob-tain) the SOS for yourself

A Few Facts About Spyware1) Spyware programs can be easily

installed on your computer without your knowledge 2) Spyware can result in iden-tity theft data corruption personal profiling and more 3) Your computer can get spyware when you download files view an unsolic-ited email visit Web pages that activate a lsquodrive-by downloadrsquo or via other means 4) 90 of Internet-connected computers are infected with spyware and 5) You can easily remove spyware from your computer with Spy Sweeper Webrootrsquos award-winning spyware protection tool

Now Letrsquos Investigate Spy Sweeper

After quickly and effortlessly loading my award-winning copy of Spy Sweeper 35 letrsquos live dangerously and see whatrsquos out there in the cruel cruel world of spyware ldquoA surfrsquoen we will go A surfrsquoen we will go Hi Ho a dairio a Surfrsquoen we gordquo While out on Webrootrsquos web site you will find ldquoSpy Auditrdquo Simply click on the link ldquoQuickly scan your PC for spyware - Itrsquos freerdquo

How Spy Audit on Their Web Site Works

At no cost or obligation to you Spy Audit will scan your system registry and hard drive space for thousands of known spyware programs Spy Audit will show you what spyware is actually on your system Rest easy it will not remove or modify any files and Spy Audit will take only seconds to run Note Webroot Software respects your privacy - after all thatrsquos their business They say ldquoRunning Spy Audit will not add cookies or harm your computer in any wayrdquo

I followed the directions religiously They were

1 Click the start spy audit button The Download Dialog will open

2 To run a Spy Audit on your computer

now click ldquoRunrdquo or ldquoOpenrdquo To save Spy Au-dit to your computer click ldquoSaverdquoAwk Not expecting anything because I have Pandarsquos Platinum 2005 Internet Security Suite ldquoin-stalledrdquo I got the IE Warning

The Problem That Showed Up On My Laptop

ldquoAdware andor Adware cookies were found on your system

Adware presence indicates a third-party is monitoring your online activities and most often results in increased exposure to adver-tising and pop-up ads

The presence of adware indicates a vul-nerability to infection and the risk of more devastating consequences in the futurerdquo

Reading from the Spyware Risk Meter I Got

ldquoYour risk assessment is calculated us-ing the following formula based on potential consequences and frequency of occurrence across all users

1 or more adware cookies = Low Risk Risk rating increases within low category with each additional adware cookie The presence of any spyware illustrates vulner-ability to infection

1 or more adware programs = Medium Risk Adware is moderately intrusive and not as pervasive as adware cookies Infec-tion is generally associated with more high-risk online activities Risk rating increases within medium category with each additional adware identified

1 or more Trojans or System Monitors = High Risk These are the most malicious forms of spyware and can cause catastrophic consequences They should be removed im-mediatelyrdquo

Note I never did actually find out what the offending adware program was seems I had a little trouble with the Java Script download

Benefits of Spy Sweeper Sales Speak

1) Better Com-puter PerformanceSpyware can cause inferior

computer performance slower internet con-nections and strange behavior One quick sweep by Spy Sweeper returns your PC to normal

2) Fewer Annoying Pop-up AdsSpyware is notorious for inundating comput-

er users with pop-up ads Spy Sweeper eliminates these programs to let you enjoy surfing the web again

3) Greater Personal PrivacyOnce spyware gets on your machine it can track your computer activities putting your personal privacy at risk Spy Sweeper lets you wipe out these programs and files so you enjoy the privacy you deserve

4) Increased PC Security Some spyware is used to steal personal data including credit card data social security numbers account numbers and more Spy Sweeper helps protect

you from fraud and identify theft by finding and removing these malicious programs

Webroot Spy Sweeper Specifics1) Webroot Spy Sweeper safeguards your

identity and restores system performance through fast smart and powerful anti-spy-ware protection 2) Comprehensive sweeps eliminate spyware in minutes 3) Smart shields conveniently block spyware before it installs on your PC 4) One-of-a-kind research system uncovers spyware threats faster for better protection 5) Unparalleled protection with the most frequently updated threat database and 6) 30-day satisfaction guarantee - no questions asked

And New in Webroot Spy Sweeper 40

FYI The new changes in the brand new Spy Sweeper 40 are 1) Enhanced scan engine for sweeps that are up to 4-times faster 2) Automated definition downloads for better protection 3) Improved schedul-ing features for greater flexibility and 4) New Smart Shields for increased blocking protection

So I downloaded the 40 upgrade and then went through the complete process once again just to see what would show up

Awk Not actually expecting any-thing once again and now because I have both Pandarsquos Platinum 2005 In-ternet Security Suite and Spy Sweeper 40 ldquoinstalledrdquo I got the ominous IE Warning

Page 6 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

(Ed Note The above is what we found on Cliffrsquos computer and he has AdAware SpyBot and SpyWare Blaster installed) AWK (-(

So Whatrsquos It All About AlfieHaving been very graphically shown

that just as all Virus protection programs

do not eliminate every known virus infection - some do get through the net - so it seems the parallel runs equally true with Spyware programs

Ever so confident that I was completely protected with my precious Panda Platinum 2005 Internet Security Suite I got a very rude shock when I saw that some adware infection

was still in there even up until I upgraded Spy Sweeper to the new 40 version Granted the number of ldquoTracesrdquo ndash Spy Sweeper ldquospy-warerdquo footprints - increased from 36K to 96K with the upgrade to 40 I was still shocked never-the-less Boy I still am I can truthfully share with you ldquoAm I ever glad I have both programs on my Laptop now as well as on all my other (test) computers in my home P2P network toordquo -

In conclusionldquoBy the end of the year spyware pro-

grams will triple in number put Firefox in their sights and turn to Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to distribute key loggers and ad spawnersrdquo predicts Richard Stien-non Director of Threat Research at Webroot Software Inc

Thanks Webroot for a real eye-opening I can only sincerely hope this review will be seen - and seriously be taken to heart - by many other such fortunate readers

Ciao

Page 9 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Minutes from June amp May Meeting Memoranda

The June meeting was called to order by President Rick Gregory

Announcements and Open Access President Gregory began the announce-

ments by talking about the big change by Apple moving to use Intel chips in their hardware Evidently the Power PC chip was not available in the quantities that allowed Apple to meet the demand for their desktops and portable equipment

E911 has been approved by the FCC as a requirement for VoIP This is generally seen as a move by the mainstream phone com-panies to roadblock the movement of their customers to a newer phone technology It requires that VoIP providers develop a way of providing the callers location to a 911 system before they can offer service

Microsoft is supposed to roll out their new Software Update Service this month It has the acronym of WSUS

The Utah Computer Society Summer Picnic is scheduled for July 13 in Murray Park at the same pavilion we have used the last three years Please go to the UCS website and RSVP The picnic is free but donations will be accepted to help defray costs

Don Nendell talked about a free offer-ing he arranged for the members of UCS Makau Corporation offers training software to the public on a wide variety of topics Don arranged for members in attendance to re-ceive a card that would allow the bearer to download and run one training program from their library

Don also talked about a program called Search Automator which would be shown to members in the main presentation later that evening

Main PresentationThe program tonight is Useful Web

Sites as identified and presented by several members Sean Wolsey Frank Herriott Rick Gregory and Larry Lamph

The URLrsquos of the web sites to be talked about (and several others) were on a sheet passed out to attendees

Sean began by talking about Gmail This is a free mail service offered by Google It is still in a Beta mode so that memberships are by referral only at this time The amazing thing is that currently they are offering over two Gigabytes of free storage The principal unique factor is that you do not create sub-folders for mail categories but use Googlersquos search technology on your content to select messages when you need to categorize your messages and find previous content It has a good spam filter Attachments are allowed

to be up 10 MB in sizeSean showed a free spyware control pro-

gram from wwwmlinnet It is called Startup Control Panel 28 It has many components that allow you to control your computer sys-tem and keep it clean of spyware and secure in operation

Lastly Sean showed the AnalogXcom website This is a site that has many free offerings There are currently 86 files and programs in the areas of Music Network Programming System and MP3 music files There are too many to list Stop by and look them over The price is right and so is the quality

Next Frank Herriott (that would be me) showed a few of his favorite web sites They are UtahCommuterLinkcom and the NOAA graphical weather forecasts site Commuting to Park City each day means a lot of time on the Interstates This website allows one to see the roads read of closures obtain current ac-cident information and travel time estimates As well I can see what Parleyrsquos Summit looks like before I ever leave my home or office The NOAA graphical forecasts are a differ-ent way of looking at weather forecasts and complement the regular weathercast infor-mation for me

Next I showed two sites that Don Nendell requested of me The first SearchAutomatorcom is home to a new search engine that reminds me of the meta-search engines that Mike Crawford showed to UCS This program takes that idea and really improves on it They have made a real powerful search engine that searches the mainstream search engines (Google Al-tavista Yahoo and so on) They arrange the results and allow you to select from catego-ries that group the search results in areas of html pages documents images sound clips and so on This is a really powerful method of searching the web and winnowing out the chaff Lastly we visited the Makau training site This was to show off the types of training materials they had to offer

UCS President Rick Gregory showed the Craigslist website to the group It started in 1995 in the Bay area and is now localized to most of the large cities in the US It became available for Salt Lake in September 2004 It is a very rich and complete listing of services such as jobs events wishlists classifieds public services and various other topics It re-ally defies a simple concise description Check it out at wwwsaltlakecitycraigslistorg

Larry Lamph talked about several of his favorite sites First was Salt Lake gas prices (wwwsaltlakegaspricescom) In brief it is a listing of the cheapest (and

highest) places to buy gas and diesel in the Salt Lake metro area You can also link to other areas in case you are traveling and want to gas up inexpensively on the road Larry next showed his favorite weather site wwwweathercom which features many different pieces of weather info Larry also quickly showed sites for Ghost Towns of Utah UFO Hunters of Utah DriverZone (for computer hardware drivers) Repair Clinic (for repair if just about anything) and TerraServercom which features pictures of the earth from space This last service has pictures of your neighborhood so you can see what your house (or your neighborrsquos or any street address) looks like

The May meeting was called to order by President Rick Gregory

Announcements and Open Access The meeting began with a message from

President Gregory about Freecycle and Salt Lake Recycle These two organizations both work to exchange or giveaway items you no longer want but do not wish to discard Search for them in Google to find out more

COMDEX has been cancelled for the Fall of 2005 This is the second year without a COMDEX show Show organizers say they are going to offer a show in 2006

Rick said that Microsoftrsquos Internet Explorer version 70 beta is to be released this summer Rick also talked about the recent security flaws in the new browser from Mozilla called Firefox Firefox has been getting patched immediately upon the disclosure of these security bugs

Rick reminded users again about the office supply store rebate programs Most purchases at Office Max Office Depot and Staples return a portion of the cost of the goods to the Utah Computer Society This is an easy way for members to support Utah Blue Chips Contact President Gregory if you have questions about the program

Wi-Max was discussed briefly It is a newer implementation of Wireless Network-ing which operates in the 24 GHz band at roughly twice the speed of 8211G or 108 megabits per second

SIGrsquos - UCS members should think about their SIG interests and pass them along to the UCS Board members At the April SUG meetings only the presenters showed up for the meetings If this effort is to be continued then members need to come to the meetings Needless to say it is discouraging for the presenters to prepare the meeting and then have no one show up for the session

Page 10 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Do you shop at Office Depot Office Max or

StaplesIf so use the following numbers for Blue Chips

to receive credit for your purchases

Office Depot Advantage1100058898

OfficeMax MaxPerks1026-77099

Staples Business Rewards34567 91452

Main PresentationGene Barlow of User Group Relations

(wwwusergroupstorecom) and his wife Linda came to present to the Utah Blue Chips Gene said that although he speaks to over one hundred user groups per year the Utah Computer Society feels like his ldquohome user grouprdquo to him The products that Gene talked about are available at his web site listed above at a discount to user group members

Gene Barlow and Dave Whittle who spoke to Utah Blue Chips ear-lier this year both have products listed at wwwusergroupstorecom Gene has product in the areas of computer organization secu-rity and backup Dave Whittle lists products for photo and video editing text and office editing and accessories for computers and mobile phones

Gene began with the Disk Director Suite 90 a tool to help you organize your hard disk drive(s) It has similar functionality to Partition Magic Gene feels that Disk Director has become a better and more useful product

Optimal Desktop Pro 40 is a powerful tool that combines the functions of a web browser (such as Internet Explorer) with the file manager (such as Windows Ex-plorer) and other functionality (RSS feed manager) all into one tool This lets you use one program to manage your local file system and web information seeking in one self contained package

Since many people are now upgrad-ing or migrating to newer more powerful PC systems today the next tool demon-strated Spearit Move Me 25 is a natural for minimizing the trouble of shifting to a new system It moves application programs configuration settings and data from an old computer to a new computer The elements moved are completely under your control This greatly reduces the pain of having to set up your new system all over again to get it

set up just the way you like it The program features an Exclude capability to mark pro-grams that you do not wish to move to your new system It also allows you to de-install old programs thereby cleaning up your systems This program is licensed to one computer the source machine It moves in-formation from the source system to another machine which is running the same version or a newer version of Windows It does not move to an older version of Windows than the one on the source system

Gene next talked about security prod-ucts from White Canyon Software My Password Vault is a program that allows you to consolidate all your passwords into one encrypted file and just have to remember one password A ldquoCopy and Pasterdquo process makes simple work of the need to use differ-ent passwords for each system Using one password over and over is a serious security hazard Secure Clean is a program that per-forms a selective overwrite of deleted files on your system so they cannot be recovered White Canyon Wipe DriveMedia Wiper is a program that completely obliterates all data on drives and removable media so you can safely discard them or sell or give them to another person Powerful data recovery pro-grams exist that can recover data you have merely ldquodeletedrdquo Wipe Drive allows you to feel confident you have really removed your data from disk drives and removable media (zip drives LS-120 drives tapes CD-RW etc)

Acronis Privacy Expert Suite 80 is a set of security products that help to keep your system free from spyware adware and annoying pop-ups This suite also in-cludes some disk wiping utilities It has an update service with an annual subscription charge

Spearit Associate This is a program that monitors your file associations and prevents them from being hi-jacked by other programs This approach is used to alter your selections at best and run mal-ware at worst

Gene took a minute to tell us about his training CD-ROMrsquos He has two CDrsquos which are instructional videorsquos showing you how to organize you hard disk drive and explains the system backup process and how to set up your backup and recovery process for fast and effective handling

The second part of Genersquos presentation covered Backup strategies and practices The frequency of backup all depends upon on how often your data is changed and what would be the ldquocostrdquo to you of re-entering the data since the last backup A typical scenario would be to backup your data daily and the full system on a weekly or monthly basis depending on how often it changed

CD-ROMrsquos and DVD-ROMrsquos were the new backup medium of choice just a few

years ago These were widely believed to have an archival shelf life of 25 years or more This is coming into serious question in the last year as many disks are failing even before 5 years have elapsed These are no longer a recommended long-term backup medium Cartridge tapes are widely used in the computer industry but are considered too expensive for home use

A new choice has appeared - hard disk drives These are long term becoming cheaper by the day and extremely fast when compared to optical or tape These can take the form of internal storage network storage or external disk drives

A backup strategy can take several forms One can use a file-oriented strategy This requires the operating system to be working in order to recover the data One can use a partition based copy utility This will be faster to write and recover from media It is a bit by bit copy of the original disk partition

Lastly one can use an Imaging pro-gram It can copy data in a full partition format or an incremental approach This is considered the optimal approach to save time and media (and money)

Lastly Gene used Acronis True Image 80 to illustrate the process of using imaging software to backup one of his disk partitions and how to recover files from it This method has the advantage of backing up even Linux disk partitions

Gene Barlow once again provided Utah Blue Chips with a timely topic and an inter-esting evening of computer talk

JulyRenewals

Preston Anderson David Bernhardt

Rick Gregory Stuart Gygi

LeRoy Johnson Jim Roberts

Robert B Stock

Page 11 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

CounterSpy HomeDetect and Protect Yourself Against SpywareDetect and Protect Yourself Against Spyware

Windows Review

Reviewed by Don Nendell

ManufacturerSunbelt Software USA(Americas Asia Pacifi c Rim)101 North Garden AvenueClearwater Florida USA 33755Tel 727-562-0101Tel 888-688-8457Fax 727-562-5199Sales salessunbelt-softwarecomCredit Card Tel 800-336-3166URL httpwwwsunbelt-softwarecom

buycfrnCost $1995 per machine (includes a one year

subscription with updates upgrades and real live human technical support)

Software Supportsupportsunbelt-softwarecom ltor visit

websitegtOn-Line Knowledge Basehttpwwwsunbelt-softwarecomSupport-

HomeOffi cecfrnTel 877-673-1153Minimum System Requirements

Windows 98SEMEXP2KPentium 11 Processor with 64MB24MB Hard Drive SpaceInternet Explorer 5 or Higher

Why choose CounterSpytrade

CounterSpy is a powerful anti-spy-ware tool that detects deletes and pro-tects your personal computer against recurring spyware threats from a broad range of malicious software Sunbelt Software claims ldquoYou can think of it as a lsquospy-wallrsquo that protects you in real-time [with] the best spyware database in the industry and the fast-est scan timesrdquo They go on to state that CounterSpy is the only anti-spyware that gets its regular spyware threat database updates from three different sources 1) Sunbeltrsquos own Spyware Research Team 2) CounterSpy users that are volunteer members of Counterspyrsquos ThreatNet Community and from 3) Microsoftrsquos Spyware Research Group

In order to effectively fi ght spyware you need a ldquocounterspyrdquo they say And possibly by sheer coincidence() their fl agship consumer product CounterSpy just might seem to fi ll that bill nicely now wouldnrsquot it

Note There are two versions of CounterSpy currently available through Sunbelt Software 1) CounterSpy for home users that works to protect a single computer and 2) CounterSpy Enter-prise which protects computers across an entire network Both can be ordered through their website and downloaded over an Internet connection which will allow you to have advanced protection installed and running on your PC within just a few minutes And also worthy of note each product comes with one yearrsquos worth of free maintenance upgrades and live tech support

According to PC World Counter-Spy has the best spyware database in the industry It was chosen as both PC WORLD ldquoWORLD CLASS 2005rdquo and ldquo2005 BEST BUYrdquo

Counterspy Flexibility

Spyware is a vicious fast-growing malig-nancy that can no longer be ignored It used to be that viruses received more public-ity than spyware because viruses move over the In-ternet so quickly throughout the world But Spyware is actually the more dangerous of the two and sadly the world is only just now really waking up to this plague Herersquos the bottom line If you value your per-sonal data at all - and protecting that data is of any importance to you - then you absolutely must repeat must use current and up-to-date versions of 1) An anti-virus software 2) A fi rewall and equally as importantly 3) An anti-spyware utility

The onset of any perceived trouble can be insidious and may actually be unobserved but when your computer fi nally does slow down or seems ultra-sluggish or it may seem like it has sud-

denly become possessed by pop-up ad-vertisements et al odds are excellent that spyware has infiltrated your system Anti-spyware utilities like CounterSpy will identify spyware on your hard disk help you remove it and protect your computer against new infections CounterSpy allows users to remove or even keep if desired spyware programs andor utilities on a case-by-case basis

More CounterSpy Defense Mechanisms

CounterSpy searches for 36 catego-ries of spyware Some examples are Tro-jans spyware adware malware hacker tools keyloggers and hijacker compo-nents Without anti-spyware utilities like CounterSpy spyware can lurk in the background waiting to be triggered by a user When triggered the spyware can steal passwords fi nancial data and personal information and literally anything it wants It can also open up backdoor entrances that hackers can use to manipulate your computer directly Which brings us face-to-face with my biggest problem and greatest fear of any of the spyware imfection(s)

Page 12 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

KeyloggersSunbelt Software warns us ldquoIf you

think spyware is just a nuisance then you are not familiar with the keylogger pro-grams that have made their way from the Internet to many peoplersquos home comput-ers in the last few years When people think about spyware they usually envi-sion those programs that lurk behind the scenes and post popup advertisements while users surf the Internet This type of spyware is annoying but keylogger spyware is downright dangerous

ldquoKeylogger spyware monitors every stroke of the keyboard you make on your computer That information is transmit-ted back to the spyware creator where hackers can analyze keystrokes for any information that they can use for nefarious purposes Passwords credit card numbers banking information and much more can be found buried within keylogger messages back to its creatorrdquo

Such is the case with the Desktop computer I am presently using to re-view CounterSpy In my initial Coun-terSpy scan it turned up four (4) pieces of spyware including two (2) very much dreaded Commercial Keyloggers embed-ded somewhere This is really scary to me personally as I have installed on this PC alone No-Adware Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE Personal SpywareBlaster Pandarsquos Platinum 2005 Internet Suite (with over 1058K virus signatures identified and protecting me with TruPrevent (See also my TruPrevent review in BCM June 2005 issue archives ltwwwucsorggt)) and a separate P2P LAN firewall manned

by IPCop Whorsquoda thunk itCaveat I must truthfully admit how-

ever that I hadnrsquot run any of the spyware programs for approximately 30 days - for some unknown reason Shame on me for being so slothful and careless

Also I had originally intended to run Spy Sweeper on this machine too but actually got started on this review of CounterSpy before I got to that point Pretty wide open here Irsquod say But then all-in-all it still is really surprising to me to come up with such a sick computer so fast Live and learn they say But then again isnrsquot that why I am supposedly do-ing these spyware reviews anyway - to help everybody out there in La-La land plus moi Truthfully if this opens even one eye and saves many others it will have been well worth the effort Silently I pray however it will make a big differ-ence to a great many persons

Heavens ldquoPhysician Heal Thyselfrdquo I keep scolding myself

Stopping Keylogger Spyware

The only way to stop keylogger (or any other) spyware is by installing (and m a i n t a i n i n g AND USING) a high-quality anti-spyware program in your PC Anti-spyware programs scan your hard

drive for spyware signatures buried deep within pro-gram files or hid-den amongst harm-less files on your hard drive Sunbelt Software advises us ldquoNo spyware is safe if you are running top-notch anti-spyware softwarerdquo ldquoCounterSpyrdquo they say - No doubt about it I would have to agree whole-

heartedly Remember ldquoHappiness is a working computerrdquo I keep saying Now I have a whole slew of spyware programs to guard my premises and perimeters Whew

Not Surprisingly - Enter Organized CyberCrime Stage Right and Left

Sunbelt Software warns us ldquoOr-ganized cybercrime has become one of the biggest challenges facing companies that specialize in protecting computers from viruses spyware and Trojans At one time the viruses that spread across the Internet were created by individuals who were more interested in notoriety than they were in crime Todayrsquos viruses are of a different breed Criminals have now realized that viruses can be used for much more than proving computer development skills Organized criminals can now create networks of lsquobotsrsquo that can be installed on vulnerable PCs and remotely controlled The word lsquobotrsquo re-ally means a personal computer owned by an unsuspecting home user that is now in reality owned by a hacker and can be used for their criminal goals Recent data shows that the number of IP addresses associated with lsquobotrsquo net-works has increased by more than 1000 percent in just one yearrdquo

It can happen to you me and any and everybody Actually no one is safe For example take a gander at this Herersquos the latest update on the subject of spyware By now we all are quite fa-miliar with The Salt Lake Tribune Sat-urday June 18 2005 front page story (plus every newspaper TV newscast

Page 13 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

etc in the world) which highlighted ldquoMillions at risk as data are hacked Cardholders Security is breached at a transaction company fraud could affect bank customersrdquo And on June 20 2005 at MSNBCcom ldquo40 million credit cards exposedrdquo as reported by Bob Sullivan who wrote ldquoMasterCard spokeswoman Sharon Gamsin said a computer virus was not to blame for the data theft She said she couldnrsquot provide details of how the systems were hacked but did say that lsquoan unauthorized entity put a spe-cific code into CardSystemsrsquo networkrsquo enabling the person or group to gain ac-cess to the datardquo Which was also duti-fully reported in InformationWeek June 20 2005 News Scan p 12 ldquo One gets the nagging feeling We havenrsquot yet seen the worst of itrdquo Amen

Fighting Organized CyberCrime and Spyware

To fight organized cybercrime and spyware both companies and individu-als need to utilize the best anti-virus and anti-malware utilities available Visit Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy Documents web site to learn more on how we can all get together to fight this crime wave Their CounterSpy Docu-ments URL is lthttpwwwsunbelt-softwarecomCounterSpy-docscfmgt Also please visit their Resource Li-brary for additional information on spyware and ldquoSpyware in the Newsrdquo The Resource Library URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomresource_librarycfmgt

Critically Important Visit Sun-belt Softwarersquos ThreatNet web site to actively participate in the spyware fight The ThreatNet URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomthreatnetcfmgt

So Whatrsquos It All About AlfieA few outside review comments are

in order here

ldquoSpyware Sneaks InIn a nationally-representative sur-

vey of more than 2000 households with at-home Internet access CR found that 36 percent reported that their home page had been changed - a common symptom of spyware Spyware isnrsquot a single type of software The term cov-ers a diverse range of applications Like spam spyware is often used by third-party marketers associated with reputable companies whose products they are hawking To avoid spyware Consumer Reports recommends that consumers

- Download and install software only from trusted online sources

- Adjust the Web browserrsquos security settings to the medium or high level

- Use updated antispyware software to scan the hard drive regularlyrdquo- Consumer Reports Consumer Reports Investigates How to Protect against Spam Spyware and Phishing Report Includes Survey Results Software Rat-ings and Tips to Avoid Online Hazards Such as ID Theft dated 892004

ldquoCounterSpy had the highest detec-tion rate in our tests The most effective scanner - CounterSpy - was also the fast-est taking only a minute to perform a complete scan of a system with 27 GB of data Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy proved the most capable of the bunch finding and stopping 93 percent of all the running processes created by our 45 test programsrdquo- PCWorld April 2005

Last HoorayCounterSpy has a couple more

features up their sleeves that are really ldquoKnock-Your-Socks-Offrdquo items System Tools - Secure File Eraser and System Tools - My PC Checkup The graphics tell it like it is

Overall Conclusion

Very seriously I have not actually intended for these two (2) BCM spyware reviews this month to be a ldquoWinner Take Allrdquo comparison of two (2) great spyware programs CounterSpy and Spy Sweep-er They are both simply ldquoAbsolutely Superiorrdquo companies and programs

and they deserve to be evaluated each on their own merits and by each and everyone of you out there individually They both are very inexpensive and they each have trialware downloads so you have absolutely nothing to lose by try-ing both of them Besides yoursquoll get a ldquosqueaky cleanrdquo PC out of the deal at least once in this or any other of your lifetimesFYI For further clarification purposes I would also like to add a comment from an article dated July 29 2004 I ran across on eWeekcom entitled SpyAdware The New Real Security Problem by Larry Seltzer He writes ldquoThere are a large number of programs to detect and remove the much larger number of attacks Since some of the best ones are free (asking for donations) it may be a good idea to run more than one rdquo To which I would further add ldquoThe lsquofreersquo ones donrsquot get all the dirt out either So lsquoGo for Brokersquo Getrsquoem all and then for sure be surerdquo

I am truly beholden to both com-panies for helping me to ldquoget the word out there as best I canrdquo about spyware spyware problems pitfalls and dangers and especially their own wonderful spy-ware programs Each company is doing an outstandingly admirable job in per-forming its part in the new now and en-suing battles of WWIII The CyberWar Thank you sincerely from the bottom of my heart Job ldquoWell Donerdquo

Talk about a powerhouse Internet-bound PC Irsquove got it all now ldquoHappi-ness Happiness Happinessrdquo

Ciao

Page 14 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Presidents CornerThoughts on Member Recruitment

To encourage word-of-mouth recruitment of new members an incentivereward program may be used One incentive would be the waiv-ing of membership dues for one year of any member who recruits a new paid membership Suggested guidelines include a limit of one waiver per year no waiver of multiple years for multiple new memberships and some method of formally attributing credit for the new membership

Use of flyers at community events could raise awareness of the organiza-tion Key features of the flyer are use of the word ldquofreerdquo ldquono experience neces-saryrdquo and no mention of any need for commitment such as annual member-ship dues A related method using post-ers would combine these features with artwork to catch a personrsquos attention and multicolored ink on heavy stock Plaster-ing an area within a half-hour drive of the meeting location in the days prior to a meeting requires coordination of members to come up with the most ef-fective and efficient advertising

Some organizations have ldquoopen housesrdquo to attract new members One variation on that for a computer group would be to hold ldquoComputer Tune-Upsrdquo for free The tune-ups could include virus and spyware scans disk defragmentation and perhaps even a selective backup to CD-R Whether these tune-ups could be held at com-munity events probably depends on the personal contacts available via current members

Expand the use of free newspaper and magazine items to promote these ldquoTune-Upsrdquo Creation of a press release both printed and electronic for distri-bution to calendar editors in a timely manner is essential Local community radio stations often provide assistance with the creation of Public Service An-nouncements and may reach an entirely new audience Local community access cable channels sometimes have scroll-ing calendars of local events Whether assistance with creation of a promo-tional video or 15-minute infomercial is available probably depends on the

local franchise agreement Lawn signs at high traffic locations with the monthly program feature may be effective if the message is concise enough to be read quickly from a distance

All of these suggestions have com-mon requirements Consistency Dedi-cation and Lots of Hard Work All mem-bers must be involved in these activities not just the Board or a single volunteer Itrsquos a case of many hands making light work The purpose of this advertising is to create awareness and kindle interest It requires Repetition and Saturation to build credibility and the appearance of solidarity

Although a Board may be able to oversee this operation a Recruiting Coordinator is strongly recommended This person would also maintain the list of potential members or the ldquoMaster Re-cruiting Listrdquo

My thanks to Pete Wex and Chris Pinkham for the articles from which these suggestions were adapted

-- Rick Gregory 2 June 2005

Mail to Membership Secretary PO Box 510811 SLC Utah 84151

MEMBERSHIP REGISTRATION New Renewal Update Mem ________ Name___________________________________________ Address_________________________________________ Home Phone (____)_________________________________________________________ Work Phone (____)__________ City_____________________State______Zip___________

E-Mail_Home_______________________________________________ E-Mail_Work________________________________________________Would you like to have E-mail about coming UCS user events Yes___ No____ If yes send to____________ Please enroll me with the Utah Computer Society Inc (Utah Blue Chips) PCUG as one of the below membership categories Business ($35)_____ Personal ($25)_______ Student ($10)_______ Senior Center ($10)_____ Family Member ($10) ____ Does not include magazine

Signature____________________________________ Date_______________ Check _________Cash______

Visa ____________________ Exp Date________MasterCharge __________________ Exp Date________

SIGsUnion Bldg

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Blue Chips mdash Utahrsquos Computer Guide in the 21st Century

Utah Blue Chips Calendar July August 2005

ADOBE

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

General Meeting

MagazineDeadline

U of U700pm

PICNIC

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Page 2: s Presentation Picnic in the Parks Presentation Picnic in the Park R.S.V.P. on our Website: UCS.ORG Page 2 Blue Chips Magazine —July 2005 y liff illward, ditor cliffm@xmission.com

Page 2 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

trade

y liff illward ditorcliffmxmissioncom

We are Read

Our Magazine is Read my Many OthersI received an e-mail from Joe Durham of the Quad Cities

Computer Society about GeoWorks which was in last months edition The following are the contents

I am Joe Durham from the Quad Cities Com-puter Society wwwqcsorg I am also a co-editor of our magazine QBITS

I saw your musings on the web about technology and its direction

I was pleased to see you men-tion Geoworks

ldquoA DOS shell called Geoworks was reputed to be better than Win-dows but IBM refused to bundle it on their systems so it also diedrdquo

They havenrsquot died they are still around I have been using it since 1990 still use it And do our newslet-ter with it The current manifestation of the Geos motif can be found at wwwbreadboxcom A ya-hoo group is devoted to it Geos-talk

I have recently converted two public domain ebooks to the Bookreader format in Ensemble (the new name for GeoWorks)

Like your group we struggle with member-ship issues printing costs and the budget

Good luck with your clubrsquos activities and outreach Have a good week ahead

I have attached a PDF version of our news-letter for your convenience Yes one can pro-duce a PDF version from Geos The page order is not consecutive due to our printerrsquos needs I purchased a Ghostscript driver for Geos from Germany

Joe Durham

From the above you can see that our magazine has a large distribution If you write an article it will be read by many people outside of Utah Therefore I encourage you to obtain one of the products for review and write a review on it so that we can publish it You never know you could be the next Mark Twain

The GovernmentXM radio might be used by the government XM and

Raytheon Co have jointly built a communications sys-tem that would use XMrsquos satellites to relay information to soldiers and emergency responders during a crisis

The Mobile Enhanced Situational Awareness Network known as MESA would get a dedicated channel on XMrsquos satellites that would be accessible only on devices given to emergency person-nel The receivers would be the same as the portable ones available to consum-ers with slight modifications to make them more rugged

Commercial satellite radio receivers are lightweight battery-powered and

cost as little as $99 Their digital transmissions have enough bandwidth to carry maps and other imagery which would be displayed on portable computers that plug into the satellite receivers The system can be pro-grammed to relay information just to specific devices so individual users can get messages appropriate to their regions

In time of war all methods of communication must be explored in case some of them fail

Adobe Premiere Elements Here in AugustAdobe Premiere will be the feature presentation

in August Adobe is mostly know for their flagship program PhotoShop They also produce PageMaker and InDesign InDesign is what is used to produce this magazine

Adobe has long been a supporter of user groups and has been quite generous with review materials

Donrsquot miss this presentation of one or their best photo editing programs Who knows perhaps you might even win a copy with a red ticket or a blue ldquoDouble your Pleasurerdquo ticket

Fineacute

Page 3 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Blue Chips Magazine

Magazine Staff

Editor mdash Cliff Millward 955-9633Review Program Liaison mdash James Alexander 250-2269Review Product Editor mdash Donna Nendell 565-9594 Review EditorProduct Recruiter mdash Don Nendell 565-9594 Photography mdash LeRoy JohnsonProof Reader mdash Larry Lamph Doug Jackson

Advertising Rates

Ad costs 1 month 3 months 6 months 12 months2 Page Spread $150 $400 $700 $1200Full Page $100 $275 $500 $900Half Page $50 $130 $250 $450Quarter Page $25 $70 $130 $225Business Card $15 $30 $60 $120

Full page size is 71frasl2 x 10 inches All other page sizes are based on a 7 x 10 inch page in order to conform to editorial style Half-page ads may be 7 x 5 inches or 31frasl2 x 10 inches Quarter-page ads are 31frasl2 x 5 inches Business card ads are 31frasl2 x 21frasl2 inches

Classified Advertising Utah Blue Chips members may place personal classified ads at no charge Maximum ad size is 7 lines 35 characters per line

Submissions Members are encouraged to submit text articles for pub li ca tion in ASCII text only Photos in TIF or JPG format only Line graphics tables in almost any vector or TIF format Do not imbed graphics or tables in text files All articles must be received by the 15th of the month preceding the month of publication All articles become the property of the Utah Computer Society and by submitting an article the author gives per mis sion for the Blue Chips Magazine Staff to edit the submission The author also gives permission for republication in other users groupsrsquo communications

Permission to Copy Permission is granted to other nonprofit PC user groups to reproduce any article published in this newsletter provided credit is given Blue Chips Mag a zine and the author (s) of the reproduced materials Re print ed articles are subject to the terms of their respective copyright holders

ldquoUtahrsquos Award Winning Pub li ca tionrdquo

Charter Member of theAssociation of PC User Groups

MONTHLY MEETING LOCATION2nd Wednesday of every month

University of UtahEngineering amp Mines Classroom Bldg

Room 104 700 pm

Officers and Trustees Eve Phone E-mailPresident Rick Gregory 582-7783 rfggtemailnetVice President Sean Wolsey 489-3819 seanwucsorgSecretary Lowell Kenedy 278-3035 lkenedynetworldcomTreasurer John Witzel 296-1390 witzeljnetscapenetStuart Gygi 576-1891 sgygixmissioncom Frank Herriott 943-7765 frank1pcstarnetcomDoug Jackson 322-2337 cjackson104hotmailcomLeRoy Johnson 581-1348 leroyjohnson2comcastnetLarry Lamph 571-2908 larrylynnsisnacom

InformationPersons or companies may join or renew at the meeting or by sending a check payable to the Utah Computer Society to

Utah Computer SocietyMembership SecretaryPO Box 510811Salt Lake City UT 84151

Individual memberships are $25year Business Memberships are $3500 a yearCorporate sponsorships are available at two levels Corporate Sponsors enjoy all benefits of mem ber ship including multiple individual membership and prepaid advertising coverage Contact a Board Member for more information $10year memberships without the magazine are available for students other family and Senior Citizen Center members

Other important informationMeeting Information httpwwwucsorgGroup Business (James Alexander) 250-2269Magazine (Cliff Millward) 955-9633Program Coordinator (James Alexander) 250-2269Web Site httpwwwucsorgWebMaster 272-8949Membership (evenings) (Bob) 262-6045

Donrsquot Miss the Picnic

This Month

Page 4 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Windows ReviewSpy Sweeper 40Block Spyware to Your ComputerReviewed by Don Nendell

ManufacturerWebroot Software IncPO Box 198162560 55th StreetBoulder Colorado 80308-2816 USAPh Toll Free (800) 7729383Web Site lthttpwwwwebrootcomgtFAX (303) 4423846 Outside the USA +1 (303) 4423823E-mail Tech Support lthttp

wwwwebrootcomsupportgtCorporate Sales amp SupportPh (800) 8708102One year of updates and support for only

$2995

Minimum System RequirementsWindows 98SE 2K ME or XP300 Mhz Processor25 MB Hard Drive SpaceSupports Internet Explorer

Last month I did a very favorable re-view on Pandarsquos TruPrevent Personal 2005 (See June 2005 UBC Magazine Archives at ltwwwucsorggt) where I wrote

ldquoSome Opening lsquoEye-Openingrsquo Thoughts on the Subject [of Spyware]

Almost everyone has anti-virus and anti-spyware software installed on their PC network and ISP or they definitely should Shame on anyone if they havenrsquot Regard-less malicious software viruses spyware and hacker attempts continue to slip through all too easily Why Why indeedrdquo

This month through the auspices of Webroot and their first quarterly STATE OF SPYWARE Q1 2005 report to the world I will share with you their phenomenally ac-curate and timely answer to my above pro-posed question ldquoWhy indeedrdquo I strongly suggest you get ldquoand share with everyonerdquo your own FREE copy of this fabulous eye-opening 75-page expose immediately if not sooner You can get it by going to lthttpwwwwebrootcomstateofspywaregt It is chocked full of startling facts of the - all-to-soon to reach your computer - up and coming invasion and full-blown epidemic (my words) of insidious Spyware A great many of those facts I share with you herein and now

I met the wonderful folks of Webroot at the Networld + Interop 2005 ShowStoppers Media event and boy am I glad I did - I think you will be too Later in the review (before I install Spy Sweeper) I want to go to their web site with this very machine (a Toshiba Satellite A75-S229 connected to the Internet through my ever-faithful D-Link WiFi Ac-

cess Point) while sitting comfortably in my living room and test it with their voluntary Webroot Consumer SpyAudit FYI My Lap-top has only Pandarsquos wonderful Platinum 2005 Internet Security Suite installed on it This machine will thenceforth become another statistic for their quarterly report information gathering through their Spy-Audit program and subsequent reporting Very Interesting But first things first

STATE OF SPYWARE Q1 2005 Re-port (SOS)

The report is a concise hard-hitting eye-opening in-depth review and analysis of the impact of spyware adware and unwanted software on consumers and corporations Here are a few important extracts

ldquoIn the late winter and early spring of 2004 a series of events hastened the public awareness of spyware as a clear and present danger to both consumers and enterprises In February the New York Times used its editorial page to call for legislation against an emerging software threat called spyware In March PC Magazine published the first comprehensive overview of anti-spyware software and featured the growing scourge on its cover pulling this new security issue out of the chat rooms and into the bright light of mainstream technology media Finally in April the Federal Trade Commission hosted a workshop on spyware attracting industry leaders opinion makers and even apologists to Washington to debate the legislative impli-cations of tiny pieces of software infiltrating unwitting computers and transmitting data to third parties without the consent of the informationrsquos owner Spyware had officially arrived

By yearrsquos end we knew that 90 of consumer computers had some form of spyware Rest assured that if 2004 was the year we discovered spyware then in 2005 we are going to find out how hard it is to beat But we can also be sure that the more we all know[] the better equipped we are to fight [what] we know we have ahead of usrdquo

During Q1 2005 the Webroot SpyAudit found more than 25 instances of spyware in each ldquoinfected consumer machinerdquo they tested With cookies excluded the number of infections averaged out at 72 per machine This is a significant statistic as it actually turns out because the subtle distinctions between the various forms of spyware are lost on most consumers and businesses

By now we need a clear definition of what we mean by ldquospywarerdquo because cur-rently the term spyware is broken up into

four (4) broad categories System Mon-itors Trojan H o r s e s Adware and Cookies The SOS report obligingly de-fines spyware thusly

ldquo The definition of spyware is all programs install-ing themselves onto a userrsquos computer by stealth subterfuge andor social engineer-ing and whose purpose is to redirect a userrsquos activities or record those activities in a way that reduces a userrsquos privacy protection or peace of mind Adware is often labeled as a subcategory of spyware mainly due to the overt ways that adware vendors initially used to install their software on end userrsquos ma-chines with little regard for the user As the spyware definition debate heats up several industry groups including one sponsored by the Center for Democracy and Technology are forming to address this issuerdquo

The State of Spyware 2005The SOS reports that an annual $2

Billion(US) - and growing rapidly - industry feeds off spyware infestations 2004 appears to be the year that concerns over spyware began to exceed anxiety over any other cyber security threat Stories of lost data and stolen accounts became more preva-lent as more hackers sought quick profit And these events are not anomalies SOS reports The SOS goes on to tell us that in Q4 2004 alone in more than 90 percent of the Webroot Consumer SpyAudit scans they uncovered at least one instance of the four major categories for which it scanned At the same time the National Cyber Secu-rity Alliance and AOL found that 89 percent of participants had no idea that they even had spyware on their PC The SOS goes on to warn us ldquo it is

Page 5 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

clear that the problem of spyware is neither abating nor is its impact well understood by PC users [and then goes on to add] the first quarter of 2005 saw an increase in high-severity security incidents involving spywarerdquo

And right on cue as if the SOS was portending such a dark future ahead of us on June 20 2005 we were shocked with the ldquo40 million credit cards exposedrdquo headlines on MSNBCcom This breach of secu-rity with spyware most certainly at its core will most certainly join the vaunted pages of The Guinness Book of Records itrsquos that big

Note Webroot intends to up-date the SOS quarterly Please visit Webrootrsquos web site to view (and ob-tain) the SOS for yourself

A Few Facts About Spyware1) Spyware programs can be easily

installed on your computer without your knowledge 2) Spyware can result in iden-tity theft data corruption personal profiling and more 3) Your computer can get spyware when you download files view an unsolic-ited email visit Web pages that activate a lsquodrive-by downloadrsquo or via other means 4) 90 of Internet-connected computers are infected with spyware and 5) You can easily remove spyware from your computer with Spy Sweeper Webrootrsquos award-winning spyware protection tool

Now Letrsquos Investigate Spy Sweeper

After quickly and effortlessly loading my award-winning copy of Spy Sweeper 35 letrsquos live dangerously and see whatrsquos out there in the cruel cruel world of spyware ldquoA surfrsquoen we will go A surfrsquoen we will go Hi Ho a dairio a Surfrsquoen we gordquo While out on Webrootrsquos web site you will find ldquoSpy Auditrdquo Simply click on the link ldquoQuickly scan your PC for spyware - Itrsquos freerdquo

How Spy Audit on Their Web Site Works

At no cost or obligation to you Spy Audit will scan your system registry and hard drive space for thousands of known spyware programs Spy Audit will show you what spyware is actually on your system Rest easy it will not remove or modify any files and Spy Audit will take only seconds to run Note Webroot Software respects your privacy - after all thatrsquos their business They say ldquoRunning Spy Audit will not add cookies or harm your computer in any wayrdquo

I followed the directions religiously They were

1 Click the start spy audit button The Download Dialog will open

2 To run a Spy Audit on your computer

now click ldquoRunrdquo or ldquoOpenrdquo To save Spy Au-dit to your computer click ldquoSaverdquoAwk Not expecting anything because I have Pandarsquos Platinum 2005 Internet Security Suite ldquoin-stalledrdquo I got the IE Warning

The Problem That Showed Up On My Laptop

ldquoAdware andor Adware cookies were found on your system

Adware presence indicates a third-party is monitoring your online activities and most often results in increased exposure to adver-tising and pop-up ads

The presence of adware indicates a vul-nerability to infection and the risk of more devastating consequences in the futurerdquo

Reading from the Spyware Risk Meter I Got

ldquoYour risk assessment is calculated us-ing the following formula based on potential consequences and frequency of occurrence across all users

1 or more adware cookies = Low Risk Risk rating increases within low category with each additional adware cookie The presence of any spyware illustrates vulner-ability to infection

1 or more adware programs = Medium Risk Adware is moderately intrusive and not as pervasive as adware cookies Infec-tion is generally associated with more high-risk online activities Risk rating increases within medium category with each additional adware identified

1 or more Trojans or System Monitors = High Risk These are the most malicious forms of spyware and can cause catastrophic consequences They should be removed im-mediatelyrdquo

Note I never did actually find out what the offending adware program was seems I had a little trouble with the Java Script download

Benefits of Spy Sweeper Sales Speak

1) Better Com-puter PerformanceSpyware can cause inferior

computer performance slower internet con-nections and strange behavior One quick sweep by Spy Sweeper returns your PC to normal

2) Fewer Annoying Pop-up AdsSpyware is notorious for inundating comput-

er users with pop-up ads Spy Sweeper eliminates these programs to let you enjoy surfing the web again

3) Greater Personal PrivacyOnce spyware gets on your machine it can track your computer activities putting your personal privacy at risk Spy Sweeper lets you wipe out these programs and files so you enjoy the privacy you deserve

4) Increased PC Security Some spyware is used to steal personal data including credit card data social security numbers account numbers and more Spy Sweeper helps protect

you from fraud and identify theft by finding and removing these malicious programs

Webroot Spy Sweeper Specifics1) Webroot Spy Sweeper safeguards your

identity and restores system performance through fast smart and powerful anti-spy-ware protection 2) Comprehensive sweeps eliminate spyware in minutes 3) Smart shields conveniently block spyware before it installs on your PC 4) One-of-a-kind research system uncovers spyware threats faster for better protection 5) Unparalleled protection with the most frequently updated threat database and 6) 30-day satisfaction guarantee - no questions asked

And New in Webroot Spy Sweeper 40

FYI The new changes in the brand new Spy Sweeper 40 are 1) Enhanced scan engine for sweeps that are up to 4-times faster 2) Automated definition downloads for better protection 3) Improved schedul-ing features for greater flexibility and 4) New Smart Shields for increased blocking protection

So I downloaded the 40 upgrade and then went through the complete process once again just to see what would show up

Awk Not actually expecting any-thing once again and now because I have both Pandarsquos Platinum 2005 In-ternet Security Suite and Spy Sweeper 40 ldquoinstalledrdquo I got the ominous IE Warning

Page 6 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

(Ed Note The above is what we found on Cliffrsquos computer and he has AdAware SpyBot and SpyWare Blaster installed) AWK (-(

So Whatrsquos It All About AlfieHaving been very graphically shown

that just as all Virus protection programs

do not eliminate every known virus infection - some do get through the net - so it seems the parallel runs equally true with Spyware programs

Ever so confident that I was completely protected with my precious Panda Platinum 2005 Internet Security Suite I got a very rude shock when I saw that some adware infection

was still in there even up until I upgraded Spy Sweeper to the new 40 version Granted the number of ldquoTracesrdquo ndash Spy Sweeper ldquospy-warerdquo footprints - increased from 36K to 96K with the upgrade to 40 I was still shocked never-the-less Boy I still am I can truthfully share with you ldquoAm I ever glad I have both programs on my Laptop now as well as on all my other (test) computers in my home P2P network toordquo -

In conclusionldquoBy the end of the year spyware pro-

grams will triple in number put Firefox in their sights and turn to Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to distribute key loggers and ad spawnersrdquo predicts Richard Stien-non Director of Threat Research at Webroot Software Inc

Thanks Webroot for a real eye-opening I can only sincerely hope this review will be seen - and seriously be taken to heart - by many other such fortunate readers

Ciao

Page 9 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Minutes from June amp May Meeting Memoranda

The June meeting was called to order by President Rick Gregory

Announcements and Open Access President Gregory began the announce-

ments by talking about the big change by Apple moving to use Intel chips in their hardware Evidently the Power PC chip was not available in the quantities that allowed Apple to meet the demand for their desktops and portable equipment

E911 has been approved by the FCC as a requirement for VoIP This is generally seen as a move by the mainstream phone com-panies to roadblock the movement of their customers to a newer phone technology It requires that VoIP providers develop a way of providing the callers location to a 911 system before they can offer service

Microsoft is supposed to roll out their new Software Update Service this month It has the acronym of WSUS

The Utah Computer Society Summer Picnic is scheduled for July 13 in Murray Park at the same pavilion we have used the last three years Please go to the UCS website and RSVP The picnic is free but donations will be accepted to help defray costs

Don Nendell talked about a free offer-ing he arranged for the members of UCS Makau Corporation offers training software to the public on a wide variety of topics Don arranged for members in attendance to re-ceive a card that would allow the bearer to download and run one training program from their library

Don also talked about a program called Search Automator which would be shown to members in the main presentation later that evening

Main PresentationThe program tonight is Useful Web

Sites as identified and presented by several members Sean Wolsey Frank Herriott Rick Gregory and Larry Lamph

The URLrsquos of the web sites to be talked about (and several others) were on a sheet passed out to attendees

Sean began by talking about Gmail This is a free mail service offered by Google It is still in a Beta mode so that memberships are by referral only at this time The amazing thing is that currently they are offering over two Gigabytes of free storage The principal unique factor is that you do not create sub-folders for mail categories but use Googlersquos search technology on your content to select messages when you need to categorize your messages and find previous content It has a good spam filter Attachments are allowed

to be up 10 MB in sizeSean showed a free spyware control pro-

gram from wwwmlinnet It is called Startup Control Panel 28 It has many components that allow you to control your computer sys-tem and keep it clean of spyware and secure in operation

Lastly Sean showed the AnalogXcom website This is a site that has many free offerings There are currently 86 files and programs in the areas of Music Network Programming System and MP3 music files There are too many to list Stop by and look them over The price is right and so is the quality

Next Frank Herriott (that would be me) showed a few of his favorite web sites They are UtahCommuterLinkcom and the NOAA graphical weather forecasts site Commuting to Park City each day means a lot of time on the Interstates This website allows one to see the roads read of closures obtain current ac-cident information and travel time estimates As well I can see what Parleyrsquos Summit looks like before I ever leave my home or office The NOAA graphical forecasts are a differ-ent way of looking at weather forecasts and complement the regular weathercast infor-mation for me

Next I showed two sites that Don Nendell requested of me The first SearchAutomatorcom is home to a new search engine that reminds me of the meta-search engines that Mike Crawford showed to UCS This program takes that idea and really improves on it They have made a real powerful search engine that searches the mainstream search engines (Google Al-tavista Yahoo and so on) They arrange the results and allow you to select from catego-ries that group the search results in areas of html pages documents images sound clips and so on This is a really powerful method of searching the web and winnowing out the chaff Lastly we visited the Makau training site This was to show off the types of training materials they had to offer

UCS President Rick Gregory showed the Craigslist website to the group It started in 1995 in the Bay area and is now localized to most of the large cities in the US It became available for Salt Lake in September 2004 It is a very rich and complete listing of services such as jobs events wishlists classifieds public services and various other topics It re-ally defies a simple concise description Check it out at wwwsaltlakecitycraigslistorg

Larry Lamph talked about several of his favorite sites First was Salt Lake gas prices (wwwsaltlakegaspricescom) In brief it is a listing of the cheapest (and

highest) places to buy gas and diesel in the Salt Lake metro area You can also link to other areas in case you are traveling and want to gas up inexpensively on the road Larry next showed his favorite weather site wwwweathercom which features many different pieces of weather info Larry also quickly showed sites for Ghost Towns of Utah UFO Hunters of Utah DriverZone (for computer hardware drivers) Repair Clinic (for repair if just about anything) and TerraServercom which features pictures of the earth from space This last service has pictures of your neighborhood so you can see what your house (or your neighborrsquos or any street address) looks like

The May meeting was called to order by President Rick Gregory

Announcements and Open Access The meeting began with a message from

President Gregory about Freecycle and Salt Lake Recycle These two organizations both work to exchange or giveaway items you no longer want but do not wish to discard Search for them in Google to find out more

COMDEX has been cancelled for the Fall of 2005 This is the second year without a COMDEX show Show organizers say they are going to offer a show in 2006

Rick said that Microsoftrsquos Internet Explorer version 70 beta is to be released this summer Rick also talked about the recent security flaws in the new browser from Mozilla called Firefox Firefox has been getting patched immediately upon the disclosure of these security bugs

Rick reminded users again about the office supply store rebate programs Most purchases at Office Max Office Depot and Staples return a portion of the cost of the goods to the Utah Computer Society This is an easy way for members to support Utah Blue Chips Contact President Gregory if you have questions about the program

Wi-Max was discussed briefly It is a newer implementation of Wireless Network-ing which operates in the 24 GHz band at roughly twice the speed of 8211G or 108 megabits per second

SIGrsquos - UCS members should think about their SIG interests and pass them along to the UCS Board members At the April SUG meetings only the presenters showed up for the meetings If this effort is to be continued then members need to come to the meetings Needless to say it is discouraging for the presenters to prepare the meeting and then have no one show up for the session

Page 10 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Do you shop at Office Depot Office Max or

StaplesIf so use the following numbers for Blue Chips

to receive credit for your purchases

Office Depot Advantage1100058898

OfficeMax MaxPerks1026-77099

Staples Business Rewards34567 91452

Main PresentationGene Barlow of User Group Relations

(wwwusergroupstorecom) and his wife Linda came to present to the Utah Blue Chips Gene said that although he speaks to over one hundred user groups per year the Utah Computer Society feels like his ldquohome user grouprdquo to him The products that Gene talked about are available at his web site listed above at a discount to user group members

Gene Barlow and Dave Whittle who spoke to Utah Blue Chips ear-lier this year both have products listed at wwwusergroupstorecom Gene has product in the areas of computer organization secu-rity and backup Dave Whittle lists products for photo and video editing text and office editing and accessories for computers and mobile phones

Gene began with the Disk Director Suite 90 a tool to help you organize your hard disk drive(s) It has similar functionality to Partition Magic Gene feels that Disk Director has become a better and more useful product

Optimal Desktop Pro 40 is a powerful tool that combines the functions of a web browser (such as Internet Explorer) with the file manager (such as Windows Ex-plorer) and other functionality (RSS feed manager) all into one tool This lets you use one program to manage your local file system and web information seeking in one self contained package

Since many people are now upgrad-ing or migrating to newer more powerful PC systems today the next tool demon-strated Spearit Move Me 25 is a natural for minimizing the trouble of shifting to a new system It moves application programs configuration settings and data from an old computer to a new computer The elements moved are completely under your control This greatly reduces the pain of having to set up your new system all over again to get it

set up just the way you like it The program features an Exclude capability to mark pro-grams that you do not wish to move to your new system It also allows you to de-install old programs thereby cleaning up your systems This program is licensed to one computer the source machine It moves in-formation from the source system to another machine which is running the same version or a newer version of Windows It does not move to an older version of Windows than the one on the source system

Gene next talked about security prod-ucts from White Canyon Software My Password Vault is a program that allows you to consolidate all your passwords into one encrypted file and just have to remember one password A ldquoCopy and Pasterdquo process makes simple work of the need to use differ-ent passwords for each system Using one password over and over is a serious security hazard Secure Clean is a program that per-forms a selective overwrite of deleted files on your system so they cannot be recovered White Canyon Wipe DriveMedia Wiper is a program that completely obliterates all data on drives and removable media so you can safely discard them or sell or give them to another person Powerful data recovery pro-grams exist that can recover data you have merely ldquodeletedrdquo Wipe Drive allows you to feel confident you have really removed your data from disk drives and removable media (zip drives LS-120 drives tapes CD-RW etc)

Acronis Privacy Expert Suite 80 is a set of security products that help to keep your system free from spyware adware and annoying pop-ups This suite also in-cludes some disk wiping utilities It has an update service with an annual subscription charge

Spearit Associate This is a program that monitors your file associations and prevents them from being hi-jacked by other programs This approach is used to alter your selections at best and run mal-ware at worst

Gene took a minute to tell us about his training CD-ROMrsquos He has two CDrsquos which are instructional videorsquos showing you how to organize you hard disk drive and explains the system backup process and how to set up your backup and recovery process for fast and effective handling

The second part of Genersquos presentation covered Backup strategies and practices The frequency of backup all depends upon on how often your data is changed and what would be the ldquocostrdquo to you of re-entering the data since the last backup A typical scenario would be to backup your data daily and the full system on a weekly or monthly basis depending on how often it changed

CD-ROMrsquos and DVD-ROMrsquos were the new backup medium of choice just a few

years ago These were widely believed to have an archival shelf life of 25 years or more This is coming into serious question in the last year as many disks are failing even before 5 years have elapsed These are no longer a recommended long-term backup medium Cartridge tapes are widely used in the computer industry but are considered too expensive for home use

A new choice has appeared - hard disk drives These are long term becoming cheaper by the day and extremely fast when compared to optical or tape These can take the form of internal storage network storage or external disk drives

A backup strategy can take several forms One can use a file-oriented strategy This requires the operating system to be working in order to recover the data One can use a partition based copy utility This will be faster to write and recover from media It is a bit by bit copy of the original disk partition

Lastly one can use an Imaging pro-gram It can copy data in a full partition format or an incremental approach This is considered the optimal approach to save time and media (and money)

Lastly Gene used Acronis True Image 80 to illustrate the process of using imaging software to backup one of his disk partitions and how to recover files from it This method has the advantage of backing up even Linux disk partitions

Gene Barlow once again provided Utah Blue Chips with a timely topic and an inter-esting evening of computer talk

JulyRenewals

Preston Anderson David Bernhardt

Rick Gregory Stuart Gygi

LeRoy Johnson Jim Roberts

Robert B Stock

Page 11 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

CounterSpy HomeDetect and Protect Yourself Against SpywareDetect and Protect Yourself Against Spyware

Windows Review

Reviewed by Don Nendell

ManufacturerSunbelt Software USA(Americas Asia Pacifi c Rim)101 North Garden AvenueClearwater Florida USA 33755Tel 727-562-0101Tel 888-688-8457Fax 727-562-5199Sales salessunbelt-softwarecomCredit Card Tel 800-336-3166URL httpwwwsunbelt-softwarecom

buycfrnCost $1995 per machine (includes a one year

subscription with updates upgrades and real live human technical support)

Software Supportsupportsunbelt-softwarecom ltor visit

websitegtOn-Line Knowledge Basehttpwwwsunbelt-softwarecomSupport-

HomeOffi cecfrnTel 877-673-1153Minimum System Requirements

Windows 98SEMEXP2KPentium 11 Processor with 64MB24MB Hard Drive SpaceInternet Explorer 5 or Higher

Why choose CounterSpytrade

CounterSpy is a powerful anti-spy-ware tool that detects deletes and pro-tects your personal computer against recurring spyware threats from a broad range of malicious software Sunbelt Software claims ldquoYou can think of it as a lsquospy-wallrsquo that protects you in real-time [with] the best spyware database in the industry and the fast-est scan timesrdquo They go on to state that CounterSpy is the only anti-spyware that gets its regular spyware threat database updates from three different sources 1) Sunbeltrsquos own Spyware Research Team 2) CounterSpy users that are volunteer members of Counterspyrsquos ThreatNet Community and from 3) Microsoftrsquos Spyware Research Group

In order to effectively fi ght spyware you need a ldquocounterspyrdquo they say And possibly by sheer coincidence() their fl agship consumer product CounterSpy just might seem to fi ll that bill nicely now wouldnrsquot it

Note There are two versions of CounterSpy currently available through Sunbelt Software 1) CounterSpy for home users that works to protect a single computer and 2) CounterSpy Enter-prise which protects computers across an entire network Both can be ordered through their website and downloaded over an Internet connection which will allow you to have advanced protection installed and running on your PC within just a few minutes And also worthy of note each product comes with one yearrsquos worth of free maintenance upgrades and live tech support

According to PC World Counter-Spy has the best spyware database in the industry It was chosen as both PC WORLD ldquoWORLD CLASS 2005rdquo and ldquo2005 BEST BUYrdquo

Counterspy Flexibility

Spyware is a vicious fast-growing malig-nancy that can no longer be ignored It used to be that viruses received more public-ity than spyware because viruses move over the In-ternet so quickly throughout the world But Spyware is actually the more dangerous of the two and sadly the world is only just now really waking up to this plague Herersquos the bottom line If you value your per-sonal data at all - and protecting that data is of any importance to you - then you absolutely must repeat must use current and up-to-date versions of 1) An anti-virus software 2) A fi rewall and equally as importantly 3) An anti-spyware utility

The onset of any perceived trouble can be insidious and may actually be unobserved but when your computer fi nally does slow down or seems ultra-sluggish or it may seem like it has sud-

denly become possessed by pop-up ad-vertisements et al odds are excellent that spyware has infiltrated your system Anti-spyware utilities like CounterSpy will identify spyware on your hard disk help you remove it and protect your computer against new infections CounterSpy allows users to remove or even keep if desired spyware programs andor utilities on a case-by-case basis

More CounterSpy Defense Mechanisms

CounterSpy searches for 36 catego-ries of spyware Some examples are Tro-jans spyware adware malware hacker tools keyloggers and hijacker compo-nents Without anti-spyware utilities like CounterSpy spyware can lurk in the background waiting to be triggered by a user When triggered the spyware can steal passwords fi nancial data and personal information and literally anything it wants It can also open up backdoor entrances that hackers can use to manipulate your computer directly Which brings us face-to-face with my biggest problem and greatest fear of any of the spyware imfection(s)

Page 12 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

KeyloggersSunbelt Software warns us ldquoIf you

think spyware is just a nuisance then you are not familiar with the keylogger pro-grams that have made their way from the Internet to many peoplersquos home comput-ers in the last few years When people think about spyware they usually envi-sion those programs that lurk behind the scenes and post popup advertisements while users surf the Internet This type of spyware is annoying but keylogger spyware is downright dangerous

ldquoKeylogger spyware monitors every stroke of the keyboard you make on your computer That information is transmit-ted back to the spyware creator where hackers can analyze keystrokes for any information that they can use for nefarious purposes Passwords credit card numbers banking information and much more can be found buried within keylogger messages back to its creatorrdquo

Such is the case with the Desktop computer I am presently using to re-view CounterSpy In my initial Coun-terSpy scan it turned up four (4) pieces of spyware including two (2) very much dreaded Commercial Keyloggers embed-ded somewhere This is really scary to me personally as I have installed on this PC alone No-Adware Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE Personal SpywareBlaster Pandarsquos Platinum 2005 Internet Suite (with over 1058K virus signatures identified and protecting me with TruPrevent (See also my TruPrevent review in BCM June 2005 issue archives ltwwwucsorggt)) and a separate P2P LAN firewall manned

by IPCop Whorsquoda thunk itCaveat I must truthfully admit how-

ever that I hadnrsquot run any of the spyware programs for approximately 30 days - for some unknown reason Shame on me for being so slothful and careless

Also I had originally intended to run Spy Sweeper on this machine too but actually got started on this review of CounterSpy before I got to that point Pretty wide open here Irsquod say But then all-in-all it still is really surprising to me to come up with such a sick computer so fast Live and learn they say But then again isnrsquot that why I am supposedly do-ing these spyware reviews anyway - to help everybody out there in La-La land plus moi Truthfully if this opens even one eye and saves many others it will have been well worth the effort Silently I pray however it will make a big differ-ence to a great many persons

Heavens ldquoPhysician Heal Thyselfrdquo I keep scolding myself

Stopping Keylogger Spyware

The only way to stop keylogger (or any other) spyware is by installing (and m a i n t a i n i n g AND USING) a high-quality anti-spyware program in your PC Anti-spyware programs scan your hard

drive for spyware signatures buried deep within pro-gram files or hid-den amongst harm-less files on your hard drive Sunbelt Software advises us ldquoNo spyware is safe if you are running top-notch anti-spyware softwarerdquo ldquoCounterSpyrdquo they say - No doubt about it I would have to agree whole-

heartedly Remember ldquoHappiness is a working computerrdquo I keep saying Now I have a whole slew of spyware programs to guard my premises and perimeters Whew

Not Surprisingly - Enter Organized CyberCrime Stage Right and Left

Sunbelt Software warns us ldquoOr-ganized cybercrime has become one of the biggest challenges facing companies that specialize in protecting computers from viruses spyware and Trojans At one time the viruses that spread across the Internet were created by individuals who were more interested in notoriety than they were in crime Todayrsquos viruses are of a different breed Criminals have now realized that viruses can be used for much more than proving computer development skills Organized criminals can now create networks of lsquobotsrsquo that can be installed on vulnerable PCs and remotely controlled The word lsquobotrsquo re-ally means a personal computer owned by an unsuspecting home user that is now in reality owned by a hacker and can be used for their criminal goals Recent data shows that the number of IP addresses associated with lsquobotrsquo net-works has increased by more than 1000 percent in just one yearrdquo

It can happen to you me and any and everybody Actually no one is safe For example take a gander at this Herersquos the latest update on the subject of spyware By now we all are quite fa-miliar with The Salt Lake Tribune Sat-urday June 18 2005 front page story (plus every newspaper TV newscast

Page 13 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

etc in the world) which highlighted ldquoMillions at risk as data are hacked Cardholders Security is breached at a transaction company fraud could affect bank customersrdquo And on June 20 2005 at MSNBCcom ldquo40 million credit cards exposedrdquo as reported by Bob Sullivan who wrote ldquoMasterCard spokeswoman Sharon Gamsin said a computer virus was not to blame for the data theft She said she couldnrsquot provide details of how the systems were hacked but did say that lsquoan unauthorized entity put a spe-cific code into CardSystemsrsquo networkrsquo enabling the person or group to gain ac-cess to the datardquo Which was also duti-fully reported in InformationWeek June 20 2005 News Scan p 12 ldquo One gets the nagging feeling We havenrsquot yet seen the worst of itrdquo Amen

Fighting Organized CyberCrime and Spyware

To fight organized cybercrime and spyware both companies and individu-als need to utilize the best anti-virus and anti-malware utilities available Visit Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy Documents web site to learn more on how we can all get together to fight this crime wave Their CounterSpy Docu-ments URL is lthttpwwwsunbelt-softwarecomCounterSpy-docscfmgt Also please visit their Resource Li-brary for additional information on spyware and ldquoSpyware in the Newsrdquo The Resource Library URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomresource_librarycfmgt

Critically Important Visit Sun-belt Softwarersquos ThreatNet web site to actively participate in the spyware fight The ThreatNet URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomthreatnetcfmgt

So Whatrsquos It All About AlfieA few outside review comments are

in order here

ldquoSpyware Sneaks InIn a nationally-representative sur-

vey of more than 2000 households with at-home Internet access CR found that 36 percent reported that their home page had been changed - a common symptom of spyware Spyware isnrsquot a single type of software The term cov-ers a diverse range of applications Like spam spyware is often used by third-party marketers associated with reputable companies whose products they are hawking To avoid spyware Consumer Reports recommends that consumers

- Download and install software only from trusted online sources

- Adjust the Web browserrsquos security settings to the medium or high level

- Use updated antispyware software to scan the hard drive regularlyrdquo- Consumer Reports Consumer Reports Investigates How to Protect against Spam Spyware and Phishing Report Includes Survey Results Software Rat-ings and Tips to Avoid Online Hazards Such as ID Theft dated 892004

ldquoCounterSpy had the highest detec-tion rate in our tests The most effective scanner - CounterSpy - was also the fast-est taking only a minute to perform a complete scan of a system with 27 GB of data Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy proved the most capable of the bunch finding and stopping 93 percent of all the running processes created by our 45 test programsrdquo- PCWorld April 2005

Last HoorayCounterSpy has a couple more

features up their sleeves that are really ldquoKnock-Your-Socks-Offrdquo items System Tools - Secure File Eraser and System Tools - My PC Checkup The graphics tell it like it is

Overall Conclusion

Very seriously I have not actually intended for these two (2) BCM spyware reviews this month to be a ldquoWinner Take Allrdquo comparison of two (2) great spyware programs CounterSpy and Spy Sweep-er They are both simply ldquoAbsolutely Superiorrdquo companies and programs

and they deserve to be evaluated each on their own merits and by each and everyone of you out there individually They both are very inexpensive and they each have trialware downloads so you have absolutely nothing to lose by try-ing both of them Besides yoursquoll get a ldquosqueaky cleanrdquo PC out of the deal at least once in this or any other of your lifetimesFYI For further clarification purposes I would also like to add a comment from an article dated July 29 2004 I ran across on eWeekcom entitled SpyAdware The New Real Security Problem by Larry Seltzer He writes ldquoThere are a large number of programs to detect and remove the much larger number of attacks Since some of the best ones are free (asking for donations) it may be a good idea to run more than one rdquo To which I would further add ldquoThe lsquofreersquo ones donrsquot get all the dirt out either So lsquoGo for Brokersquo Getrsquoem all and then for sure be surerdquo

I am truly beholden to both com-panies for helping me to ldquoget the word out there as best I canrdquo about spyware spyware problems pitfalls and dangers and especially their own wonderful spy-ware programs Each company is doing an outstandingly admirable job in per-forming its part in the new now and en-suing battles of WWIII The CyberWar Thank you sincerely from the bottom of my heart Job ldquoWell Donerdquo

Talk about a powerhouse Internet-bound PC Irsquove got it all now ldquoHappi-ness Happiness Happinessrdquo

Ciao

Page 14 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Presidents CornerThoughts on Member Recruitment

To encourage word-of-mouth recruitment of new members an incentivereward program may be used One incentive would be the waiv-ing of membership dues for one year of any member who recruits a new paid membership Suggested guidelines include a limit of one waiver per year no waiver of multiple years for multiple new memberships and some method of formally attributing credit for the new membership

Use of flyers at community events could raise awareness of the organiza-tion Key features of the flyer are use of the word ldquofreerdquo ldquono experience neces-saryrdquo and no mention of any need for commitment such as annual member-ship dues A related method using post-ers would combine these features with artwork to catch a personrsquos attention and multicolored ink on heavy stock Plaster-ing an area within a half-hour drive of the meeting location in the days prior to a meeting requires coordination of members to come up with the most ef-fective and efficient advertising

Some organizations have ldquoopen housesrdquo to attract new members One variation on that for a computer group would be to hold ldquoComputer Tune-Upsrdquo for free The tune-ups could include virus and spyware scans disk defragmentation and perhaps even a selective backup to CD-R Whether these tune-ups could be held at com-munity events probably depends on the personal contacts available via current members

Expand the use of free newspaper and magazine items to promote these ldquoTune-Upsrdquo Creation of a press release both printed and electronic for distri-bution to calendar editors in a timely manner is essential Local community radio stations often provide assistance with the creation of Public Service An-nouncements and may reach an entirely new audience Local community access cable channels sometimes have scroll-ing calendars of local events Whether assistance with creation of a promo-tional video or 15-minute infomercial is available probably depends on the

local franchise agreement Lawn signs at high traffic locations with the monthly program feature may be effective if the message is concise enough to be read quickly from a distance

All of these suggestions have com-mon requirements Consistency Dedi-cation and Lots of Hard Work All mem-bers must be involved in these activities not just the Board or a single volunteer Itrsquos a case of many hands making light work The purpose of this advertising is to create awareness and kindle interest It requires Repetition and Saturation to build credibility and the appearance of solidarity

Although a Board may be able to oversee this operation a Recruiting Coordinator is strongly recommended This person would also maintain the list of potential members or the ldquoMaster Re-cruiting Listrdquo

My thanks to Pete Wex and Chris Pinkham for the articles from which these suggestions were adapted

-- Rick Gregory 2 June 2005

Mail to Membership Secretary PO Box 510811 SLC Utah 84151

MEMBERSHIP REGISTRATION New Renewal Update Mem ________ Name___________________________________________ Address_________________________________________ Home Phone (____)_________________________________________________________ Work Phone (____)__________ City_____________________State______Zip___________

E-Mail_Home_______________________________________________ E-Mail_Work________________________________________________Would you like to have E-mail about coming UCS user events Yes___ No____ If yes send to____________ Please enroll me with the Utah Computer Society Inc (Utah Blue Chips) PCUG as one of the below membership categories Business ($35)_____ Personal ($25)_______ Student ($10)_______ Senior Center ($10)_____ Family Member ($10) ____ Does not include magazine

Signature____________________________________ Date_______________ Check _________Cash______

Visa ____________________ Exp Date________MasterCharge __________________ Exp Date________

SIGsUnion Bldg

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Blue Chips mdash Utahrsquos Computer Guide in the 21st Century

Utah Blue Chips Calendar July August 2005

ADOBE

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

General Meeting

MagazineDeadline

U of U700pm

PICNIC

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Page 3: s Presentation Picnic in the Parks Presentation Picnic in the Park R.S.V.P. on our Website: UCS.ORG Page 2 Blue Chips Magazine —July 2005 y liff illward, ditor cliffm@xmission.com

Page 3 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Blue Chips Magazine

Magazine Staff

Editor mdash Cliff Millward 955-9633Review Program Liaison mdash James Alexander 250-2269Review Product Editor mdash Donna Nendell 565-9594 Review EditorProduct Recruiter mdash Don Nendell 565-9594 Photography mdash LeRoy JohnsonProof Reader mdash Larry Lamph Doug Jackson

Advertising Rates

Ad costs 1 month 3 months 6 months 12 months2 Page Spread $150 $400 $700 $1200Full Page $100 $275 $500 $900Half Page $50 $130 $250 $450Quarter Page $25 $70 $130 $225Business Card $15 $30 $60 $120

Full page size is 71frasl2 x 10 inches All other page sizes are based on a 7 x 10 inch page in order to conform to editorial style Half-page ads may be 7 x 5 inches or 31frasl2 x 10 inches Quarter-page ads are 31frasl2 x 5 inches Business card ads are 31frasl2 x 21frasl2 inches

Classified Advertising Utah Blue Chips members may place personal classified ads at no charge Maximum ad size is 7 lines 35 characters per line

Submissions Members are encouraged to submit text articles for pub li ca tion in ASCII text only Photos in TIF or JPG format only Line graphics tables in almost any vector or TIF format Do not imbed graphics or tables in text files All articles must be received by the 15th of the month preceding the month of publication All articles become the property of the Utah Computer Society and by submitting an article the author gives per mis sion for the Blue Chips Magazine Staff to edit the submission The author also gives permission for republication in other users groupsrsquo communications

Permission to Copy Permission is granted to other nonprofit PC user groups to reproduce any article published in this newsletter provided credit is given Blue Chips Mag a zine and the author (s) of the reproduced materials Re print ed articles are subject to the terms of their respective copyright holders

ldquoUtahrsquos Award Winning Pub li ca tionrdquo

Charter Member of theAssociation of PC User Groups

MONTHLY MEETING LOCATION2nd Wednesday of every month

University of UtahEngineering amp Mines Classroom Bldg

Room 104 700 pm

Officers and Trustees Eve Phone E-mailPresident Rick Gregory 582-7783 rfggtemailnetVice President Sean Wolsey 489-3819 seanwucsorgSecretary Lowell Kenedy 278-3035 lkenedynetworldcomTreasurer John Witzel 296-1390 witzeljnetscapenetStuart Gygi 576-1891 sgygixmissioncom Frank Herriott 943-7765 frank1pcstarnetcomDoug Jackson 322-2337 cjackson104hotmailcomLeRoy Johnson 581-1348 leroyjohnson2comcastnetLarry Lamph 571-2908 larrylynnsisnacom

InformationPersons or companies may join or renew at the meeting or by sending a check payable to the Utah Computer Society to

Utah Computer SocietyMembership SecretaryPO Box 510811Salt Lake City UT 84151

Individual memberships are $25year Business Memberships are $3500 a yearCorporate sponsorships are available at two levels Corporate Sponsors enjoy all benefits of mem ber ship including multiple individual membership and prepaid advertising coverage Contact a Board Member for more information $10year memberships without the magazine are available for students other family and Senior Citizen Center members

Other important informationMeeting Information httpwwwucsorgGroup Business (James Alexander) 250-2269Magazine (Cliff Millward) 955-9633Program Coordinator (James Alexander) 250-2269Web Site httpwwwucsorgWebMaster 272-8949Membership (evenings) (Bob) 262-6045

Donrsquot Miss the Picnic

This Month

Page 4 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Windows ReviewSpy Sweeper 40Block Spyware to Your ComputerReviewed by Don Nendell

ManufacturerWebroot Software IncPO Box 198162560 55th StreetBoulder Colorado 80308-2816 USAPh Toll Free (800) 7729383Web Site lthttpwwwwebrootcomgtFAX (303) 4423846 Outside the USA +1 (303) 4423823E-mail Tech Support lthttp

wwwwebrootcomsupportgtCorporate Sales amp SupportPh (800) 8708102One year of updates and support for only

$2995

Minimum System RequirementsWindows 98SE 2K ME or XP300 Mhz Processor25 MB Hard Drive SpaceSupports Internet Explorer

Last month I did a very favorable re-view on Pandarsquos TruPrevent Personal 2005 (See June 2005 UBC Magazine Archives at ltwwwucsorggt) where I wrote

ldquoSome Opening lsquoEye-Openingrsquo Thoughts on the Subject [of Spyware]

Almost everyone has anti-virus and anti-spyware software installed on their PC network and ISP or they definitely should Shame on anyone if they havenrsquot Regard-less malicious software viruses spyware and hacker attempts continue to slip through all too easily Why Why indeedrdquo

This month through the auspices of Webroot and their first quarterly STATE OF SPYWARE Q1 2005 report to the world I will share with you their phenomenally ac-curate and timely answer to my above pro-posed question ldquoWhy indeedrdquo I strongly suggest you get ldquoand share with everyonerdquo your own FREE copy of this fabulous eye-opening 75-page expose immediately if not sooner You can get it by going to lthttpwwwwebrootcomstateofspywaregt It is chocked full of startling facts of the - all-to-soon to reach your computer - up and coming invasion and full-blown epidemic (my words) of insidious Spyware A great many of those facts I share with you herein and now

I met the wonderful folks of Webroot at the Networld + Interop 2005 ShowStoppers Media event and boy am I glad I did - I think you will be too Later in the review (before I install Spy Sweeper) I want to go to their web site with this very machine (a Toshiba Satellite A75-S229 connected to the Internet through my ever-faithful D-Link WiFi Ac-

cess Point) while sitting comfortably in my living room and test it with their voluntary Webroot Consumer SpyAudit FYI My Lap-top has only Pandarsquos wonderful Platinum 2005 Internet Security Suite installed on it This machine will thenceforth become another statistic for their quarterly report information gathering through their Spy-Audit program and subsequent reporting Very Interesting But first things first

STATE OF SPYWARE Q1 2005 Re-port (SOS)

The report is a concise hard-hitting eye-opening in-depth review and analysis of the impact of spyware adware and unwanted software on consumers and corporations Here are a few important extracts

ldquoIn the late winter and early spring of 2004 a series of events hastened the public awareness of spyware as a clear and present danger to both consumers and enterprises In February the New York Times used its editorial page to call for legislation against an emerging software threat called spyware In March PC Magazine published the first comprehensive overview of anti-spyware software and featured the growing scourge on its cover pulling this new security issue out of the chat rooms and into the bright light of mainstream technology media Finally in April the Federal Trade Commission hosted a workshop on spyware attracting industry leaders opinion makers and even apologists to Washington to debate the legislative impli-cations of tiny pieces of software infiltrating unwitting computers and transmitting data to third parties without the consent of the informationrsquos owner Spyware had officially arrived

By yearrsquos end we knew that 90 of consumer computers had some form of spyware Rest assured that if 2004 was the year we discovered spyware then in 2005 we are going to find out how hard it is to beat But we can also be sure that the more we all know[] the better equipped we are to fight [what] we know we have ahead of usrdquo

During Q1 2005 the Webroot SpyAudit found more than 25 instances of spyware in each ldquoinfected consumer machinerdquo they tested With cookies excluded the number of infections averaged out at 72 per machine This is a significant statistic as it actually turns out because the subtle distinctions between the various forms of spyware are lost on most consumers and businesses

By now we need a clear definition of what we mean by ldquospywarerdquo because cur-rently the term spyware is broken up into

four (4) broad categories System Mon-itors Trojan H o r s e s Adware and Cookies The SOS report obligingly de-fines spyware thusly

ldquo The definition of spyware is all programs install-ing themselves onto a userrsquos computer by stealth subterfuge andor social engineer-ing and whose purpose is to redirect a userrsquos activities or record those activities in a way that reduces a userrsquos privacy protection or peace of mind Adware is often labeled as a subcategory of spyware mainly due to the overt ways that adware vendors initially used to install their software on end userrsquos ma-chines with little regard for the user As the spyware definition debate heats up several industry groups including one sponsored by the Center for Democracy and Technology are forming to address this issuerdquo

The State of Spyware 2005The SOS reports that an annual $2

Billion(US) - and growing rapidly - industry feeds off spyware infestations 2004 appears to be the year that concerns over spyware began to exceed anxiety over any other cyber security threat Stories of lost data and stolen accounts became more preva-lent as more hackers sought quick profit And these events are not anomalies SOS reports The SOS goes on to tell us that in Q4 2004 alone in more than 90 percent of the Webroot Consumer SpyAudit scans they uncovered at least one instance of the four major categories for which it scanned At the same time the National Cyber Secu-rity Alliance and AOL found that 89 percent of participants had no idea that they even had spyware on their PC The SOS goes on to warn us ldquo it is

Page 5 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

clear that the problem of spyware is neither abating nor is its impact well understood by PC users [and then goes on to add] the first quarter of 2005 saw an increase in high-severity security incidents involving spywarerdquo

And right on cue as if the SOS was portending such a dark future ahead of us on June 20 2005 we were shocked with the ldquo40 million credit cards exposedrdquo headlines on MSNBCcom This breach of secu-rity with spyware most certainly at its core will most certainly join the vaunted pages of The Guinness Book of Records itrsquos that big

Note Webroot intends to up-date the SOS quarterly Please visit Webrootrsquos web site to view (and ob-tain) the SOS for yourself

A Few Facts About Spyware1) Spyware programs can be easily

installed on your computer without your knowledge 2) Spyware can result in iden-tity theft data corruption personal profiling and more 3) Your computer can get spyware when you download files view an unsolic-ited email visit Web pages that activate a lsquodrive-by downloadrsquo or via other means 4) 90 of Internet-connected computers are infected with spyware and 5) You can easily remove spyware from your computer with Spy Sweeper Webrootrsquos award-winning spyware protection tool

Now Letrsquos Investigate Spy Sweeper

After quickly and effortlessly loading my award-winning copy of Spy Sweeper 35 letrsquos live dangerously and see whatrsquos out there in the cruel cruel world of spyware ldquoA surfrsquoen we will go A surfrsquoen we will go Hi Ho a dairio a Surfrsquoen we gordquo While out on Webrootrsquos web site you will find ldquoSpy Auditrdquo Simply click on the link ldquoQuickly scan your PC for spyware - Itrsquos freerdquo

How Spy Audit on Their Web Site Works

At no cost or obligation to you Spy Audit will scan your system registry and hard drive space for thousands of known spyware programs Spy Audit will show you what spyware is actually on your system Rest easy it will not remove or modify any files and Spy Audit will take only seconds to run Note Webroot Software respects your privacy - after all thatrsquos their business They say ldquoRunning Spy Audit will not add cookies or harm your computer in any wayrdquo

I followed the directions religiously They were

1 Click the start spy audit button The Download Dialog will open

2 To run a Spy Audit on your computer

now click ldquoRunrdquo or ldquoOpenrdquo To save Spy Au-dit to your computer click ldquoSaverdquoAwk Not expecting anything because I have Pandarsquos Platinum 2005 Internet Security Suite ldquoin-stalledrdquo I got the IE Warning

The Problem That Showed Up On My Laptop

ldquoAdware andor Adware cookies were found on your system

Adware presence indicates a third-party is monitoring your online activities and most often results in increased exposure to adver-tising and pop-up ads

The presence of adware indicates a vul-nerability to infection and the risk of more devastating consequences in the futurerdquo

Reading from the Spyware Risk Meter I Got

ldquoYour risk assessment is calculated us-ing the following formula based on potential consequences and frequency of occurrence across all users

1 or more adware cookies = Low Risk Risk rating increases within low category with each additional adware cookie The presence of any spyware illustrates vulner-ability to infection

1 or more adware programs = Medium Risk Adware is moderately intrusive and not as pervasive as adware cookies Infec-tion is generally associated with more high-risk online activities Risk rating increases within medium category with each additional adware identified

1 or more Trojans or System Monitors = High Risk These are the most malicious forms of spyware and can cause catastrophic consequences They should be removed im-mediatelyrdquo

Note I never did actually find out what the offending adware program was seems I had a little trouble with the Java Script download

Benefits of Spy Sweeper Sales Speak

1) Better Com-puter PerformanceSpyware can cause inferior

computer performance slower internet con-nections and strange behavior One quick sweep by Spy Sweeper returns your PC to normal

2) Fewer Annoying Pop-up AdsSpyware is notorious for inundating comput-

er users with pop-up ads Spy Sweeper eliminates these programs to let you enjoy surfing the web again

3) Greater Personal PrivacyOnce spyware gets on your machine it can track your computer activities putting your personal privacy at risk Spy Sweeper lets you wipe out these programs and files so you enjoy the privacy you deserve

4) Increased PC Security Some spyware is used to steal personal data including credit card data social security numbers account numbers and more Spy Sweeper helps protect

you from fraud and identify theft by finding and removing these malicious programs

Webroot Spy Sweeper Specifics1) Webroot Spy Sweeper safeguards your

identity and restores system performance through fast smart and powerful anti-spy-ware protection 2) Comprehensive sweeps eliminate spyware in minutes 3) Smart shields conveniently block spyware before it installs on your PC 4) One-of-a-kind research system uncovers spyware threats faster for better protection 5) Unparalleled protection with the most frequently updated threat database and 6) 30-day satisfaction guarantee - no questions asked

And New in Webroot Spy Sweeper 40

FYI The new changes in the brand new Spy Sweeper 40 are 1) Enhanced scan engine for sweeps that are up to 4-times faster 2) Automated definition downloads for better protection 3) Improved schedul-ing features for greater flexibility and 4) New Smart Shields for increased blocking protection

So I downloaded the 40 upgrade and then went through the complete process once again just to see what would show up

Awk Not actually expecting any-thing once again and now because I have both Pandarsquos Platinum 2005 In-ternet Security Suite and Spy Sweeper 40 ldquoinstalledrdquo I got the ominous IE Warning

Page 6 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

(Ed Note The above is what we found on Cliffrsquos computer and he has AdAware SpyBot and SpyWare Blaster installed) AWK (-(

So Whatrsquos It All About AlfieHaving been very graphically shown

that just as all Virus protection programs

do not eliminate every known virus infection - some do get through the net - so it seems the parallel runs equally true with Spyware programs

Ever so confident that I was completely protected with my precious Panda Platinum 2005 Internet Security Suite I got a very rude shock when I saw that some adware infection

was still in there even up until I upgraded Spy Sweeper to the new 40 version Granted the number of ldquoTracesrdquo ndash Spy Sweeper ldquospy-warerdquo footprints - increased from 36K to 96K with the upgrade to 40 I was still shocked never-the-less Boy I still am I can truthfully share with you ldquoAm I ever glad I have both programs on my Laptop now as well as on all my other (test) computers in my home P2P network toordquo -

In conclusionldquoBy the end of the year spyware pro-

grams will triple in number put Firefox in their sights and turn to Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to distribute key loggers and ad spawnersrdquo predicts Richard Stien-non Director of Threat Research at Webroot Software Inc

Thanks Webroot for a real eye-opening I can only sincerely hope this review will be seen - and seriously be taken to heart - by many other such fortunate readers

Ciao

Page 9 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Minutes from June amp May Meeting Memoranda

The June meeting was called to order by President Rick Gregory

Announcements and Open Access President Gregory began the announce-

ments by talking about the big change by Apple moving to use Intel chips in their hardware Evidently the Power PC chip was not available in the quantities that allowed Apple to meet the demand for their desktops and portable equipment

E911 has been approved by the FCC as a requirement for VoIP This is generally seen as a move by the mainstream phone com-panies to roadblock the movement of their customers to a newer phone technology It requires that VoIP providers develop a way of providing the callers location to a 911 system before they can offer service

Microsoft is supposed to roll out their new Software Update Service this month It has the acronym of WSUS

The Utah Computer Society Summer Picnic is scheduled for July 13 in Murray Park at the same pavilion we have used the last three years Please go to the UCS website and RSVP The picnic is free but donations will be accepted to help defray costs

Don Nendell talked about a free offer-ing he arranged for the members of UCS Makau Corporation offers training software to the public on a wide variety of topics Don arranged for members in attendance to re-ceive a card that would allow the bearer to download and run one training program from their library

Don also talked about a program called Search Automator which would be shown to members in the main presentation later that evening

Main PresentationThe program tonight is Useful Web

Sites as identified and presented by several members Sean Wolsey Frank Herriott Rick Gregory and Larry Lamph

The URLrsquos of the web sites to be talked about (and several others) were on a sheet passed out to attendees

Sean began by talking about Gmail This is a free mail service offered by Google It is still in a Beta mode so that memberships are by referral only at this time The amazing thing is that currently they are offering over two Gigabytes of free storage The principal unique factor is that you do not create sub-folders for mail categories but use Googlersquos search technology on your content to select messages when you need to categorize your messages and find previous content It has a good spam filter Attachments are allowed

to be up 10 MB in sizeSean showed a free spyware control pro-

gram from wwwmlinnet It is called Startup Control Panel 28 It has many components that allow you to control your computer sys-tem and keep it clean of spyware and secure in operation

Lastly Sean showed the AnalogXcom website This is a site that has many free offerings There are currently 86 files and programs in the areas of Music Network Programming System and MP3 music files There are too many to list Stop by and look them over The price is right and so is the quality

Next Frank Herriott (that would be me) showed a few of his favorite web sites They are UtahCommuterLinkcom and the NOAA graphical weather forecasts site Commuting to Park City each day means a lot of time on the Interstates This website allows one to see the roads read of closures obtain current ac-cident information and travel time estimates As well I can see what Parleyrsquos Summit looks like before I ever leave my home or office The NOAA graphical forecasts are a differ-ent way of looking at weather forecasts and complement the regular weathercast infor-mation for me

Next I showed two sites that Don Nendell requested of me The first SearchAutomatorcom is home to a new search engine that reminds me of the meta-search engines that Mike Crawford showed to UCS This program takes that idea and really improves on it They have made a real powerful search engine that searches the mainstream search engines (Google Al-tavista Yahoo and so on) They arrange the results and allow you to select from catego-ries that group the search results in areas of html pages documents images sound clips and so on This is a really powerful method of searching the web and winnowing out the chaff Lastly we visited the Makau training site This was to show off the types of training materials they had to offer

UCS President Rick Gregory showed the Craigslist website to the group It started in 1995 in the Bay area and is now localized to most of the large cities in the US It became available for Salt Lake in September 2004 It is a very rich and complete listing of services such as jobs events wishlists classifieds public services and various other topics It re-ally defies a simple concise description Check it out at wwwsaltlakecitycraigslistorg

Larry Lamph talked about several of his favorite sites First was Salt Lake gas prices (wwwsaltlakegaspricescom) In brief it is a listing of the cheapest (and

highest) places to buy gas and diesel in the Salt Lake metro area You can also link to other areas in case you are traveling and want to gas up inexpensively on the road Larry next showed his favorite weather site wwwweathercom which features many different pieces of weather info Larry also quickly showed sites for Ghost Towns of Utah UFO Hunters of Utah DriverZone (for computer hardware drivers) Repair Clinic (for repair if just about anything) and TerraServercom which features pictures of the earth from space This last service has pictures of your neighborhood so you can see what your house (or your neighborrsquos or any street address) looks like

The May meeting was called to order by President Rick Gregory

Announcements and Open Access The meeting began with a message from

President Gregory about Freecycle and Salt Lake Recycle These two organizations both work to exchange or giveaway items you no longer want but do not wish to discard Search for them in Google to find out more

COMDEX has been cancelled for the Fall of 2005 This is the second year without a COMDEX show Show organizers say they are going to offer a show in 2006

Rick said that Microsoftrsquos Internet Explorer version 70 beta is to be released this summer Rick also talked about the recent security flaws in the new browser from Mozilla called Firefox Firefox has been getting patched immediately upon the disclosure of these security bugs

Rick reminded users again about the office supply store rebate programs Most purchases at Office Max Office Depot and Staples return a portion of the cost of the goods to the Utah Computer Society This is an easy way for members to support Utah Blue Chips Contact President Gregory if you have questions about the program

Wi-Max was discussed briefly It is a newer implementation of Wireless Network-ing which operates in the 24 GHz band at roughly twice the speed of 8211G or 108 megabits per second

SIGrsquos - UCS members should think about their SIG interests and pass them along to the UCS Board members At the April SUG meetings only the presenters showed up for the meetings If this effort is to be continued then members need to come to the meetings Needless to say it is discouraging for the presenters to prepare the meeting and then have no one show up for the session

Page 10 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Do you shop at Office Depot Office Max or

StaplesIf so use the following numbers for Blue Chips

to receive credit for your purchases

Office Depot Advantage1100058898

OfficeMax MaxPerks1026-77099

Staples Business Rewards34567 91452

Main PresentationGene Barlow of User Group Relations

(wwwusergroupstorecom) and his wife Linda came to present to the Utah Blue Chips Gene said that although he speaks to over one hundred user groups per year the Utah Computer Society feels like his ldquohome user grouprdquo to him The products that Gene talked about are available at his web site listed above at a discount to user group members

Gene Barlow and Dave Whittle who spoke to Utah Blue Chips ear-lier this year both have products listed at wwwusergroupstorecom Gene has product in the areas of computer organization secu-rity and backup Dave Whittle lists products for photo and video editing text and office editing and accessories for computers and mobile phones

Gene began with the Disk Director Suite 90 a tool to help you organize your hard disk drive(s) It has similar functionality to Partition Magic Gene feels that Disk Director has become a better and more useful product

Optimal Desktop Pro 40 is a powerful tool that combines the functions of a web browser (such as Internet Explorer) with the file manager (such as Windows Ex-plorer) and other functionality (RSS feed manager) all into one tool This lets you use one program to manage your local file system and web information seeking in one self contained package

Since many people are now upgrad-ing or migrating to newer more powerful PC systems today the next tool demon-strated Spearit Move Me 25 is a natural for minimizing the trouble of shifting to a new system It moves application programs configuration settings and data from an old computer to a new computer The elements moved are completely under your control This greatly reduces the pain of having to set up your new system all over again to get it

set up just the way you like it The program features an Exclude capability to mark pro-grams that you do not wish to move to your new system It also allows you to de-install old programs thereby cleaning up your systems This program is licensed to one computer the source machine It moves in-formation from the source system to another machine which is running the same version or a newer version of Windows It does not move to an older version of Windows than the one on the source system

Gene next talked about security prod-ucts from White Canyon Software My Password Vault is a program that allows you to consolidate all your passwords into one encrypted file and just have to remember one password A ldquoCopy and Pasterdquo process makes simple work of the need to use differ-ent passwords for each system Using one password over and over is a serious security hazard Secure Clean is a program that per-forms a selective overwrite of deleted files on your system so they cannot be recovered White Canyon Wipe DriveMedia Wiper is a program that completely obliterates all data on drives and removable media so you can safely discard them or sell or give them to another person Powerful data recovery pro-grams exist that can recover data you have merely ldquodeletedrdquo Wipe Drive allows you to feel confident you have really removed your data from disk drives and removable media (zip drives LS-120 drives tapes CD-RW etc)

Acronis Privacy Expert Suite 80 is a set of security products that help to keep your system free from spyware adware and annoying pop-ups This suite also in-cludes some disk wiping utilities It has an update service with an annual subscription charge

Spearit Associate This is a program that monitors your file associations and prevents them from being hi-jacked by other programs This approach is used to alter your selections at best and run mal-ware at worst

Gene took a minute to tell us about his training CD-ROMrsquos He has two CDrsquos which are instructional videorsquos showing you how to organize you hard disk drive and explains the system backup process and how to set up your backup and recovery process for fast and effective handling

The second part of Genersquos presentation covered Backup strategies and practices The frequency of backup all depends upon on how often your data is changed and what would be the ldquocostrdquo to you of re-entering the data since the last backup A typical scenario would be to backup your data daily and the full system on a weekly or monthly basis depending on how often it changed

CD-ROMrsquos and DVD-ROMrsquos were the new backup medium of choice just a few

years ago These were widely believed to have an archival shelf life of 25 years or more This is coming into serious question in the last year as many disks are failing even before 5 years have elapsed These are no longer a recommended long-term backup medium Cartridge tapes are widely used in the computer industry but are considered too expensive for home use

A new choice has appeared - hard disk drives These are long term becoming cheaper by the day and extremely fast when compared to optical or tape These can take the form of internal storage network storage or external disk drives

A backup strategy can take several forms One can use a file-oriented strategy This requires the operating system to be working in order to recover the data One can use a partition based copy utility This will be faster to write and recover from media It is a bit by bit copy of the original disk partition

Lastly one can use an Imaging pro-gram It can copy data in a full partition format or an incremental approach This is considered the optimal approach to save time and media (and money)

Lastly Gene used Acronis True Image 80 to illustrate the process of using imaging software to backup one of his disk partitions and how to recover files from it This method has the advantage of backing up even Linux disk partitions

Gene Barlow once again provided Utah Blue Chips with a timely topic and an inter-esting evening of computer talk

JulyRenewals

Preston Anderson David Bernhardt

Rick Gregory Stuart Gygi

LeRoy Johnson Jim Roberts

Robert B Stock

Page 11 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

CounterSpy HomeDetect and Protect Yourself Against SpywareDetect and Protect Yourself Against Spyware

Windows Review

Reviewed by Don Nendell

ManufacturerSunbelt Software USA(Americas Asia Pacifi c Rim)101 North Garden AvenueClearwater Florida USA 33755Tel 727-562-0101Tel 888-688-8457Fax 727-562-5199Sales salessunbelt-softwarecomCredit Card Tel 800-336-3166URL httpwwwsunbelt-softwarecom

buycfrnCost $1995 per machine (includes a one year

subscription with updates upgrades and real live human technical support)

Software Supportsupportsunbelt-softwarecom ltor visit

websitegtOn-Line Knowledge Basehttpwwwsunbelt-softwarecomSupport-

HomeOffi cecfrnTel 877-673-1153Minimum System Requirements

Windows 98SEMEXP2KPentium 11 Processor with 64MB24MB Hard Drive SpaceInternet Explorer 5 or Higher

Why choose CounterSpytrade

CounterSpy is a powerful anti-spy-ware tool that detects deletes and pro-tects your personal computer against recurring spyware threats from a broad range of malicious software Sunbelt Software claims ldquoYou can think of it as a lsquospy-wallrsquo that protects you in real-time [with] the best spyware database in the industry and the fast-est scan timesrdquo They go on to state that CounterSpy is the only anti-spyware that gets its regular spyware threat database updates from three different sources 1) Sunbeltrsquos own Spyware Research Team 2) CounterSpy users that are volunteer members of Counterspyrsquos ThreatNet Community and from 3) Microsoftrsquos Spyware Research Group

In order to effectively fi ght spyware you need a ldquocounterspyrdquo they say And possibly by sheer coincidence() their fl agship consumer product CounterSpy just might seem to fi ll that bill nicely now wouldnrsquot it

Note There are two versions of CounterSpy currently available through Sunbelt Software 1) CounterSpy for home users that works to protect a single computer and 2) CounterSpy Enter-prise which protects computers across an entire network Both can be ordered through their website and downloaded over an Internet connection which will allow you to have advanced protection installed and running on your PC within just a few minutes And also worthy of note each product comes with one yearrsquos worth of free maintenance upgrades and live tech support

According to PC World Counter-Spy has the best spyware database in the industry It was chosen as both PC WORLD ldquoWORLD CLASS 2005rdquo and ldquo2005 BEST BUYrdquo

Counterspy Flexibility

Spyware is a vicious fast-growing malig-nancy that can no longer be ignored It used to be that viruses received more public-ity than spyware because viruses move over the In-ternet so quickly throughout the world But Spyware is actually the more dangerous of the two and sadly the world is only just now really waking up to this plague Herersquos the bottom line If you value your per-sonal data at all - and protecting that data is of any importance to you - then you absolutely must repeat must use current and up-to-date versions of 1) An anti-virus software 2) A fi rewall and equally as importantly 3) An anti-spyware utility

The onset of any perceived trouble can be insidious and may actually be unobserved but when your computer fi nally does slow down or seems ultra-sluggish or it may seem like it has sud-

denly become possessed by pop-up ad-vertisements et al odds are excellent that spyware has infiltrated your system Anti-spyware utilities like CounterSpy will identify spyware on your hard disk help you remove it and protect your computer against new infections CounterSpy allows users to remove or even keep if desired spyware programs andor utilities on a case-by-case basis

More CounterSpy Defense Mechanisms

CounterSpy searches for 36 catego-ries of spyware Some examples are Tro-jans spyware adware malware hacker tools keyloggers and hijacker compo-nents Without anti-spyware utilities like CounterSpy spyware can lurk in the background waiting to be triggered by a user When triggered the spyware can steal passwords fi nancial data and personal information and literally anything it wants It can also open up backdoor entrances that hackers can use to manipulate your computer directly Which brings us face-to-face with my biggest problem and greatest fear of any of the spyware imfection(s)

Page 12 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

KeyloggersSunbelt Software warns us ldquoIf you

think spyware is just a nuisance then you are not familiar with the keylogger pro-grams that have made their way from the Internet to many peoplersquos home comput-ers in the last few years When people think about spyware they usually envi-sion those programs that lurk behind the scenes and post popup advertisements while users surf the Internet This type of spyware is annoying but keylogger spyware is downright dangerous

ldquoKeylogger spyware monitors every stroke of the keyboard you make on your computer That information is transmit-ted back to the spyware creator where hackers can analyze keystrokes for any information that they can use for nefarious purposes Passwords credit card numbers banking information and much more can be found buried within keylogger messages back to its creatorrdquo

Such is the case with the Desktop computer I am presently using to re-view CounterSpy In my initial Coun-terSpy scan it turned up four (4) pieces of spyware including two (2) very much dreaded Commercial Keyloggers embed-ded somewhere This is really scary to me personally as I have installed on this PC alone No-Adware Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE Personal SpywareBlaster Pandarsquos Platinum 2005 Internet Suite (with over 1058K virus signatures identified and protecting me with TruPrevent (See also my TruPrevent review in BCM June 2005 issue archives ltwwwucsorggt)) and a separate P2P LAN firewall manned

by IPCop Whorsquoda thunk itCaveat I must truthfully admit how-

ever that I hadnrsquot run any of the spyware programs for approximately 30 days - for some unknown reason Shame on me for being so slothful and careless

Also I had originally intended to run Spy Sweeper on this machine too but actually got started on this review of CounterSpy before I got to that point Pretty wide open here Irsquod say But then all-in-all it still is really surprising to me to come up with such a sick computer so fast Live and learn they say But then again isnrsquot that why I am supposedly do-ing these spyware reviews anyway - to help everybody out there in La-La land plus moi Truthfully if this opens even one eye and saves many others it will have been well worth the effort Silently I pray however it will make a big differ-ence to a great many persons

Heavens ldquoPhysician Heal Thyselfrdquo I keep scolding myself

Stopping Keylogger Spyware

The only way to stop keylogger (or any other) spyware is by installing (and m a i n t a i n i n g AND USING) a high-quality anti-spyware program in your PC Anti-spyware programs scan your hard

drive for spyware signatures buried deep within pro-gram files or hid-den amongst harm-less files on your hard drive Sunbelt Software advises us ldquoNo spyware is safe if you are running top-notch anti-spyware softwarerdquo ldquoCounterSpyrdquo they say - No doubt about it I would have to agree whole-

heartedly Remember ldquoHappiness is a working computerrdquo I keep saying Now I have a whole slew of spyware programs to guard my premises and perimeters Whew

Not Surprisingly - Enter Organized CyberCrime Stage Right and Left

Sunbelt Software warns us ldquoOr-ganized cybercrime has become one of the biggest challenges facing companies that specialize in protecting computers from viruses spyware and Trojans At one time the viruses that spread across the Internet were created by individuals who were more interested in notoriety than they were in crime Todayrsquos viruses are of a different breed Criminals have now realized that viruses can be used for much more than proving computer development skills Organized criminals can now create networks of lsquobotsrsquo that can be installed on vulnerable PCs and remotely controlled The word lsquobotrsquo re-ally means a personal computer owned by an unsuspecting home user that is now in reality owned by a hacker and can be used for their criminal goals Recent data shows that the number of IP addresses associated with lsquobotrsquo net-works has increased by more than 1000 percent in just one yearrdquo

It can happen to you me and any and everybody Actually no one is safe For example take a gander at this Herersquos the latest update on the subject of spyware By now we all are quite fa-miliar with The Salt Lake Tribune Sat-urday June 18 2005 front page story (plus every newspaper TV newscast

Page 13 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

etc in the world) which highlighted ldquoMillions at risk as data are hacked Cardholders Security is breached at a transaction company fraud could affect bank customersrdquo And on June 20 2005 at MSNBCcom ldquo40 million credit cards exposedrdquo as reported by Bob Sullivan who wrote ldquoMasterCard spokeswoman Sharon Gamsin said a computer virus was not to blame for the data theft She said she couldnrsquot provide details of how the systems were hacked but did say that lsquoan unauthorized entity put a spe-cific code into CardSystemsrsquo networkrsquo enabling the person or group to gain ac-cess to the datardquo Which was also duti-fully reported in InformationWeek June 20 2005 News Scan p 12 ldquo One gets the nagging feeling We havenrsquot yet seen the worst of itrdquo Amen

Fighting Organized CyberCrime and Spyware

To fight organized cybercrime and spyware both companies and individu-als need to utilize the best anti-virus and anti-malware utilities available Visit Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy Documents web site to learn more on how we can all get together to fight this crime wave Their CounterSpy Docu-ments URL is lthttpwwwsunbelt-softwarecomCounterSpy-docscfmgt Also please visit their Resource Li-brary for additional information on spyware and ldquoSpyware in the Newsrdquo The Resource Library URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomresource_librarycfmgt

Critically Important Visit Sun-belt Softwarersquos ThreatNet web site to actively participate in the spyware fight The ThreatNet URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomthreatnetcfmgt

So Whatrsquos It All About AlfieA few outside review comments are

in order here

ldquoSpyware Sneaks InIn a nationally-representative sur-

vey of more than 2000 households with at-home Internet access CR found that 36 percent reported that their home page had been changed - a common symptom of spyware Spyware isnrsquot a single type of software The term cov-ers a diverse range of applications Like spam spyware is often used by third-party marketers associated with reputable companies whose products they are hawking To avoid spyware Consumer Reports recommends that consumers

- Download and install software only from trusted online sources

- Adjust the Web browserrsquos security settings to the medium or high level

- Use updated antispyware software to scan the hard drive regularlyrdquo- Consumer Reports Consumer Reports Investigates How to Protect against Spam Spyware and Phishing Report Includes Survey Results Software Rat-ings and Tips to Avoid Online Hazards Such as ID Theft dated 892004

ldquoCounterSpy had the highest detec-tion rate in our tests The most effective scanner - CounterSpy - was also the fast-est taking only a minute to perform a complete scan of a system with 27 GB of data Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy proved the most capable of the bunch finding and stopping 93 percent of all the running processes created by our 45 test programsrdquo- PCWorld April 2005

Last HoorayCounterSpy has a couple more

features up their sleeves that are really ldquoKnock-Your-Socks-Offrdquo items System Tools - Secure File Eraser and System Tools - My PC Checkup The graphics tell it like it is

Overall Conclusion

Very seriously I have not actually intended for these two (2) BCM spyware reviews this month to be a ldquoWinner Take Allrdquo comparison of two (2) great spyware programs CounterSpy and Spy Sweep-er They are both simply ldquoAbsolutely Superiorrdquo companies and programs

and they deserve to be evaluated each on their own merits and by each and everyone of you out there individually They both are very inexpensive and they each have trialware downloads so you have absolutely nothing to lose by try-ing both of them Besides yoursquoll get a ldquosqueaky cleanrdquo PC out of the deal at least once in this or any other of your lifetimesFYI For further clarification purposes I would also like to add a comment from an article dated July 29 2004 I ran across on eWeekcom entitled SpyAdware The New Real Security Problem by Larry Seltzer He writes ldquoThere are a large number of programs to detect and remove the much larger number of attacks Since some of the best ones are free (asking for donations) it may be a good idea to run more than one rdquo To which I would further add ldquoThe lsquofreersquo ones donrsquot get all the dirt out either So lsquoGo for Brokersquo Getrsquoem all and then for sure be surerdquo

I am truly beholden to both com-panies for helping me to ldquoget the word out there as best I canrdquo about spyware spyware problems pitfalls and dangers and especially their own wonderful spy-ware programs Each company is doing an outstandingly admirable job in per-forming its part in the new now and en-suing battles of WWIII The CyberWar Thank you sincerely from the bottom of my heart Job ldquoWell Donerdquo

Talk about a powerhouse Internet-bound PC Irsquove got it all now ldquoHappi-ness Happiness Happinessrdquo

Ciao

Page 14 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Presidents CornerThoughts on Member Recruitment

To encourage word-of-mouth recruitment of new members an incentivereward program may be used One incentive would be the waiv-ing of membership dues for one year of any member who recruits a new paid membership Suggested guidelines include a limit of one waiver per year no waiver of multiple years for multiple new memberships and some method of formally attributing credit for the new membership

Use of flyers at community events could raise awareness of the organiza-tion Key features of the flyer are use of the word ldquofreerdquo ldquono experience neces-saryrdquo and no mention of any need for commitment such as annual member-ship dues A related method using post-ers would combine these features with artwork to catch a personrsquos attention and multicolored ink on heavy stock Plaster-ing an area within a half-hour drive of the meeting location in the days prior to a meeting requires coordination of members to come up with the most ef-fective and efficient advertising

Some organizations have ldquoopen housesrdquo to attract new members One variation on that for a computer group would be to hold ldquoComputer Tune-Upsrdquo for free The tune-ups could include virus and spyware scans disk defragmentation and perhaps even a selective backup to CD-R Whether these tune-ups could be held at com-munity events probably depends on the personal contacts available via current members

Expand the use of free newspaper and magazine items to promote these ldquoTune-Upsrdquo Creation of a press release both printed and electronic for distri-bution to calendar editors in a timely manner is essential Local community radio stations often provide assistance with the creation of Public Service An-nouncements and may reach an entirely new audience Local community access cable channels sometimes have scroll-ing calendars of local events Whether assistance with creation of a promo-tional video or 15-minute infomercial is available probably depends on the

local franchise agreement Lawn signs at high traffic locations with the monthly program feature may be effective if the message is concise enough to be read quickly from a distance

All of these suggestions have com-mon requirements Consistency Dedi-cation and Lots of Hard Work All mem-bers must be involved in these activities not just the Board or a single volunteer Itrsquos a case of many hands making light work The purpose of this advertising is to create awareness and kindle interest It requires Repetition and Saturation to build credibility and the appearance of solidarity

Although a Board may be able to oversee this operation a Recruiting Coordinator is strongly recommended This person would also maintain the list of potential members or the ldquoMaster Re-cruiting Listrdquo

My thanks to Pete Wex and Chris Pinkham for the articles from which these suggestions were adapted

-- Rick Gregory 2 June 2005

Mail to Membership Secretary PO Box 510811 SLC Utah 84151

MEMBERSHIP REGISTRATION New Renewal Update Mem ________ Name___________________________________________ Address_________________________________________ Home Phone (____)_________________________________________________________ Work Phone (____)__________ City_____________________State______Zip___________

E-Mail_Home_______________________________________________ E-Mail_Work________________________________________________Would you like to have E-mail about coming UCS user events Yes___ No____ If yes send to____________ Please enroll me with the Utah Computer Society Inc (Utah Blue Chips) PCUG as one of the below membership categories Business ($35)_____ Personal ($25)_______ Student ($10)_______ Senior Center ($10)_____ Family Member ($10) ____ Does not include magazine

Signature____________________________________ Date_______________ Check _________Cash______

Visa ____________________ Exp Date________MasterCharge __________________ Exp Date________

SIGsUnion Bldg

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Blue Chips mdash Utahrsquos Computer Guide in the 21st Century

Utah Blue Chips Calendar July August 2005

ADOBE

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

General Meeting

MagazineDeadline

U of U700pm

PICNIC

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Page 4: s Presentation Picnic in the Parks Presentation Picnic in the Park R.S.V.P. on our Website: UCS.ORG Page 2 Blue Chips Magazine —July 2005 y liff illward, ditor cliffm@xmission.com

Page 4 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Windows ReviewSpy Sweeper 40Block Spyware to Your ComputerReviewed by Don Nendell

ManufacturerWebroot Software IncPO Box 198162560 55th StreetBoulder Colorado 80308-2816 USAPh Toll Free (800) 7729383Web Site lthttpwwwwebrootcomgtFAX (303) 4423846 Outside the USA +1 (303) 4423823E-mail Tech Support lthttp

wwwwebrootcomsupportgtCorporate Sales amp SupportPh (800) 8708102One year of updates and support for only

$2995

Minimum System RequirementsWindows 98SE 2K ME or XP300 Mhz Processor25 MB Hard Drive SpaceSupports Internet Explorer

Last month I did a very favorable re-view on Pandarsquos TruPrevent Personal 2005 (See June 2005 UBC Magazine Archives at ltwwwucsorggt) where I wrote

ldquoSome Opening lsquoEye-Openingrsquo Thoughts on the Subject [of Spyware]

Almost everyone has anti-virus and anti-spyware software installed on their PC network and ISP or they definitely should Shame on anyone if they havenrsquot Regard-less malicious software viruses spyware and hacker attempts continue to slip through all too easily Why Why indeedrdquo

This month through the auspices of Webroot and their first quarterly STATE OF SPYWARE Q1 2005 report to the world I will share with you their phenomenally ac-curate and timely answer to my above pro-posed question ldquoWhy indeedrdquo I strongly suggest you get ldquoand share with everyonerdquo your own FREE copy of this fabulous eye-opening 75-page expose immediately if not sooner You can get it by going to lthttpwwwwebrootcomstateofspywaregt It is chocked full of startling facts of the - all-to-soon to reach your computer - up and coming invasion and full-blown epidemic (my words) of insidious Spyware A great many of those facts I share with you herein and now

I met the wonderful folks of Webroot at the Networld + Interop 2005 ShowStoppers Media event and boy am I glad I did - I think you will be too Later in the review (before I install Spy Sweeper) I want to go to their web site with this very machine (a Toshiba Satellite A75-S229 connected to the Internet through my ever-faithful D-Link WiFi Ac-

cess Point) while sitting comfortably in my living room and test it with their voluntary Webroot Consumer SpyAudit FYI My Lap-top has only Pandarsquos wonderful Platinum 2005 Internet Security Suite installed on it This machine will thenceforth become another statistic for their quarterly report information gathering through their Spy-Audit program and subsequent reporting Very Interesting But first things first

STATE OF SPYWARE Q1 2005 Re-port (SOS)

The report is a concise hard-hitting eye-opening in-depth review and analysis of the impact of spyware adware and unwanted software on consumers and corporations Here are a few important extracts

ldquoIn the late winter and early spring of 2004 a series of events hastened the public awareness of spyware as a clear and present danger to both consumers and enterprises In February the New York Times used its editorial page to call for legislation against an emerging software threat called spyware In March PC Magazine published the first comprehensive overview of anti-spyware software and featured the growing scourge on its cover pulling this new security issue out of the chat rooms and into the bright light of mainstream technology media Finally in April the Federal Trade Commission hosted a workshop on spyware attracting industry leaders opinion makers and even apologists to Washington to debate the legislative impli-cations of tiny pieces of software infiltrating unwitting computers and transmitting data to third parties without the consent of the informationrsquos owner Spyware had officially arrived

By yearrsquos end we knew that 90 of consumer computers had some form of spyware Rest assured that if 2004 was the year we discovered spyware then in 2005 we are going to find out how hard it is to beat But we can also be sure that the more we all know[] the better equipped we are to fight [what] we know we have ahead of usrdquo

During Q1 2005 the Webroot SpyAudit found more than 25 instances of spyware in each ldquoinfected consumer machinerdquo they tested With cookies excluded the number of infections averaged out at 72 per machine This is a significant statistic as it actually turns out because the subtle distinctions between the various forms of spyware are lost on most consumers and businesses

By now we need a clear definition of what we mean by ldquospywarerdquo because cur-rently the term spyware is broken up into

four (4) broad categories System Mon-itors Trojan H o r s e s Adware and Cookies The SOS report obligingly de-fines spyware thusly

ldquo The definition of spyware is all programs install-ing themselves onto a userrsquos computer by stealth subterfuge andor social engineer-ing and whose purpose is to redirect a userrsquos activities or record those activities in a way that reduces a userrsquos privacy protection or peace of mind Adware is often labeled as a subcategory of spyware mainly due to the overt ways that adware vendors initially used to install their software on end userrsquos ma-chines with little regard for the user As the spyware definition debate heats up several industry groups including one sponsored by the Center for Democracy and Technology are forming to address this issuerdquo

The State of Spyware 2005The SOS reports that an annual $2

Billion(US) - and growing rapidly - industry feeds off spyware infestations 2004 appears to be the year that concerns over spyware began to exceed anxiety over any other cyber security threat Stories of lost data and stolen accounts became more preva-lent as more hackers sought quick profit And these events are not anomalies SOS reports The SOS goes on to tell us that in Q4 2004 alone in more than 90 percent of the Webroot Consumer SpyAudit scans they uncovered at least one instance of the four major categories for which it scanned At the same time the National Cyber Secu-rity Alliance and AOL found that 89 percent of participants had no idea that they even had spyware on their PC The SOS goes on to warn us ldquo it is

Page 5 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

clear that the problem of spyware is neither abating nor is its impact well understood by PC users [and then goes on to add] the first quarter of 2005 saw an increase in high-severity security incidents involving spywarerdquo

And right on cue as if the SOS was portending such a dark future ahead of us on June 20 2005 we were shocked with the ldquo40 million credit cards exposedrdquo headlines on MSNBCcom This breach of secu-rity with spyware most certainly at its core will most certainly join the vaunted pages of The Guinness Book of Records itrsquos that big

Note Webroot intends to up-date the SOS quarterly Please visit Webrootrsquos web site to view (and ob-tain) the SOS for yourself

A Few Facts About Spyware1) Spyware programs can be easily

installed on your computer without your knowledge 2) Spyware can result in iden-tity theft data corruption personal profiling and more 3) Your computer can get spyware when you download files view an unsolic-ited email visit Web pages that activate a lsquodrive-by downloadrsquo or via other means 4) 90 of Internet-connected computers are infected with spyware and 5) You can easily remove spyware from your computer with Spy Sweeper Webrootrsquos award-winning spyware protection tool

Now Letrsquos Investigate Spy Sweeper

After quickly and effortlessly loading my award-winning copy of Spy Sweeper 35 letrsquos live dangerously and see whatrsquos out there in the cruel cruel world of spyware ldquoA surfrsquoen we will go A surfrsquoen we will go Hi Ho a dairio a Surfrsquoen we gordquo While out on Webrootrsquos web site you will find ldquoSpy Auditrdquo Simply click on the link ldquoQuickly scan your PC for spyware - Itrsquos freerdquo

How Spy Audit on Their Web Site Works

At no cost or obligation to you Spy Audit will scan your system registry and hard drive space for thousands of known spyware programs Spy Audit will show you what spyware is actually on your system Rest easy it will not remove or modify any files and Spy Audit will take only seconds to run Note Webroot Software respects your privacy - after all thatrsquos their business They say ldquoRunning Spy Audit will not add cookies or harm your computer in any wayrdquo

I followed the directions religiously They were

1 Click the start spy audit button The Download Dialog will open

2 To run a Spy Audit on your computer

now click ldquoRunrdquo or ldquoOpenrdquo To save Spy Au-dit to your computer click ldquoSaverdquoAwk Not expecting anything because I have Pandarsquos Platinum 2005 Internet Security Suite ldquoin-stalledrdquo I got the IE Warning

The Problem That Showed Up On My Laptop

ldquoAdware andor Adware cookies were found on your system

Adware presence indicates a third-party is monitoring your online activities and most often results in increased exposure to adver-tising and pop-up ads

The presence of adware indicates a vul-nerability to infection and the risk of more devastating consequences in the futurerdquo

Reading from the Spyware Risk Meter I Got

ldquoYour risk assessment is calculated us-ing the following formula based on potential consequences and frequency of occurrence across all users

1 or more adware cookies = Low Risk Risk rating increases within low category with each additional adware cookie The presence of any spyware illustrates vulner-ability to infection

1 or more adware programs = Medium Risk Adware is moderately intrusive and not as pervasive as adware cookies Infec-tion is generally associated with more high-risk online activities Risk rating increases within medium category with each additional adware identified

1 or more Trojans or System Monitors = High Risk These are the most malicious forms of spyware and can cause catastrophic consequences They should be removed im-mediatelyrdquo

Note I never did actually find out what the offending adware program was seems I had a little trouble with the Java Script download

Benefits of Spy Sweeper Sales Speak

1) Better Com-puter PerformanceSpyware can cause inferior

computer performance slower internet con-nections and strange behavior One quick sweep by Spy Sweeper returns your PC to normal

2) Fewer Annoying Pop-up AdsSpyware is notorious for inundating comput-

er users with pop-up ads Spy Sweeper eliminates these programs to let you enjoy surfing the web again

3) Greater Personal PrivacyOnce spyware gets on your machine it can track your computer activities putting your personal privacy at risk Spy Sweeper lets you wipe out these programs and files so you enjoy the privacy you deserve

4) Increased PC Security Some spyware is used to steal personal data including credit card data social security numbers account numbers and more Spy Sweeper helps protect

you from fraud and identify theft by finding and removing these malicious programs

Webroot Spy Sweeper Specifics1) Webroot Spy Sweeper safeguards your

identity and restores system performance through fast smart and powerful anti-spy-ware protection 2) Comprehensive sweeps eliminate spyware in minutes 3) Smart shields conveniently block spyware before it installs on your PC 4) One-of-a-kind research system uncovers spyware threats faster for better protection 5) Unparalleled protection with the most frequently updated threat database and 6) 30-day satisfaction guarantee - no questions asked

And New in Webroot Spy Sweeper 40

FYI The new changes in the brand new Spy Sweeper 40 are 1) Enhanced scan engine for sweeps that are up to 4-times faster 2) Automated definition downloads for better protection 3) Improved schedul-ing features for greater flexibility and 4) New Smart Shields for increased blocking protection

So I downloaded the 40 upgrade and then went through the complete process once again just to see what would show up

Awk Not actually expecting any-thing once again and now because I have both Pandarsquos Platinum 2005 In-ternet Security Suite and Spy Sweeper 40 ldquoinstalledrdquo I got the ominous IE Warning

Page 6 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

(Ed Note The above is what we found on Cliffrsquos computer and he has AdAware SpyBot and SpyWare Blaster installed) AWK (-(

So Whatrsquos It All About AlfieHaving been very graphically shown

that just as all Virus protection programs

do not eliminate every known virus infection - some do get through the net - so it seems the parallel runs equally true with Spyware programs

Ever so confident that I was completely protected with my precious Panda Platinum 2005 Internet Security Suite I got a very rude shock when I saw that some adware infection

was still in there even up until I upgraded Spy Sweeper to the new 40 version Granted the number of ldquoTracesrdquo ndash Spy Sweeper ldquospy-warerdquo footprints - increased from 36K to 96K with the upgrade to 40 I was still shocked never-the-less Boy I still am I can truthfully share with you ldquoAm I ever glad I have both programs on my Laptop now as well as on all my other (test) computers in my home P2P network toordquo -

In conclusionldquoBy the end of the year spyware pro-

grams will triple in number put Firefox in their sights and turn to Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to distribute key loggers and ad spawnersrdquo predicts Richard Stien-non Director of Threat Research at Webroot Software Inc

Thanks Webroot for a real eye-opening I can only sincerely hope this review will be seen - and seriously be taken to heart - by many other such fortunate readers

Ciao

Page 9 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Minutes from June amp May Meeting Memoranda

The June meeting was called to order by President Rick Gregory

Announcements and Open Access President Gregory began the announce-

ments by talking about the big change by Apple moving to use Intel chips in their hardware Evidently the Power PC chip was not available in the quantities that allowed Apple to meet the demand for their desktops and portable equipment

E911 has been approved by the FCC as a requirement for VoIP This is generally seen as a move by the mainstream phone com-panies to roadblock the movement of their customers to a newer phone technology It requires that VoIP providers develop a way of providing the callers location to a 911 system before they can offer service

Microsoft is supposed to roll out their new Software Update Service this month It has the acronym of WSUS

The Utah Computer Society Summer Picnic is scheduled for July 13 in Murray Park at the same pavilion we have used the last three years Please go to the UCS website and RSVP The picnic is free but donations will be accepted to help defray costs

Don Nendell talked about a free offer-ing he arranged for the members of UCS Makau Corporation offers training software to the public on a wide variety of topics Don arranged for members in attendance to re-ceive a card that would allow the bearer to download and run one training program from their library

Don also talked about a program called Search Automator which would be shown to members in the main presentation later that evening

Main PresentationThe program tonight is Useful Web

Sites as identified and presented by several members Sean Wolsey Frank Herriott Rick Gregory and Larry Lamph

The URLrsquos of the web sites to be talked about (and several others) were on a sheet passed out to attendees

Sean began by talking about Gmail This is a free mail service offered by Google It is still in a Beta mode so that memberships are by referral only at this time The amazing thing is that currently they are offering over two Gigabytes of free storage The principal unique factor is that you do not create sub-folders for mail categories but use Googlersquos search technology on your content to select messages when you need to categorize your messages and find previous content It has a good spam filter Attachments are allowed

to be up 10 MB in sizeSean showed a free spyware control pro-

gram from wwwmlinnet It is called Startup Control Panel 28 It has many components that allow you to control your computer sys-tem and keep it clean of spyware and secure in operation

Lastly Sean showed the AnalogXcom website This is a site that has many free offerings There are currently 86 files and programs in the areas of Music Network Programming System and MP3 music files There are too many to list Stop by and look them over The price is right and so is the quality

Next Frank Herriott (that would be me) showed a few of his favorite web sites They are UtahCommuterLinkcom and the NOAA graphical weather forecasts site Commuting to Park City each day means a lot of time on the Interstates This website allows one to see the roads read of closures obtain current ac-cident information and travel time estimates As well I can see what Parleyrsquos Summit looks like before I ever leave my home or office The NOAA graphical forecasts are a differ-ent way of looking at weather forecasts and complement the regular weathercast infor-mation for me

Next I showed two sites that Don Nendell requested of me The first SearchAutomatorcom is home to a new search engine that reminds me of the meta-search engines that Mike Crawford showed to UCS This program takes that idea and really improves on it They have made a real powerful search engine that searches the mainstream search engines (Google Al-tavista Yahoo and so on) They arrange the results and allow you to select from catego-ries that group the search results in areas of html pages documents images sound clips and so on This is a really powerful method of searching the web and winnowing out the chaff Lastly we visited the Makau training site This was to show off the types of training materials they had to offer

UCS President Rick Gregory showed the Craigslist website to the group It started in 1995 in the Bay area and is now localized to most of the large cities in the US It became available for Salt Lake in September 2004 It is a very rich and complete listing of services such as jobs events wishlists classifieds public services and various other topics It re-ally defies a simple concise description Check it out at wwwsaltlakecitycraigslistorg

Larry Lamph talked about several of his favorite sites First was Salt Lake gas prices (wwwsaltlakegaspricescom) In brief it is a listing of the cheapest (and

highest) places to buy gas and diesel in the Salt Lake metro area You can also link to other areas in case you are traveling and want to gas up inexpensively on the road Larry next showed his favorite weather site wwwweathercom which features many different pieces of weather info Larry also quickly showed sites for Ghost Towns of Utah UFO Hunters of Utah DriverZone (for computer hardware drivers) Repair Clinic (for repair if just about anything) and TerraServercom which features pictures of the earth from space This last service has pictures of your neighborhood so you can see what your house (or your neighborrsquos or any street address) looks like

The May meeting was called to order by President Rick Gregory

Announcements and Open Access The meeting began with a message from

President Gregory about Freecycle and Salt Lake Recycle These two organizations both work to exchange or giveaway items you no longer want but do not wish to discard Search for them in Google to find out more

COMDEX has been cancelled for the Fall of 2005 This is the second year without a COMDEX show Show organizers say they are going to offer a show in 2006

Rick said that Microsoftrsquos Internet Explorer version 70 beta is to be released this summer Rick also talked about the recent security flaws in the new browser from Mozilla called Firefox Firefox has been getting patched immediately upon the disclosure of these security bugs

Rick reminded users again about the office supply store rebate programs Most purchases at Office Max Office Depot and Staples return a portion of the cost of the goods to the Utah Computer Society This is an easy way for members to support Utah Blue Chips Contact President Gregory if you have questions about the program

Wi-Max was discussed briefly It is a newer implementation of Wireless Network-ing which operates in the 24 GHz band at roughly twice the speed of 8211G or 108 megabits per second

SIGrsquos - UCS members should think about their SIG interests and pass them along to the UCS Board members At the April SUG meetings only the presenters showed up for the meetings If this effort is to be continued then members need to come to the meetings Needless to say it is discouraging for the presenters to prepare the meeting and then have no one show up for the session

Page 10 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Do you shop at Office Depot Office Max or

StaplesIf so use the following numbers for Blue Chips

to receive credit for your purchases

Office Depot Advantage1100058898

OfficeMax MaxPerks1026-77099

Staples Business Rewards34567 91452

Main PresentationGene Barlow of User Group Relations

(wwwusergroupstorecom) and his wife Linda came to present to the Utah Blue Chips Gene said that although he speaks to over one hundred user groups per year the Utah Computer Society feels like his ldquohome user grouprdquo to him The products that Gene talked about are available at his web site listed above at a discount to user group members

Gene Barlow and Dave Whittle who spoke to Utah Blue Chips ear-lier this year both have products listed at wwwusergroupstorecom Gene has product in the areas of computer organization secu-rity and backup Dave Whittle lists products for photo and video editing text and office editing and accessories for computers and mobile phones

Gene began with the Disk Director Suite 90 a tool to help you organize your hard disk drive(s) It has similar functionality to Partition Magic Gene feels that Disk Director has become a better and more useful product

Optimal Desktop Pro 40 is a powerful tool that combines the functions of a web browser (such as Internet Explorer) with the file manager (such as Windows Ex-plorer) and other functionality (RSS feed manager) all into one tool This lets you use one program to manage your local file system and web information seeking in one self contained package

Since many people are now upgrad-ing or migrating to newer more powerful PC systems today the next tool demon-strated Spearit Move Me 25 is a natural for minimizing the trouble of shifting to a new system It moves application programs configuration settings and data from an old computer to a new computer The elements moved are completely under your control This greatly reduces the pain of having to set up your new system all over again to get it

set up just the way you like it The program features an Exclude capability to mark pro-grams that you do not wish to move to your new system It also allows you to de-install old programs thereby cleaning up your systems This program is licensed to one computer the source machine It moves in-formation from the source system to another machine which is running the same version or a newer version of Windows It does not move to an older version of Windows than the one on the source system

Gene next talked about security prod-ucts from White Canyon Software My Password Vault is a program that allows you to consolidate all your passwords into one encrypted file and just have to remember one password A ldquoCopy and Pasterdquo process makes simple work of the need to use differ-ent passwords for each system Using one password over and over is a serious security hazard Secure Clean is a program that per-forms a selective overwrite of deleted files on your system so they cannot be recovered White Canyon Wipe DriveMedia Wiper is a program that completely obliterates all data on drives and removable media so you can safely discard them or sell or give them to another person Powerful data recovery pro-grams exist that can recover data you have merely ldquodeletedrdquo Wipe Drive allows you to feel confident you have really removed your data from disk drives and removable media (zip drives LS-120 drives tapes CD-RW etc)

Acronis Privacy Expert Suite 80 is a set of security products that help to keep your system free from spyware adware and annoying pop-ups This suite also in-cludes some disk wiping utilities It has an update service with an annual subscription charge

Spearit Associate This is a program that monitors your file associations and prevents them from being hi-jacked by other programs This approach is used to alter your selections at best and run mal-ware at worst

Gene took a minute to tell us about his training CD-ROMrsquos He has two CDrsquos which are instructional videorsquos showing you how to organize you hard disk drive and explains the system backup process and how to set up your backup and recovery process for fast and effective handling

The second part of Genersquos presentation covered Backup strategies and practices The frequency of backup all depends upon on how often your data is changed and what would be the ldquocostrdquo to you of re-entering the data since the last backup A typical scenario would be to backup your data daily and the full system on a weekly or monthly basis depending on how often it changed

CD-ROMrsquos and DVD-ROMrsquos were the new backup medium of choice just a few

years ago These were widely believed to have an archival shelf life of 25 years or more This is coming into serious question in the last year as many disks are failing even before 5 years have elapsed These are no longer a recommended long-term backup medium Cartridge tapes are widely used in the computer industry but are considered too expensive for home use

A new choice has appeared - hard disk drives These are long term becoming cheaper by the day and extremely fast when compared to optical or tape These can take the form of internal storage network storage or external disk drives

A backup strategy can take several forms One can use a file-oriented strategy This requires the operating system to be working in order to recover the data One can use a partition based copy utility This will be faster to write and recover from media It is a bit by bit copy of the original disk partition

Lastly one can use an Imaging pro-gram It can copy data in a full partition format or an incremental approach This is considered the optimal approach to save time and media (and money)

Lastly Gene used Acronis True Image 80 to illustrate the process of using imaging software to backup one of his disk partitions and how to recover files from it This method has the advantage of backing up even Linux disk partitions

Gene Barlow once again provided Utah Blue Chips with a timely topic and an inter-esting evening of computer talk

JulyRenewals

Preston Anderson David Bernhardt

Rick Gregory Stuart Gygi

LeRoy Johnson Jim Roberts

Robert B Stock

Page 11 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

CounterSpy HomeDetect and Protect Yourself Against SpywareDetect and Protect Yourself Against Spyware

Windows Review

Reviewed by Don Nendell

ManufacturerSunbelt Software USA(Americas Asia Pacifi c Rim)101 North Garden AvenueClearwater Florida USA 33755Tel 727-562-0101Tel 888-688-8457Fax 727-562-5199Sales salessunbelt-softwarecomCredit Card Tel 800-336-3166URL httpwwwsunbelt-softwarecom

buycfrnCost $1995 per machine (includes a one year

subscription with updates upgrades and real live human technical support)

Software Supportsupportsunbelt-softwarecom ltor visit

websitegtOn-Line Knowledge Basehttpwwwsunbelt-softwarecomSupport-

HomeOffi cecfrnTel 877-673-1153Minimum System Requirements

Windows 98SEMEXP2KPentium 11 Processor with 64MB24MB Hard Drive SpaceInternet Explorer 5 or Higher

Why choose CounterSpytrade

CounterSpy is a powerful anti-spy-ware tool that detects deletes and pro-tects your personal computer against recurring spyware threats from a broad range of malicious software Sunbelt Software claims ldquoYou can think of it as a lsquospy-wallrsquo that protects you in real-time [with] the best spyware database in the industry and the fast-est scan timesrdquo They go on to state that CounterSpy is the only anti-spyware that gets its regular spyware threat database updates from three different sources 1) Sunbeltrsquos own Spyware Research Team 2) CounterSpy users that are volunteer members of Counterspyrsquos ThreatNet Community and from 3) Microsoftrsquos Spyware Research Group

In order to effectively fi ght spyware you need a ldquocounterspyrdquo they say And possibly by sheer coincidence() their fl agship consumer product CounterSpy just might seem to fi ll that bill nicely now wouldnrsquot it

Note There are two versions of CounterSpy currently available through Sunbelt Software 1) CounterSpy for home users that works to protect a single computer and 2) CounterSpy Enter-prise which protects computers across an entire network Both can be ordered through their website and downloaded over an Internet connection which will allow you to have advanced protection installed and running on your PC within just a few minutes And also worthy of note each product comes with one yearrsquos worth of free maintenance upgrades and live tech support

According to PC World Counter-Spy has the best spyware database in the industry It was chosen as both PC WORLD ldquoWORLD CLASS 2005rdquo and ldquo2005 BEST BUYrdquo

Counterspy Flexibility

Spyware is a vicious fast-growing malig-nancy that can no longer be ignored It used to be that viruses received more public-ity than spyware because viruses move over the In-ternet so quickly throughout the world But Spyware is actually the more dangerous of the two and sadly the world is only just now really waking up to this plague Herersquos the bottom line If you value your per-sonal data at all - and protecting that data is of any importance to you - then you absolutely must repeat must use current and up-to-date versions of 1) An anti-virus software 2) A fi rewall and equally as importantly 3) An anti-spyware utility

The onset of any perceived trouble can be insidious and may actually be unobserved but when your computer fi nally does slow down or seems ultra-sluggish or it may seem like it has sud-

denly become possessed by pop-up ad-vertisements et al odds are excellent that spyware has infiltrated your system Anti-spyware utilities like CounterSpy will identify spyware on your hard disk help you remove it and protect your computer against new infections CounterSpy allows users to remove or even keep if desired spyware programs andor utilities on a case-by-case basis

More CounterSpy Defense Mechanisms

CounterSpy searches for 36 catego-ries of spyware Some examples are Tro-jans spyware adware malware hacker tools keyloggers and hijacker compo-nents Without anti-spyware utilities like CounterSpy spyware can lurk in the background waiting to be triggered by a user When triggered the spyware can steal passwords fi nancial data and personal information and literally anything it wants It can also open up backdoor entrances that hackers can use to manipulate your computer directly Which brings us face-to-face with my biggest problem and greatest fear of any of the spyware imfection(s)

Page 12 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

KeyloggersSunbelt Software warns us ldquoIf you

think spyware is just a nuisance then you are not familiar with the keylogger pro-grams that have made their way from the Internet to many peoplersquos home comput-ers in the last few years When people think about spyware they usually envi-sion those programs that lurk behind the scenes and post popup advertisements while users surf the Internet This type of spyware is annoying but keylogger spyware is downright dangerous

ldquoKeylogger spyware monitors every stroke of the keyboard you make on your computer That information is transmit-ted back to the spyware creator where hackers can analyze keystrokes for any information that they can use for nefarious purposes Passwords credit card numbers banking information and much more can be found buried within keylogger messages back to its creatorrdquo

Such is the case with the Desktop computer I am presently using to re-view CounterSpy In my initial Coun-terSpy scan it turned up four (4) pieces of spyware including two (2) very much dreaded Commercial Keyloggers embed-ded somewhere This is really scary to me personally as I have installed on this PC alone No-Adware Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE Personal SpywareBlaster Pandarsquos Platinum 2005 Internet Suite (with over 1058K virus signatures identified and protecting me with TruPrevent (See also my TruPrevent review in BCM June 2005 issue archives ltwwwucsorggt)) and a separate P2P LAN firewall manned

by IPCop Whorsquoda thunk itCaveat I must truthfully admit how-

ever that I hadnrsquot run any of the spyware programs for approximately 30 days - for some unknown reason Shame on me for being so slothful and careless

Also I had originally intended to run Spy Sweeper on this machine too but actually got started on this review of CounterSpy before I got to that point Pretty wide open here Irsquod say But then all-in-all it still is really surprising to me to come up with such a sick computer so fast Live and learn they say But then again isnrsquot that why I am supposedly do-ing these spyware reviews anyway - to help everybody out there in La-La land plus moi Truthfully if this opens even one eye and saves many others it will have been well worth the effort Silently I pray however it will make a big differ-ence to a great many persons

Heavens ldquoPhysician Heal Thyselfrdquo I keep scolding myself

Stopping Keylogger Spyware

The only way to stop keylogger (or any other) spyware is by installing (and m a i n t a i n i n g AND USING) a high-quality anti-spyware program in your PC Anti-spyware programs scan your hard

drive for spyware signatures buried deep within pro-gram files or hid-den amongst harm-less files on your hard drive Sunbelt Software advises us ldquoNo spyware is safe if you are running top-notch anti-spyware softwarerdquo ldquoCounterSpyrdquo they say - No doubt about it I would have to agree whole-

heartedly Remember ldquoHappiness is a working computerrdquo I keep saying Now I have a whole slew of spyware programs to guard my premises and perimeters Whew

Not Surprisingly - Enter Organized CyberCrime Stage Right and Left

Sunbelt Software warns us ldquoOr-ganized cybercrime has become one of the biggest challenges facing companies that specialize in protecting computers from viruses spyware and Trojans At one time the viruses that spread across the Internet were created by individuals who were more interested in notoriety than they were in crime Todayrsquos viruses are of a different breed Criminals have now realized that viruses can be used for much more than proving computer development skills Organized criminals can now create networks of lsquobotsrsquo that can be installed on vulnerable PCs and remotely controlled The word lsquobotrsquo re-ally means a personal computer owned by an unsuspecting home user that is now in reality owned by a hacker and can be used for their criminal goals Recent data shows that the number of IP addresses associated with lsquobotrsquo net-works has increased by more than 1000 percent in just one yearrdquo

It can happen to you me and any and everybody Actually no one is safe For example take a gander at this Herersquos the latest update on the subject of spyware By now we all are quite fa-miliar with The Salt Lake Tribune Sat-urday June 18 2005 front page story (plus every newspaper TV newscast

Page 13 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

etc in the world) which highlighted ldquoMillions at risk as data are hacked Cardholders Security is breached at a transaction company fraud could affect bank customersrdquo And on June 20 2005 at MSNBCcom ldquo40 million credit cards exposedrdquo as reported by Bob Sullivan who wrote ldquoMasterCard spokeswoman Sharon Gamsin said a computer virus was not to blame for the data theft She said she couldnrsquot provide details of how the systems were hacked but did say that lsquoan unauthorized entity put a spe-cific code into CardSystemsrsquo networkrsquo enabling the person or group to gain ac-cess to the datardquo Which was also duti-fully reported in InformationWeek June 20 2005 News Scan p 12 ldquo One gets the nagging feeling We havenrsquot yet seen the worst of itrdquo Amen

Fighting Organized CyberCrime and Spyware

To fight organized cybercrime and spyware both companies and individu-als need to utilize the best anti-virus and anti-malware utilities available Visit Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy Documents web site to learn more on how we can all get together to fight this crime wave Their CounterSpy Docu-ments URL is lthttpwwwsunbelt-softwarecomCounterSpy-docscfmgt Also please visit their Resource Li-brary for additional information on spyware and ldquoSpyware in the Newsrdquo The Resource Library URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomresource_librarycfmgt

Critically Important Visit Sun-belt Softwarersquos ThreatNet web site to actively participate in the spyware fight The ThreatNet URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomthreatnetcfmgt

So Whatrsquos It All About AlfieA few outside review comments are

in order here

ldquoSpyware Sneaks InIn a nationally-representative sur-

vey of more than 2000 households with at-home Internet access CR found that 36 percent reported that their home page had been changed - a common symptom of spyware Spyware isnrsquot a single type of software The term cov-ers a diverse range of applications Like spam spyware is often used by third-party marketers associated with reputable companies whose products they are hawking To avoid spyware Consumer Reports recommends that consumers

- Download and install software only from trusted online sources

- Adjust the Web browserrsquos security settings to the medium or high level

- Use updated antispyware software to scan the hard drive regularlyrdquo- Consumer Reports Consumer Reports Investigates How to Protect against Spam Spyware and Phishing Report Includes Survey Results Software Rat-ings and Tips to Avoid Online Hazards Such as ID Theft dated 892004

ldquoCounterSpy had the highest detec-tion rate in our tests The most effective scanner - CounterSpy - was also the fast-est taking only a minute to perform a complete scan of a system with 27 GB of data Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy proved the most capable of the bunch finding and stopping 93 percent of all the running processes created by our 45 test programsrdquo- PCWorld April 2005

Last HoorayCounterSpy has a couple more

features up their sleeves that are really ldquoKnock-Your-Socks-Offrdquo items System Tools - Secure File Eraser and System Tools - My PC Checkup The graphics tell it like it is

Overall Conclusion

Very seriously I have not actually intended for these two (2) BCM spyware reviews this month to be a ldquoWinner Take Allrdquo comparison of two (2) great spyware programs CounterSpy and Spy Sweep-er They are both simply ldquoAbsolutely Superiorrdquo companies and programs

and they deserve to be evaluated each on their own merits and by each and everyone of you out there individually They both are very inexpensive and they each have trialware downloads so you have absolutely nothing to lose by try-ing both of them Besides yoursquoll get a ldquosqueaky cleanrdquo PC out of the deal at least once in this or any other of your lifetimesFYI For further clarification purposes I would also like to add a comment from an article dated July 29 2004 I ran across on eWeekcom entitled SpyAdware The New Real Security Problem by Larry Seltzer He writes ldquoThere are a large number of programs to detect and remove the much larger number of attacks Since some of the best ones are free (asking for donations) it may be a good idea to run more than one rdquo To which I would further add ldquoThe lsquofreersquo ones donrsquot get all the dirt out either So lsquoGo for Brokersquo Getrsquoem all and then for sure be surerdquo

I am truly beholden to both com-panies for helping me to ldquoget the word out there as best I canrdquo about spyware spyware problems pitfalls and dangers and especially their own wonderful spy-ware programs Each company is doing an outstandingly admirable job in per-forming its part in the new now and en-suing battles of WWIII The CyberWar Thank you sincerely from the bottom of my heart Job ldquoWell Donerdquo

Talk about a powerhouse Internet-bound PC Irsquove got it all now ldquoHappi-ness Happiness Happinessrdquo

Ciao

Page 14 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Presidents CornerThoughts on Member Recruitment

To encourage word-of-mouth recruitment of new members an incentivereward program may be used One incentive would be the waiv-ing of membership dues for one year of any member who recruits a new paid membership Suggested guidelines include a limit of one waiver per year no waiver of multiple years for multiple new memberships and some method of formally attributing credit for the new membership

Use of flyers at community events could raise awareness of the organiza-tion Key features of the flyer are use of the word ldquofreerdquo ldquono experience neces-saryrdquo and no mention of any need for commitment such as annual member-ship dues A related method using post-ers would combine these features with artwork to catch a personrsquos attention and multicolored ink on heavy stock Plaster-ing an area within a half-hour drive of the meeting location in the days prior to a meeting requires coordination of members to come up with the most ef-fective and efficient advertising

Some organizations have ldquoopen housesrdquo to attract new members One variation on that for a computer group would be to hold ldquoComputer Tune-Upsrdquo for free The tune-ups could include virus and spyware scans disk defragmentation and perhaps even a selective backup to CD-R Whether these tune-ups could be held at com-munity events probably depends on the personal contacts available via current members

Expand the use of free newspaper and magazine items to promote these ldquoTune-Upsrdquo Creation of a press release both printed and electronic for distri-bution to calendar editors in a timely manner is essential Local community radio stations often provide assistance with the creation of Public Service An-nouncements and may reach an entirely new audience Local community access cable channels sometimes have scroll-ing calendars of local events Whether assistance with creation of a promo-tional video or 15-minute infomercial is available probably depends on the

local franchise agreement Lawn signs at high traffic locations with the monthly program feature may be effective if the message is concise enough to be read quickly from a distance

All of these suggestions have com-mon requirements Consistency Dedi-cation and Lots of Hard Work All mem-bers must be involved in these activities not just the Board or a single volunteer Itrsquos a case of many hands making light work The purpose of this advertising is to create awareness and kindle interest It requires Repetition and Saturation to build credibility and the appearance of solidarity

Although a Board may be able to oversee this operation a Recruiting Coordinator is strongly recommended This person would also maintain the list of potential members or the ldquoMaster Re-cruiting Listrdquo

My thanks to Pete Wex and Chris Pinkham for the articles from which these suggestions were adapted

-- Rick Gregory 2 June 2005

Mail to Membership Secretary PO Box 510811 SLC Utah 84151

MEMBERSHIP REGISTRATION New Renewal Update Mem ________ Name___________________________________________ Address_________________________________________ Home Phone (____)_________________________________________________________ Work Phone (____)__________ City_____________________State______Zip___________

E-Mail_Home_______________________________________________ E-Mail_Work________________________________________________Would you like to have E-mail about coming UCS user events Yes___ No____ If yes send to____________ Please enroll me with the Utah Computer Society Inc (Utah Blue Chips) PCUG as one of the below membership categories Business ($35)_____ Personal ($25)_______ Student ($10)_______ Senior Center ($10)_____ Family Member ($10) ____ Does not include magazine

Signature____________________________________ Date_______________ Check _________Cash______

Visa ____________________ Exp Date________MasterCharge __________________ Exp Date________

SIGsUnion Bldg

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Blue Chips mdash Utahrsquos Computer Guide in the 21st Century

Utah Blue Chips Calendar July August 2005

ADOBE

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

General Meeting

MagazineDeadline

U of U700pm

PICNIC

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Page 5: s Presentation Picnic in the Parks Presentation Picnic in the Park R.S.V.P. on our Website: UCS.ORG Page 2 Blue Chips Magazine —July 2005 y liff illward, ditor cliffm@xmission.com

Page 5 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

clear that the problem of spyware is neither abating nor is its impact well understood by PC users [and then goes on to add] the first quarter of 2005 saw an increase in high-severity security incidents involving spywarerdquo

And right on cue as if the SOS was portending such a dark future ahead of us on June 20 2005 we were shocked with the ldquo40 million credit cards exposedrdquo headlines on MSNBCcom This breach of secu-rity with spyware most certainly at its core will most certainly join the vaunted pages of The Guinness Book of Records itrsquos that big

Note Webroot intends to up-date the SOS quarterly Please visit Webrootrsquos web site to view (and ob-tain) the SOS for yourself

A Few Facts About Spyware1) Spyware programs can be easily

installed on your computer without your knowledge 2) Spyware can result in iden-tity theft data corruption personal profiling and more 3) Your computer can get spyware when you download files view an unsolic-ited email visit Web pages that activate a lsquodrive-by downloadrsquo or via other means 4) 90 of Internet-connected computers are infected with spyware and 5) You can easily remove spyware from your computer with Spy Sweeper Webrootrsquos award-winning spyware protection tool

Now Letrsquos Investigate Spy Sweeper

After quickly and effortlessly loading my award-winning copy of Spy Sweeper 35 letrsquos live dangerously and see whatrsquos out there in the cruel cruel world of spyware ldquoA surfrsquoen we will go A surfrsquoen we will go Hi Ho a dairio a Surfrsquoen we gordquo While out on Webrootrsquos web site you will find ldquoSpy Auditrdquo Simply click on the link ldquoQuickly scan your PC for spyware - Itrsquos freerdquo

How Spy Audit on Their Web Site Works

At no cost or obligation to you Spy Audit will scan your system registry and hard drive space for thousands of known spyware programs Spy Audit will show you what spyware is actually on your system Rest easy it will not remove or modify any files and Spy Audit will take only seconds to run Note Webroot Software respects your privacy - after all thatrsquos their business They say ldquoRunning Spy Audit will not add cookies or harm your computer in any wayrdquo

I followed the directions religiously They were

1 Click the start spy audit button The Download Dialog will open

2 To run a Spy Audit on your computer

now click ldquoRunrdquo or ldquoOpenrdquo To save Spy Au-dit to your computer click ldquoSaverdquoAwk Not expecting anything because I have Pandarsquos Platinum 2005 Internet Security Suite ldquoin-stalledrdquo I got the IE Warning

The Problem That Showed Up On My Laptop

ldquoAdware andor Adware cookies were found on your system

Adware presence indicates a third-party is monitoring your online activities and most often results in increased exposure to adver-tising and pop-up ads

The presence of adware indicates a vul-nerability to infection and the risk of more devastating consequences in the futurerdquo

Reading from the Spyware Risk Meter I Got

ldquoYour risk assessment is calculated us-ing the following formula based on potential consequences and frequency of occurrence across all users

1 or more adware cookies = Low Risk Risk rating increases within low category with each additional adware cookie The presence of any spyware illustrates vulner-ability to infection

1 or more adware programs = Medium Risk Adware is moderately intrusive and not as pervasive as adware cookies Infec-tion is generally associated with more high-risk online activities Risk rating increases within medium category with each additional adware identified

1 or more Trojans or System Monitors = High Risk These are the most malicious forms of spyware and can cause catastrophic consequences They should be removed im-mediatelyrdquo

Note I never did actually find out what the offending adware program was seems I had a little trouble with the Java Script download

Benefits of Spy Sweeper Sales Speak

1) Better Com-puter PerformanceSpyware can cause inferior

computer performance slower internet con-nections and strange behavior One quick sweep by Spy Sweeper returns your PC to normal

2) Fewer Annoying Pop-up AdsSpyware is notorious for inundating comput-

er users with pop-up ads Spy Sweeper eliminates these programs to let you enjoy surfing the web again

3) Greater Personal PrivacyOnce spyware gets on your machine it can track your computer activities putting your personal privacy at risk Spy Sweeper lets you wipe out these programs and files so you enjoy the privacy you deserve

4) Increased PC Security Some spyware is used to steal personal data including credit card data social security numbers account numbers and more Spy Sweeper helps protect

you from fraud and identify theft by finding and removing these malicious programs

Webroot Spy Sweeper Specifics1) Webroot Spy Sweeper safeguards your

identity and restores system performance through fast smart and powerful anti-spy-ware protection 2) Comprehensive sweeps eliminate spyware in minutes 3) Smart shields conveniently block spyware before it installs on your PC 4) One-of-a-kind research system uncovers spyware threats faster for better protection 5) Unparalleled protection with the most frequently updated threat database and 6) 30-day satisfaction guarantee - no questions asked

And New in Webroot Spy Sweeper 40

FYI The new changes in the brand new Spy Sweeper 40 are 1) Enhanced scan engine for sweeps that are up to 4-times faster 2) Automated definition downloads for better protection 3) Improved schedul-ing features for greater flexibility and 4) New Smart Shields for increased blocking protection

So I downloaded the 40 upgrade and then went through the complete process once again just to see what would show up

Awk Not actually expecting any-thing once again and now because I have both Pandarsquos Platinum 2005 In-ternet Security Suite and Spy Sweeper 40 ldquoinstalledrdquo I got the ominous IE Warning

Page 6 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

(Ed Note The above is what we found on Cliffrsquos computer and he has AdAware SpyBot and SpyWare Blaster installed) AWK (-(

So Whatrsquos It All About AlfieHaving been very graphically shown

that just as all Virus protection programs

do not eliminate every known virus infection - some do get through the net - so it seems the parallel runs equally true with Spyware programs

Ever so confident that I was completely protected with my precious Panda Platinum 2005 Internet Security Suite I got a very rude shock when I saw that some adware infection

was still in there even up until I upgraded Spy Sweeper to the new 40 version Granted the number of ldquoTracesrdquo ndash Spy Sweeper ldquospy-warerdquo footprints - increased from 36K to 96K with the upgrade to 40 I was still shocked never-the-less Boy I still am I can truthfully share with you ldquoAm I ever glad I have both programs on my Laptop now as well as on all my other (test) computers in my home P2P network toordquo -

In conclusionldquoBy the end of the year spyware pro-

grams will triple in number put Firefox in their sights and turn to Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to distribute key loggers and ad spawnersrdquo predicts Richard Stien-non Director of Threat Research at Webroot Software Inc

Thanks Webroot for a real eye-opening I can only sincerely hope this review will be seen - and seriously be taken to heart - by many other such fortunate readers

Ciao

Page 9 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Minutes from June amp May Meeting Memoranda

The June meeting was called to order by President Rick Gregory

Announcements and Open Access President Gregory began the announce-

ments by talking about the big change by Apple moving to use Intel chips in their hardware Evidently the Power PC chip was not available in the quantities that allowed Apple to meet the demand for their desktops and portable equipment

E911 has been approved by the FCC as a requirement for VoIP This is generally seen as a move by the mainstream phone com-panies to roadblock the movement of their customers to a newer phone technology It requires that VoIP providers develop a way of providing the callers location to a 911 system before they can offer service

Microsoft is supposed to roll out their new Software Update Service this month It has the acronym of WSUS

The Utah Computer Society Summer Picnic is scheduled for July 13 in Murray Park at the same pavilion we have used the last three years Please go to the UCS website and RSVP The picnic is free but donations will be accepted to help defray costs

Don Nendell talked about a free offer-ing he arranged for the members of UCS Makau Corporation offers training software to the public on a wide variety of topics Don arranged for members in attendance to re-ceive a card that would allow the bearer to download and run one training program from their library

Don also talked about a program called Search Automator which would be shown to members in the main presentation later that evening

Main PresentationThe program tonight is Useful Web

Sites as identified and presented by several members Sean Wolsey Frank Herriott Rick Gregory and Larry Lamph

The URLrsquos of the web sites to be talked about (and several others) were on a sheet passed out to attendees

Sean began by talking about Gmail This is a free mail service offered by Google It is still in a Beta mode so that memberships are by referral only at this time The amazing thing is that currently they are offering over two Gigabytes of free storage The principal unique factor is that you do not create sub-folders for mail categories but use Googlersquos search technology on your content to select messages when you need to categorize your messages and find previous content It has a good spam filter Attachments are allowed

to be up 10 MB in sizeSean showed a free spyware control pro-

gram from wwwmlinnet It is called Startup Control Panel 28 It has many components that allow you to control your computer sys-tem and keep it clean of spyware and secure in operation

Lastly Sean showed the AnalogXcom website This is a site that has many free offerings There are currently 86 files and programs in the areas of Music Network Programming System and MP3 music files There are too many to list Stop by and look them over The price is right and so is the quality

Next Frank Herriott (that would be me) showed a few of his favorite web sites They are UtahCommuterLinkcom and the NOAA graphical weather forecasts site Commuting to Park City each day means a lot of time on the Interstates This website allows one to see the roads read of closures obtain current ac-cident information and travel time estimates As well I can see what Parleyrsquos Summit looks like before I ever leave my home or office The NOAA graphical forecasts are a differ-ent way of looking at weather forecasts and complement the regular weathercast infor-mation for me

Next I showed two sites that Don Nendell requested of me The first SearchAutomatorcom is home to a new search engine that reminds me of the meta-search engines that Mike Crawford showed to UCS This program takes that idea and really improves on it They have made a real powerful search engine that searches the mainstream search engines (Google Al-tavista Yahoo and so on) They arrange the results and allow you to select from catego-ries that group the search results in areas of html pages documents images sound clips and so on This is a really powerful method of searching the web and winnowing out the chaff Lastly we visited the Makau training site This was to show off the types of training materials they had to offer

UCS President Rick Gregory showed the Craigslist website to the group It started in 1995 in the Bay area and is now localized to most of the large cities in the US It became available for Salt Lake in September 2004 It is a very rich and complete listing of services such as jobs events wishlists classifieds public services and various other topics It re-ally defies a simple concise description Check it out at wwwsaltlakecitycraigslistorg

Larry Lamph talked about several of his favorite sites First was Salt Lake gas prices (wwwsaltlakegaspricescom) In brief it is a listing of the cheapest (and

highest) places to buy gas and diesel in the Salt Lake metro area You can also link to other areas in case you are traveling and want to gas up inexpensively on the road Larry next showed his favorite weather site wwwweathercom which features many different pieces of weather info Larry also quickly showed sites for Ghost Towns of Utah UFO Hunters of Utah DriverZone (for computer hardware drivers) Repair Clinic (for repair if just about anything) and TerraServercom which features pictures of the earth from space This last service has pictures of your neighborhood so you can see what your house (or your neighborrsquos or any street address) looks like

The May meeting was called to order by President Rick Gregory

Announcements and Open Access The meeting began with a message from

President Gregory about Freecycle and Salt Lake Recycle These two organizations both work to exchange or giveaway items you no longer want but do not wish to discard Search for them in Google to find out more

COMDEX has been cancelled for the Fall of 2005 This is the second year without a COMDEX show Show organizers say they are going to offer a show in 2006

Rick said that Microsoftrsquos Internet Explorer version 70 beta is to be released this summer Rick also talked about the recent security flaws in the new browser from Mozilla called Firefox Firefox has been getting patched immediately upon the disclosure of these security bugs

Rick reminded users again about the office supply store rebate programs Most purchases at Office Max Office Depot and Staples return a portion of the cost of the goods to the Utah Computer Society This is an easy way for members to support Utah Blue Chips Contact President Gregory if you have questions about the program

Wi-Max was discussed briefly It is a newer implementation of Wireless Network-ing which operates in the 24 GHz band at roughly twice the speed of 8211G or 108 megabits per second

SIGrsquos - UCS members should think about their SIG interests and pass them along to the UCS Board members At the April SUG meetings only the presenters showed up for the meetings If this effort is to be continued then members need to come to the meetings Needless to say it is discouraging for the presenters to prepare the meeting and then have no one show up for the session

Page 10 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Do you shop at Office Depot Office Max or

StaplesIf so use the following numbers for Blue Chips

to receive credit for your purchases

Office Depot Advantage1100058898

OfficeMax MaxPerks1026-77099

Staples Business Rewards34567 91452

Main PresentationGene Barlow of User Group Relations

(wwwusergroupstorecom) and his wife Linda came to present to the Utah Blue Chips Gene said that although he speaks to over one hundred user groups per year the Utah Computer Society feels like his ldquohome user grouprdquo to him The products that Gene talked about are available at his web site listed above at a discount to user group members

Gene Barlow and Dave Whittle who spoke to Utah Blue Chips ear-lier this year both have products listed at wwwusergroupstorecom Gene has product in the areas of computer organization secu-rity and backup Dave Whittle lists products for photo and video editing text and office editing and accessories for computers and mobile phones

Gene began with the Disk Director Suite 90 a tool to help you organize your hard disk drive(s) It has similar functionality to Partition Magic Gene feels that Disk Director has become a better and more useful product

Optimal Desktop Pro 40 is a powerful tool that combines the functions of a web browser (such as Internet Explorer) with the file manager (such as Windows Ex-plorer) and other functionality (RSS feed manager) all into one tool This lets you use one program to manage your local file system and web information seeking in one self contained package

Since many people are now upgrad-ing or migrating to newer more powerful PC systems today the next tool demon-strated Spearit Move Me 25 is a natural for minimizing the trouble of shifting to a new system It moves application programs configuration settings and data from an old computer to a new computer The elements moved are completely under your control This greatly reduces the pain of having to set up your new system all over again to get it

set up just the way you like it The program features an Exclude capability to mark pro-grams that you do not wish to move to your new system It also allows you to de-install old programs thereby cleaning up your systems This program is licensed to one computer the source machine It moves in-formation from the source system to another machine which is running the same version or a newer version of Windows It does not move to an older version of Windows than the one on the source system

Gene next talked about security prod-ucts from White Canyon Software My Password Vault is a program that allows you to consolidate all your passwords into one encrypted file and just have to remember one password A ldquoCopy and Pasterdquo process makes simple work of the need to use differ-ent passwords for each system Using one password over and over is a serious security hazard Secure Clean is a program that per-forms a selective overwrite of deleted files on your system so they cannot be recovered White Canyon Wipe DriveMedia Wiper is a program that completely obliterates all data on drives and removable media so you can safely discard them or sell or give them to another person Powerful data recovery pro-grams exist that can recover data you have merely ldquodeletedrdquo Wipe Drive allows you to feel confident you have really removed your data from disk drives and removable media (zip drives LS-120 drives tapes CD-RW etc)

Acronis Privacy Expert Suite 80 is a set of security products that help to keep your system free from spyware adware and annoying pop-ups This suite also in-cludes some disk wiping utilities It has an update service with an annual subscription charge

Spearit Associate This is a program that monitors your file associations and prevents them from being hi-jacked by other programs This approach is used to alter your selections at best and run mal-ware at worst

Gene took a minute to tell us about his training CD-ROMrsquos He has two CDrsquos which are instructional videorsquos showing you how to organize you hard disk drive and explains the system backup process and how to set up your backup and recovery process for fast and effective handling

The second part of Genersquos presentation covered Backup strategies and practices The frequency of backup all depends upon on how often your data is changed and what would be the ldquocostrdquo to you of re-entering the data since the last backup A typical scenario would be to backup your data daily and the full system on a weekly or monthly basis depending on how often it changed

CD-ROMrsquos and DVD-ROMrsquos were the new backup medium of choice just a few

years ago These were widely believed to have an archival shelf life of 25 years or more This is coming into serious question in the last year as many disks are failing even before 5 years have elapsed These are no longer a recommended long-term backup medium Cartridge tapes are widely used in the computer industry but are considered too expensive for home use

A new choice has appeared - hard disk drives These are long term becoming cheaper by the day and extremely fast when compared to optical or tape These can take the form of internal storage network storage or external disk drives

A backup strategy can take several forms One can use a file-oriented strategy This requires the operating system to be working in order to recover the data One can use a partition based copy utility This will be faster to write and recover from media It is a bit by bit copy of the original disk partition

Lastly one can use an Imaging pro-gram It can copy data in a full partition format or an incremental approach This is considered the optimal approach to save time and media (and money)

Lastly Gene used Acronis True Image 80 to illustrate the process of using imaging software to backup one of his disk partitions and how to recover files from it This method has the advantage of backing up even Linux disk partitions

Gene Barlow once again provided Utah Blue Chips with a timely topic and an inter-esting evening of computer talk

JulyRenewals

Preston Anderson David Bernhardt

Rick Gregory Stuart Gygi

LeRoy Johnson Jim Roberts

Robert B Stock

Page 11 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

CounterSpy HomeDetect and Protect Yourself Against SpywareDetect and Protect Yourself Against Spyware

Windows Review

Reviewed by Don Nendell

ManufacturerSunbelt Software USA(Americas Asia Pacifi c Rim)101 North Garden AvenueClearwater Florida USA 33755Tel 727-562-0101Tel 888-688-8457Fax 727-562-5199Sales salessunbelt-softwarecomCredit Card Tel 800-336-3166URL httpwwwsunbelt-softwarecom

buycfrnCost $1995 per machine (includes a one year

subscription with updates upgrades and real live human technical support)

Software Supportsupportsunbelt-softwarecom ltor visit

websitegtOn-Line Knowledge Basehttpwwwsunbelt-softwarecomSupport-

HomeOffi cecfrnTel 877-673-1153Minimum System Requirements

Windows 98SEMEXP2KPentium 11 Processor with 64MB24MB Hard Drive SpaceInternet Explorer 5 or Higher

Why choose CounterSpytrade

CounterSpy is a powerful anti-spy-ware tool that detects deletes and pro-tects your personal computer against recurring spyware threats from a broad range of malicious software Sunbelt Software claims ldquoYou can think of it as a lsquospy-wallrsquo that protects you in real-time [with] the best spyware database in the industry and the fast-est scan timesrdquo They go on to state that CounterSpy is the only anti-spyware that gets its regular spyware threat database updates from three different sources 1) Sunbeltrsquos own Spyware Research Team 2) CounterSpy users that are volunteer members of Counterspyrsquos ThreatNet Community and from 3) Microsoftrsquos Spyware Research Group

In order to effectively fi ght spyware you need a ldquocounterspyrdquo they say And possibly by sheer coincidence() their fl agship consumer product CounterSpy just might seem to fi ll that bill nicely now wouldnrsquot it

Note There are two versions of CounterSpy currently available through Sunbelt Software 1) CounterSpy for home users that works to protect a single computer and 2) CounterSpy Enter-prise which protects computers across an entire network Both can be ordered through their website and downloaded over an Internet connection which will allow you to have advanced protection installed and running on your PC within just a few minutes And also worthy of note each product comes with one yearrsquos worth of free maintenance upgrades and live tech support

According to PC World Counter-Spy has the best spyware database in the industry It was chosen as both PC WORLD ldquoWORLD CLASS 2005rdquo and ldquo2005 BEST BUYrdquo

Counterspy Flexibility

Spyware is a vicious fast-growing malig-nancy that can no longer be ignored It used to be that viruses received more public-ity than spyware because viruses move over the In-ternet so quickly throughout the world But Spyware is actually the more dangerous of the two and sadly the world is only just now really waking up to this plague Herersquos the bottom line If you value your per-sonal data at all - and protecting that data is of any importance to you - then you absolutely must repeat must use current and up-to-date versions of 1) An anti-virus software 2) A fi rewall and equally as importantly 3) An anti-spyware utility

The onset of any perceived trouble can be insidious and may actually be unobserved but when your computer fi nally does slow down or seems ultra-sluggish or it may seem like it has sud-

denly become possessed by pop-up ad-vertisements et al odds are excellent that spyware has infiltrated your system Anti-spyware utilities like CounterSpy will identify spyware on your hard disk help you remove it and protect your computer against new infections CounterSpy allows users to remove or even keep if desired spyware programs andor utilities on a case-by-case basis

More CounterSpy Defense Mechanisms

CounterSpy searches for 36 catego-ries of spyware Some examples are Tro-jans spyware adware malware hacker tools keyloggers and hijacker compo-nents Without anti-spyware utilities like CounterSpy spyware can lurk in the background waiting to be triggered by a user When triggered the spyware can steal passwords fi nancial data and personal information and literally anything it wants It can also open up backdoor entrances that hackers can use to manipulate your computer directly Which brings us face-to-face with my biggest problem and greatest fear of any of the spyware imfection(s)

Page 12 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

KeyloggersSunbelt Software warns us ldquoIf you

think spyware is just a nuisance then you are not familiar with the keylogger pro-grams that have made their way from the Internet to many peoplersquos home comput-ers in the last few years When people think about spyware they usually envi-sion those programs that lurk behind the scenes and post popup advertisements while users surf the Internet This type of spyware is annoying but keylogger spyware is downright dangerous

ldquoKeylogger spyware monitors every stroke of the keyboard you make on your computer That information is transmit-ted back to the spyware creator where hackers can analyze keystrokes for any information that they can use for nefarious purposes Passwords credit card numbers banking information and much more can be found buried within keylogger messages back to its creatorrdquo

Such is the case with the Desktop computer I am presently using to re-view CounterSpy In my initial Coun-terSpy scan it turned up four (4) pieces of spyware including two (2) very much dreaded Commercial Keyloggers embed-ded somewhere This is really scary to me personally as I have installed on this PC alone No-Adware Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE Personal SpywareBlaster Pandarsquos Platinum 2005 Internet Suite (with over 1058K virus signatures identified and protecting me with TruPrevent (See also my TruPrevent review in BCM June 2005 issue archives ltwwwucsorggt)) and a separate P2P LAN firewall manned

by IPCop Whorsquoda thunk itCaveat I must truthfully admit how-

ever that I hadnrsquot run any of the spyware programs for approximately 30 days - for some unknown reason Shame on me for being so slothful and careless

Also I had originally intended to run Spy Sweeper on this machine too but actually got started on this review of CounterSpy before I got to that point Pretty wide open here Irsquod say But then all-in-all it still is really surprising to me to come up with such a sick computer so fast Live and learn they say But then again isnrsquot that why I am supposedly do-ing these spyware reviews anyway - to help everybody out there in La-La land plus moi Truthfully if this opens even one eye and saves many others it will have been well worth the effort Silently I pray however it will make a big differ-ence to a great many persons

Heavens ldquoPhysician Heal Thyselfrdquo I keep scolding myself

Stopping Keylogger Spyware

The only way to stop keylogger (or any other) spyware is by installing (and m a i n t a i n i n g AND USING) a high-quality anti-spyware program in your PC Anti-spyware programs scan your hard

drive for spyware signatures buried deep within pro-gram files or hid-den amongst harm-less files on your hard drive Sunbelt Software advises us ldquoNo spyware is safe if you are running top-notch anti-spyware softwarerdquo ldquoCounterSpyrdquo they say - No doubt about it I would have to agree whole-

heartedly Remember ldquoHappiness is a working computerrdquo I keep saying Now I have a whole slew of spyware programs to guard my premises and perimeters Whew

Not Surprisingly - Enter Organized CyberCrime Stage Right and Left

Sunbelt Software warns us ldquoOr-ganized cybercrime has become one of the biggest challenges facing companies that specialize in protecting computers from viruses spyware and Trojans At one time the viruses that spread across the Internet were created by individuals who were more interested in notoriety than they were in crime Todayrsquos viruses are of a different breed Criminals have now realized that viruses can be used for much more than proving computer development skills Organized criminals can now create networks of lsquobotsrsquo that can be installed on vulnerable PCs and remotely controlled The word lsquobotrsquo re-ally means a personal computer owned by an unsuspecting home user that is now in reality owned by a hacker and can be used for their criminal goals Recent data shows that the number of IP addresses associated with lsquobotrsquo net-works has increased by more than 1000 percent in just one yearrdquo

It can happen to you me and any and everybody Actually no one is safe For example take a gander at this Herersquos the latest update on the subject of spyware By now we all are quite fa-miliar with The Salt Lake Tribune Sat-urday June 18 2005 front page story (plus every newspaper TV newscast

Page 13 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

etc in the world) which highlighted ldquoMillions at risk as data are hacked Cardholders Security is breached at a transaction company fraud could affect bank customersrdquo And on June 20 2005 at MSNBCcom ldquo40 million credit cards exposedrdquo as reported by Bob Sullivan who wrote ldquoMasterCard spokeswoman Sharon Gamsin said a computer virus was not to blame for the data theft She said she couldnrsquot provide details of how the systems were hacked but did say that lsquoan unauthorized entity put a spe-cific code into CardSystemsrsquo networkrsquo enabling the person or group to gain ac-cess to the datardquo Which was also duti-fully reported in InformationWeek June 20 2005 News Scan p 12 ldquo One gets the nagging feeling We havenrsquot yet seen the worst of itrdquo Amen

Fighting Organized CyberCrime and Spyware

To fight organized cybercrime and spyware both companies and individu-als need to utilize the best anti-virus and anti-malware utilities available Visit Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy Documents web site to learn more on how we can all get together to fight this crime wave Their CounterSpy Docu-ments URL is lthttpwwwsunbelt-softwarecomCounterSpy-docscfmgt Also please visit their Resource Li-brary for additional information on spyware and ldquoSpyware in the Newsrdquo The Resource Library URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomresource_librarycfmgt

Critically Important Visit Sun-belt Softwarersquos ThreatNet web site to actively participate in the spyware fight The ThreatNet URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomthreatnetcfmgt

So Whatrsquos It All About AlfieA few outside review comments are

in order here

ldquoSpyware Sneaks InIn a nationally-representative sur-

vey of more than 2000 households with at-home Internet access CR found that 36 percent reported that their home page had been changed - a common symptom of spyware Spyware isnrsquot a single type of software The term cov-ers a diverse range of applications Like spam spyware is often used by third-party marketers associated with reputable companies whose products they are hawking To avoid spyware Consumer Reports recommends that consumers

- Download and install software only from trusted online sources

- Adjust the Web browserrsquos security settings to the medium or high level

- Use updated antispyware software to scan the hard drive regularlyrdquo- Consumer Reports Consumer Reports Investigates How to Protect against Spam Spyware and Phishing Report Includes Survey Results Software Rat-ings and Tips to Avoid Online Hazards Such as ID Theft dated 892004

ldquoCounterSpy had the highest detec-tion rate in our tests The most effective scanner - CounterSpy - was also the fast-est taking only a minute to perform a complete scan of a system with 27 GB of data Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy proved the most capable of the bunch finding and stopping 93 percent of all the running processes created by our 45 test programsrdquo- PCWorld April 2005

Last HoorayCounterSpy has a couple more

features up their sleeves that are really ldquoKnock-Your-Socks-Offrdquo items System Tools - Secure File Eraser and System Tools - My PC Checkup The graphics tell it like it is

Overall Conclusion

Very seriously I have not actually intended for these two (2) BCM spyware reviews this month to be a ldquoWinner Take Allrdquo comparison of two (2) great spyware programs CounterSpy and Spy Sweep-er They are both simply ldquoAbsolutely Superiorrdquo companies and programs

and they deserve to be evaluated each on their own merits and by each and everyone of you out there individually They both are very inexpensive and they each have trialware downloads so you have absolutely nothing to lose by try-ing both of them Besides yoursquoll get a ldquosqueaky cleanrdquo PC out of the deal at least once in this or any other of your lifetimesFYI For further clarification purposes I would also like to add a comment from an article dated July 29 2004 I ran across on eWeekcom entitled SpyAdware The New Real Security Problem by Larry Seltzer He writes ldquoThere are a large number of programs to detect and remove the much larger number of attacks Since some of the best ones are free (asking for donations) it may be a good idea to run more than one rdquo To which I would further add ldquoThe lsquofreersquo ones donrsquot get all the dirt out either So lsquoGo for Brokersquo Getrsquoem all and then for sure be surerdquo

I am truly beholden to both com-panies for helping me to ldquoget the word out there as best I canrdquo about spyware spyware problems pitfalls and dangers and especially their own wonderful spy-ware programs Each company is doing an outstandingly admirable job in per-forming its part in the new now and en-suing battles of WWIII The CyberWar Thank you sincerely from the bottom of my heart Job ldquoWell Donerdquo

Talk about a powerhouse Internet-bound PC Irsquove got it all now ldquoHappi-ness Happiness Happinessrdquo

Ciao

Page 14 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Presidents CornerThoughts on Member Recruitment

To encourage word-of-mouth recruitment of new members an incentivereward program may be used One incentive would be the waiv-ing of membership dues for one year of any member who recruits a new paid membership Suggested guidelines include a limit of one waiver per year no waiver of multiple years for multiple new memberships and some method of formally attributing credit for the new membership

Use of flyers at community events could raise awareness of the organiza-tion Key features of the flyer are use of the word ldquofreerdquo ldquono experience neces-saryrdquo and no mention of any need for commitment such as annual member-ship dues A related method using post-ers would combine these features with artwork to catch a personrsquos attention and multicolored ink on heavy stock Plaster-ing an area within a half-hour drive of the meeting location in the days prior to a meeting requires coordination of members to come up with the most ef-fective and efficient advertising

Some organizations have ldquoopen housesrdquo to attract new members One variation on that for a computer group would be to hold ldquoComputer Tune-Upsrdquo for free The tune-ups could include virus and spyware scans disk defragmentation and perhaps even a selective backup to CD-R Whether these tune-ups could be held at com-munity events probably depends on the personal contacts available via current members

Expand the use of free newspaper and magazine items to promote these ldquoTune-Upsrdquo Creation of a press release both printed and electronic for distri-bution to calendar editors in a timely manner is essential Local community radio stations often provide assistance with the creation of Public Service An-nouncements and may reach an entirely new audience Local community access cable channels sometimes have scroll-ing calendars of local events Whether assistance with creation of a promo-tional video or 15-minute infomercial is available probably depends on the

local franchise agreement Lawn signs at high traffic locations with the monthly program feature may be effective if the message is concise enough to be read quickly from a distance

All of these suggestions have com-mon requirements Consistency Dedi-cation and Lots of Hard Work All mem-bers must be involved in these activities not just the Board or a single volunteer Itrsquos a case of many hands making light work The purpose of this advertising is to create awareness and kindle interest It requires Repetition and Saturation to build credibility and the appearance of solidarity

Although a Board may be able to oversee this operation a Recruiting Coordinator is strongly recommended This person would also maintain the list of potential members or the ldquoMaster Re-cruiting Listrdquo

My thanks to Pete Wex and Chris Pinkham for the articles from which these suggestions were adapted

-- Rick Gregory 2 June 2005

Mail to Membership Secretary PO Box 510811 SLC Utah 84151

MEMBERSHIP REGISTRATION New Renewal Update Mem ________ Name___________________________________________ Address_________________________________________ Home Phone (____)_________________________________________________________ Work Phone (____)__________ City_____________________State______Zip___________

E-Mail_Home_______________________________________________ E-Mail_Work________________________________________________Would you like to have E-mail about coming UCS user events Yes___ No____ If yes send to____________ Please enroll me with the Utah Computer Society Inc (Utah Blue Chips) PCUG as one of the below membership categories Business ($35)_____ Personal ($25)_______ Student ($10)_______ Senior Center ($10)_____ Family Member ($10) ____ Does not include magazine

Signature____________________________________ Date_______________ Check _________Cash______

Visa ____________________ Exp Date________MasterCharge __________________ Exp Date________

SIGsUnion Bldg

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Blue Chips mdash Utahrsquos Computer Guide in the 21st Century

Utah Blue Chips Calendar July August 2005

ADOBE

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

General Meeting

MagazineDeadline

U of U700pm

PICNIC

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Page 6: s Presentation Picnic in the Parks Presentation Picnic in the Park R.S.V.P. on our Website: UCS.ORG Page 2 Blue Chips Magazine —July 2005 y liff illward, ditor cliffm@xmission.com

Page 6 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

(Ed Note The above is what we found on Cliffrsquos computer and he has AdAware SpyBot and SpyWare Blaster installed) AWK (-(

So Whatrsquos It All About AlfieHaving been very graphically shown

that just as all Virus protection programs

do not eliminate every known virus infection - some do get through the net - so it seems the parallel runs equally true with Spyware programs

Ever so confident that I was completely protected with my precious Panda Platinum 2005 Internet Security Suite I got a very rude shock when I saw that some adware infection

was still in there even up until I upgraded Spy Sweeper to the new 40 version Granted the number of ldquoTracesrdquo ndash Spy Sweeper ldquospy-warerdquo footprints - increased from 36K to 96K with the upgrade to 40 I was still shocked never-the-less Boy I still am I can truthfully share with you ldquoAm I ever glad I have both programs on my Laptop now as well as on all my other (test) computers in my home P2P network toordquo -

In conclusionldquoBy the end of the year spyware pro-

grams will triple in number put Firefox in their sights and turn to Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to distribute key loggers and ad spawnersrdquo predicts Richard Stien-non Director of Threat Research at Webroot Software Inc

Thanks Webroot for a real eye-opening I can only sincerely hope this review will be seen - and seriously be taken to heart - by many other such fortunate readers

Ciao

Page 9 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Minutes from June amp May Meeting Memoranda

The June meeting was called to order by President Rick Gregory

Announcements and Open Access President Gregory began the announce-

ments by talking about the big change by Apple moving to use Intel chips in their hardware Evidently the Power PC chip was not available in the quantities that allowed Apple to meet the demand for their desktops and portable equipment

E911 has been approved by the FCC as a requirement for VoIP This is generally seen as a move by the mainstream phone com-panies to roadblock the movement of their customers to a newer phone technology It requires that VoIP providers develop a way of providing the callers location to a 911 system before they can offer service

Microsoft is supposed to roll out their new Software Update Service this month It has the acronym of WSUS

The Utah Computer Society Summer Picnic is scheduled for July 13 in Murray Park at the same pavilion we have used the last three years Please go to the UCS website and RSVP The picnic is free but donations will be accepted to help defray costs

Don Nendell talked about a free offer-ing he arranged for the members of UCS Makau Corporation offers training software to the public on a wide variety of topics Don arranged for members in attendance to re-ceive a card that would allow the bearer to download and run one training program from their library

Don also talked about a program called Search Automator which would be shown to members in the main presentation later that evening

Main PresentationThe program tonight is Useful Web

Sites as identified and presented by several members Sean Wolsey Frank Herriott Rick Gregory and Larry Lamph

The URLrsquos of the web sites to be talked about (and several others) were on a sheet passed out to attendees

Sean began by talking about Gmail This is a free mail service offered by Google It is still in a Beta mode so that memberships are by referral only at this time The amazing thing is that currently they are offering over two Gigabytes of free storage The principal unique factor is that you do not create sub-folders for mail categories but use Googlersquos search technology on your content to select messages when you need to categorize your messages and find previous content It has a good spam filter Attachments are allowed

to be up 10 MB in sizeSean showed a free spyware control pro-

gram from wwwmlinnet It is called Startup Control Panel 28 It has many components that allow you to control your computer sys-tem and keep it clean of spyware and secure in operation

Lastly Sean showed the AnalogXcom website This is a site that has many free offerings There are currently 86 files and programs in the areas of Music Network Programming System and MP3 music files There are too many to list Stop by and look them over The price is right and so is the quality

Next Frank Herriott (that would be me) showed a few of his favorite web sites They are UtahCommuterLinkcom and the NOAA graphical weather forecasts site Commuting to Park City each day means a lot of time on the Interstates This website allows one to see the roads read of closures obtain current ac-cident information and travel time estimates As well I can see what Parleyrsquos Summit looks like before I ever leave my home or office The NOAA graphical forecasts are a differ-ent way of looking at weather forecasts and complement the regular weathercast infor-mation for me

Next I showed two sites that Don Nendell requested of me The first SearchAutomatorcom is home to a new search engine that reminds me of the meta-search engines that Mike Crawford showed to UCS This program takes that idea and really improves on it They have made a real powerful search engine that searches the mainstream search engines (Google Al-tavista Yahoo and so on) They arrange the results and allow you to select from catego-ries that group the search results in areas of html pages documents images sound clips and so on This is a really powerful method of searching the web and winnowing out the chaff Lastly we visited the Makau training site This was to show off the types of training materials they had to offer

UCS President Rick Gregory showed the Craigslist website to the group It started in 1995 in the Bay area and is now localized to most of the large cities in the US It became available for Salt Lake in September 2004 It is a very rich and complete listing of services such as jobs events wishlists classifieds public services and various other topics It re-ally defies a simple concise description Check it out at wwwsaltlakecitycraigslistorg

Larry Lamph talked about several of his favorite sites First was Salt Lake gas prices (wwwsaltlakegaspricescom) In brief it is a listing of the cheapest (and

highest) places to buy gas and diesel in the Salt Lake metro area You can also link to other areas in case you are traveling and want to gas up inexpensively on the road Larry next showed his favorite weather site wwwweathercom which features many different pieces of weather info Larry also quickly showed sites for Ghost Towns of Utah UFO Hunters of Utah DriverZone (for computer hardware drivers) Repair Clinic (for repair if just about anything) and TerraServercom which features pictures of the earth from space This last service has pictures of your neighborhood so you can see what your house (or your neighborrsquos or any street address) looks like

The May meeting was called to order by President Rick Gregory

Announcements and Open Access The meeting began with a message from

President Gregory about Freecycle and Salt Lake Recycle These two organizations both work to exchange or giveaway items you no longer want but do not wish to discard Search for them in Google to find out more

COMDEX has been cancelled for the Fall of 2005 This is the second year without a COMDEX show Show organizers say they are going to offer a show in 2006

Rick said that Microsoftrsquos Internet Explorer version 70 beta is to be released this summer Rick also talked about the recent security flaws in the new browser from Mozilla called Firefox Firefox has been getting patched immediately upon the disclosure of these security bugs

Rick reminded users again about the office supply store rebate programs Most purchases at Office Max Office Depot and Staples return a portion of the cost of the goods to the Utah Computer Society This is an easy way for members to support Utah Blue Chips Contact President Gregory if you have questions about the program

Wi-Max was discussed briefly It is a newer implementation of Wireless Network-ing which operates in the 24 GHz band at roughly twice the speed of 8211G or 108 megabits per second

SIGrsquos - UCS members should think about their SIG interests and pass them along to the UCS Board members At the April SUG meetings only the presenters showed up for the meetings If this effort is to be continued then members need to come to the meetings Needless to say it is discouraging for the presenters to prepare the meeting and then have no one show up for the session

Page 10 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Do you shop at Office Depot Office Max or

StaplesIf so use the following numbers for Blue Chips

to receive credit for your purchases

Office Depot Advantage1100058898

OfficeMax MaxPerks1026-77099

Staples Business Rewards34567 91452

Main PresentationGene Barlow of User Group Relations

(wwwusergroupstorecom) and his wife Linda came to present to the Utah Blue Chips Gene said that although he speaks to over one hundred user groups per year the Utah Computer Society feels like his ldquohome user grouprdquo to him The products that Gene talked about are available at his web site listed above at a discount to user group members

Gene Barlow and Dave Whittle who spoke to Utah Blue Chips ear-lier this year both have products listed at wwwusergroupstorecom Gene has product in the areas of computer organization secu-rity and backup Dave Whittle lists products for photo and video editing text and office editing and accessories for computers and mobile phones

Gene began with the Disk Director Suite 90 a tool to help you organize your hard disk drive(s) It has similar functionality to Partition Magic Gene feels that Disk Director has become a better and more useful product

Optimal Desktop Pro 40 is a powerful tool that combines the functions of a web browser (such as Internet Explorer) with the file manager (such as Windows Ex-plorer) and other functionality (RSS feed manager) all into one tool This lets you use one program to manage your local file system and web information seeking in one self contained package

Since many people are now upgrad-ing or migrating to newer more powerful PC systems today the next tool demon-strated Spearit Move Me 25 is a natural for minimizing the trouble of shifting to a new system It moves application programs configuration settings and data from an old computer to a new computer The elements moved are completely under your control This greatly reduces the pain of having to set up your new system all over again to get it

set up just the way you like it The program features an Exclude capability to mark pro-grams that you do not wish to move to your new system It also allows you to de-install old programs thereby cleaning up your systems This program is licensed to one computer the source machine It moves in-formation from the source system to another machine which is running the same version or a newer version of Windows It does not move to an older version of Windows than the one on the source system

Gene next talked about security prod-ucts from White Canyon Software My Password Vault is a program that allows you to consolidate all your passwords into one encrypted file and just have to remember one password A ldquoCopy and Pasterdquo process makes simple work of the need to use differ-ent passwords for each system Using one password over and over is a serious security hazard Secure Clean is a program that per-forms a selective overwrite of deleted files on your system so they cannot be recovered White Canyon Wipe DriveMedia Wiper is a program that completely obliterates all data on drives and removable media so you can safely discard them or sell or give them to another person Powerful data recovery pro-grams exist that can recover data you have merely ldquodeletedrdquo Wipe Drive allows you to feel confident you have really removed your data from disk drives and removable media (zip drives LS-120 drives tapes CD-RW etc)

Acronis Privacy Expert Suite 80 is a set of security products that help to keep your system free from spyware adware and annoying pop-ups This suite also in-cludes some disk wiping utilities It has an update service with an annual subscription charge

Spearit Associate This is a program that monitors your file associations and prevents them from being hi-jacked by other programs This approach is used to alter your selections at best and run mal-ware at worst

Gene took a minute to tell us about his training CD-ROMrsquos He has two CDrsquos which are instructional videorsquos showing you how to organize you hard disk drive and explains the system backup process and how to set up your backup and recovery process for fast and effective handling

The second part of Genersquos presentation covered Backup strategies and practices The frequency of backup all depends upon on how often your data is changed and what would be the ldquocostrdquo to you of re-entering the data since the last backup A typical scenario would be to backup your data daily and the full system on a weekly or monthly basis depending on how often it changed

CD-ROMrsquos and DVD-ROMrsquos were the new backup medium of choice just a few

years ago These were widely believed to have an archival shelf life of 25 years or more This is coming into serious question in the last year as many disks are failing even before 5 years have elapsed These are no longer a recommended long-term backup medium Cartridge tapes are widely used in the computer industry but are considered too expensive for home use

A new choice has appeared - hard disk drives These are long term becoming cheaper by the day and extremely fast when compared to optical or tape These can take the form of internal storage network storage or external disk drives

A backup strategy can take several forms One can use a file-oriented strategy This requires the operating system to be working in order to recover the data One can use a partition based copy utility This will be faster to write and recover from media It is a bit by bit copy of the original disk partition

Lastly one can use an Imaging pro-gram It can copy data in a full partition format or an incremental approach This is considered the optimal approach to save time and media (and money)

Lastly Gene used Acronis True Image 80 to illustrate the process of using imaging software to backup one of his disk partitions and how to recover files from it This method has the advantage of backing up even Linux disk partitions

Gene Barlow once again provided Utah Blue Chips with a timely topic and an inter-esting evening of computer talk

JulyRenewals

Preston Anderson David Bernhardt

Rick Gregory Stuart Gygi

LeRoy Johnson Jim Roberts

Robert B Stock

Page 11 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

CounterSpy HomeDetect and Protect Yourself Against SpywareDetect and Protect Yourself Against Spyware

Windows Review

Reviewed by Don Nendell

ManufacturerSunbelt Software USA(Americas Asia Pacifi c Rim)101 North Garden AvenueClearwater Florida USA 33755Tel 727-562-0101Tel 888-688-8457Fax 727-562-5199Sales salessunbelt-softwarecomCredit Card Tel 800-336-3166URL httpwwwsunbelt-softwarecom

buycfrnCost $1995 per machine (includes a one year

subscription with updates upgrades and real live human technical support)

Software Supportsupportsunbelt-softwarecom ltor visit

websitegtOn-Line Knowledge Basehttpwwwsunbelt-softwarecomSupport-

HomeOffi cecfrnTel 877-673-1153Minimum System Requirements

Windows 98SEMEXP2KPentium 11 Processor with 64MB24MB Hard Drive SpaceInternet Explorer 5 or Higher

Why choose CounterSpytrade

CounterSpy is a powerful anti-spy-ware tool that detects deletes and pro-tects your personal computer against recurring spyware threats from a broad range of malicious software Sunbelt Software claims ldquoYou can think of it as a lsquospy-wallrsquo that protects you in real-time [with] the best spyware database in the industry and the fast-est scan timesrdquo They go on to state that CounterSpy is the only anti-spyware that gets its regular spyware threat database updates from three different sources 1) Sunbeltrsquos own Spyware Research Team 2) CounterSpy users that are volunteer members of Counterspyrsquos ThreatNet Community and from 3) Microsoftrsquos Spyware Research Group

In order to effectively fi ght spyware you need a ldquocounterspyrdquo they say And possibly by sheer coincidence() their fl agship consumer product CounterSpy just might seem to fi ll that bill nicely now wouldnrsquot it

Note There are two versions of CounterSpy currently available through Sunbelt Software 1) CounterSpy for home users that works to protect a single computer and 2) CounterSpy Enter-prise which protects computers across an entire network Both can be ordered through their website and downloaded over an Internet connection which will allow you to have advanced protection installed and running on your PC within just a few minutes And also worthy of note each product comes with one yearrsquos worth of free maintenance upgrades and live tech support

According to PC World Counter-Spy has the best spyware database in the industry It was chosen as both PC WORLD ldquoWORLD CLASS 2005rdquo and ldquo2005 BEST BUYrdquo

Counterspy Flexibility

Spyware is a vicious fast-growing malig-nancy that can no longer be ignored It used to be that viruses received more public-ity than spyware because viruses move over the In-ternet so quickly throughout the world But Spyware is actually the more dangerous of the two and sadly the world is only just now really waking up to this plague Herersquos the bottom line If you value your per-sonal data at all - and protecting that data is of any importance to you - then you absolutely must repeat must use current and up-to-date versions of 1) An anti-virus software 2) A fi rewall and equally as importantly 3) An anti-spyware utility

The onset of any perceived trouble can be insidious and may actually be unobserved but when your computer fi nally does slow down or seems ultra-sluggish or it may seem like it has sud-

denly become possessed by pop-up ad-vertisements et al odds are excellent that spyware has infiltrated your system Anti-spyware utilities like CounterSpy will identify spyware on your hard disk help you remove it and protect your computer against new infections CounterSpy allows users to remove or even keep if desired spyware programs andor utilities on a case-by-case basis

More CounterSpy Defense Mechanisms

CounterSpy searches for 36 catego-ries of spyware Some examples are Tro-jans spyware adware malware hacker tools keyloggers and hijacker compo-nents Without anti-spyware utilities like CounterSpy spyware can lurk in the background waiting to be triggered by a user When triggered the spyware can steal passwords fi nancial data and personal information and literally anything it wants It can also open up backdoor entrances that hackers can use to manipulate your computer directly Which brings us face-to-face with my biggest problem and greatest fear of any of the spyware imfection(s)

Page 12 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

KeyloggersSunbelt Software warns us ldquoIf you

think spyware is just a nuisance then you are not familiar with the keylogger pro-grams that have made their way from the Internet to many peoplersquos home comput-ers in the last few years When people think about spyware they usually envi-sion those programs that lurk behind the scenes and post popup advertisements while users surf the Internet This type of spyware is annoying but keylogger spyware is downright dangerous

ldquoKeylogger spyware monitors every stroke of the keyboard you make on your computer That information is transmit-ted back to the spyware creator where hackers can analyze keystrokes for any information that they can use for nefarious purposes Passwords credit card numbers banking information and much more can be found buried within keylogger messages back to its creatorrdquo

Such is the case with the Desktop computer I am presently using to re-view CounterSpy In my initial Coun-terSpy scan it turned up four (4) pieces of spyware including two (2) very much dreaded Commercial Keyloggers embed-ded somewhere This is really scary to me personally as I have installed on this PC alone No-Adware Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE Personal SpywareBlaster Pandarsquos Platinum 2005 Internet Suite (with over 1058K virus signatures identified and protecting me with TruPrevent (See also my TruPrevent review in BCM June 2005 issue archives ltwwwucsorggt)) and a separate P2P LAN firewall manned

by IPCop Whorsquoda thunk itCaveat I must truthfully admit how-

ever that I hadnrsquot run any of the spyware programs for approximately 30 days - for some unknown reason Shame on me for being so slothful and careless

Also I had originally intended to run Spy Sweeper on this machine too but actually got started on this review of CounterSpy before I got to that point Pretty wide open here Irsquod say But then all-in-all it still is really surprising to me to come up with such a sick computer so fast Live and learn they say But then again isnrsquot that why I am supposedly do-ing these spyware reviews anyway - to help everybody out there in La-La land plus moi Truthfully if this opens even one eye and saves many others it will have been well worth the effort Silently I pray however it will make a big differ-ence to a great many persons

Heavens ldquoPhysician Heal Thyselfrdquo I keep scolding myself

Stopping Keylogger Spyware

The only way to stop keylogger (or any other) spyware is by installing (and m a i n t a i n i n g AND USING) a high-quality anti-spyware program in your PC Anti-spyware programs scan your hard

drive for spyware signatures buried deep within pro-gram files or hid-den amongst harm-less files on your hard drive Sunbelt Software advises us ldquoNo spyware is safe if you are running top-notch anti-spyware softwarerdquo ldquoCounterSpyrdquo they say - No doubt about it I would have to agree whole-

heartedly Remember ldquoHappiness is a working computerrdquo I keep saying Now I have a whole slew of spyware programs to guard my premises and perimeters Whew

Not Surprisingly - Enter Organized CyberCrime Stage Right and Left

Sunbelt Software warns us ldquoOr-ganized cybercrime has become one of the biggest challenges facing companies that specialize in protecting computers from viruses spyware and Trojans At one time the viruses that spread across the Internet were created by individuals who were more interested in notoriety than they were in crime Todayrsquos viruses are of a different breed Criminals have now realized that viruses can be used for much more than proving computer development skills Organized criminals can now create networks of lsquobotsrsquo that can be installed on vulnerable PCs and remotely controlled The word lsquobotrsquo re-ally means a personal computer owned by an unsuspecting home user that is now in reality owned by a hacker and can be used for their criminal goals Recent data shows that the number of IP addresses associated with lsquobotrsquo net-works has increased by more than 1000 percent in just one yearrdquo

It can happen to you me and any and everybody Actually no one is safe For example take a gander at this Herersquos the latest update on the subject of spyware By now we all are quite fa-miliar with The Salt Lake Tribune Sat-urday June 18 2005 front page story (plus every newspaper TV newscast

Page 13 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

etc in the world) which highlighted ldquoMillions at risk as data are hacked Cardholders Security is breached at a transaction company fraud could affect bank customersrdquo And on June 20 2005 at MSNBCcom ldquo40 million credit cards exposedrdquo as reported by Bob Sullivan who wrote ldquoMasterCard spokeswoman Sharon Gamsin said a computer virus was not to blame for the data theft She said she couldnrsquot provide details of how the systems were hacked but did say that lsquoan unauthorized entity put a spe-cific code into CardSystemsrsquo networkrsquo enabling the person or group to gain ac-cess to the datardquo Which was also duti-fully reported in InformationWeek June 20 2005 News Scan p 12 ldquo One gets the nagging feeling We havenrsquot yet seen the worst of itrdquo Amen

Fighting Organized CyberCrime and Spyware

To fight organized cybercrime and spyware both companies and individu-als need to utilize the best anti-virus and anti-malware utilities available Visit Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy Documents web site to learn more on how we can all get together to fight this crime wave Their CounterSpy Docu-ments URL is lthttpwwwsunbelt-softwarecomCounterSpy-docscfmgt Also please visit their Resource Li-brary for additional information on spyware and ldquoSpyware in the Newsrdquo The Resource Library URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomresource_librarycfmgt

Critically Important Visit Sun-belt Softwarersquos ThreatNet web site to actively participate in the spyware fight The ThreatNet URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomthreatnetcfmgt

So Whatrsquos It All About AlfieA few outside review comments are

in order here

ldquoSpyware Sneaks InIn a nationally-representative sur-

vey of more than 2000 households with at-home Internet access CR found that 36 percent reported that their home page had been changed - a common symptom of spyware Spyware isnrsquot a single type of software The term cov-ers a diverse range of applications Like spam spyware is often used by third-party marketers associated with reputable companies whose products they are hawking To avoid spyware Consumer Reports recommends that consumers

- Download and install software only from trusted online sources

- Adjust the Web browserrsquos security settings to the medium or high level

- Use updated antispyware software to scan the hard drive regularlyrdquo- Consumer Reports Consumer Reports Investigates How to Protect against Spam Spyware and Phishing Report Includes Survey Results Software Rat-ings and Tips to Avoid Online Hazards Such as ID Theft dated 892004

ldquoCounterSpy had the highest detec-tion rate in our tests The most effective scanner - CounterSpy - was also the fast-est taking only a minute to perform a complete scan of a system with 27 GB of data Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy proved the most capable of the bunch finding and stopping 93 percent of all the running processes created by our 45 test programsrdquo- PCWorld April 2005

Last HoorayCounterSpy has a couple more

features up their sleeves that are really ldquoKnock-Your-Socks-Offrdquo items System Tools - Secure File Eraser and System Tools - My PC Checkup The graphics tell it like it is

Overall Conclusion

Very seriously I have not actually intended for these two (2) BCM spyware reviews this month to be a ldquoWinner Take Allrdquo comparison of two (2) great spyware programs CounterSpy and Spy Sweep-er They are both simply ldquoAbsolutely Superiorrdquo companies and programs

and they deserve to be evaluated each on their own merits and by each and everyone of you out there individually They both are very inexpensive and they each have trialware downloads so you have absolutely nothing to lose by try-ing both of them Besides yoursquoll get a ldquosqueaky cleanrdquo PC out of the deal at least once in this or any other of your lifetimesFYI For further clarification purposes I would also like to add a comment from an article dated July 29 2004 I ran across on eWeekcom entitled SpyAdware The New Real Security Problem by Larry Seltzer He writes ldquoThere are a large number of programs to detect and remove the much larger number of attacks Since some of the best ones are free (asking for donations) it may be a good idea to run more than one rdquo To which I would further add ldquoThe lsquofreersquo ones donrsquot get all the dirt out either So lsquoGo for Brokersquo Getrsquoem all and then for sure be surerdquo

I am truly beholden to both com-panies for helping me to ldquoget the word out there as best I canrdquo about spyware spyware problems pitfalls and dangers and especially their own wonderful spy-ware programs Each company is doing an outstandingly admirable job in per-forming its part in the new now and en-suing battles of WWIII The CyberWar Thank you sincerely from the bottom of my heart Job ldquoWell Donerdquo

Talk about a powerhouse Internet-bound PC Irsquove got it all now ldquoHappi-ness Happiness Happinessrdquo

Ciao

Page 14 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Presidents CornerThoughts on Member Recruitment

To encourage word-of-mouth recruitment of new members an incentivereward program may be used One incentive would be the waiv-ing of membership dues for one year of any member who recruits a new paid membership Suggested guidelines include a limit of one waiver per year no waiver of multiple years for multiple new memberships and some method of formally attributing credit for the new membership

Use of flyers at community events could raise awareness of the organiza-tion Key features of the flyer are use of the word ldquofreerdquo ldquono experience neces-saryrdquo and no mention of any need for commitment such as annual member-ship dues A related method using post-ers would combine these features with artwork to catch a personrsquos attention and multicolored ink on heavy stock Plaster-ing an area within a half-hour drive of the meeting location in the days prior to a meeting requires coordination of members to come up with the most ef-fective and efficient advertising

Some organizations have ldquoopen housesrdquo to attract new members One variation on that for a computer group would be to hold ldquoComputer Tune-Upsrdquo for free The tune-ups could include virus and spyware scans disk defragmentation and perhaps even a selective backup to CD-R Whether these tune-ups could be held at com-munity events probably depends on the personal contacts available via current members

Expand the use of free newspaper and magazine items to promote these ldquoTune-Upsrdquo Creation of a press release both printed and electronic for distri-bution to calendar editors in a timely manner is essential Local community radio stations often provide assistance with the creation of Public Service An-nouncements and may reach an entirely new audience Local community access cable channels sometimes have scroll-ing calendars of local events Whether assistance with creation of a promo-tional video or 15-minute infomercial is available probably depends on the

local franchise agreement Lawn signs at high traffic locations with the monthly program feature may be effective if the message is concise enough to be read quickly from a distance

All of these suggestions have com-mon requirements Consistency Dedi-cation and Lots of Hard Work All mem-bers must be involved in these activities not just the Board or a single volunteer Itrsquos a case of many hands making light work The purpose of this advertising is to create awareness and kindle interest It requires Repetition and Saturation to build credibility and the appearance of solidarity

Although a Board may be able to oversee this operation a Recruiting Coordinator is strongly recommended This person would also maintain the list of potential members or the ldquoMaster Re-cruiting Listrdquo

My thanks to Pete Wex and Chris Pinkham for the articles from which these suggestions were adapted

-- Rick Gregory 2 June 2005

Mail to Membership Secretary PO Box 510811 SLC Utah 84151

MEMBERSHIP REGISTRATION New Renewal Update Mem ________ Name___________________________________________ Address_________________________________________ Home Phone (____)_________________________________________________________ Work Phone (____)__________ City_____________________State______Zip___________

E-Mail_Home_______________________________________________ E-Mail_Work________________________________________________Would you like to have E-mail about coming UCS user events Yes___ No____ If yes send to____________ Please enroll me with the Utah Computer Society Inc (Utah Blue Chips) PCUG as one of the below membership categories Business ($35)_____ Personal ($25)_______ Student ($10)_______ Senior Center ($10)_____ Family Member ($10) ____ Does not include magazine

Signature____________________________________ Date_______________ Check _________Cash______

Visa ____________________ Exp Date________MasterCharge __________________ Exp Date________

SIGsUnion Bldg

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Blue Chips mdash Utahrsquos Computer Guide in the 21st Century

Utah Blue Chips Calendar July August 2005

ADOBE

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

General Meeting

MagazineDeadline

U of U700pm

PICNIC

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Page 7: s Presentation Picnic in the Parks Presentation Picnic in the Park R.S.V.P. on our Website: UCS.ORG Page 2 Blue Chips Magazine —July 2005 y liff illward, ditor cliffm@xmission.com

Page 9 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Minutes from June amp May Meeting Memoranda

The June meeting was called to order by President Rick Gregory

Announcements and Open Access President Gregory began the announce-

ments by talking about the big change by Apple moving to use Intel chips in their hardware Evidently the Power PC chip was not available in the quantities that allowed Apple to meet the demand for their desktops and portable equipment

E911 has been approved by the FCC as a requirement for VoIP This is generally seen as a move by the mainstream phone com-panies to roadblock the movement of their customers to a newer phone technology It requires that VoIP providers develop a way of providing the callers location to a 911 system before they can offer service

Microsoft is supposed to roll out their new Software Update Service this month It has the acronym of WSUS

The Utah Computer Society Summer Picnic is scheduled for July 13 in Murray Park at the same pavilion we have used the last three years Please go to the UCS website and RSVP The picnic is free but donations will be accepted to help defray costs

Don Nendell talked about a free offer-ing he arranged for the members of UCS Makau Corporation offers training software to the public on a wide variety of topics Don arranged for members in attendance to re-ceive a card that would allow the bearer to download and run one training program from their library

Don also talked about a program called Search Automator which would be shown to members in the main presentation later that evening

Main PresentationThe program tonight is Useful Web

Sites as identified and presented by several members Sean Wolsey Frank Herriott Rick Gregory and Larry Lamph

The URLrsquos of the web sites to be talked about (and several others) were on a sheet passed out to attendees

Sean began by talking about Gmail This is a free mail service offered by Google It is still in a Beta mode so that memberships are by referral only at this time The amazing thing is that currently they are offering over two Gigabytes of free storage The principal unique factor is that you do not create sub-folders for mail categories but use Googlersquos search technology on your content to select messages when you need to categorize your messages and find previous content It has a good spam filter Attachments are allowed

to be up 10 MB in sizeSean showed a free spyware control pro-

gram from wwwmlinnet It is called Startup Control Panel 28 It has many components that allow you to control your computer sys-tem and keep it clean of spyware and secure in operation

Lastly Sean showed the AnalogXcom website This is a site that has many free offerings There are currently 86 files and programs in the areas of Music Network Programming System and MP3 music files There are too many to list Stop by and look them over The price is right and so is the quality

Next Frank Herriott (that would be me) showed a few of his favorite web sites They are UtahCommuterLinkcom and the NOAA graphical weather forecasts site Commuting to Park City each day means a lot of time on the Interstates This website allows one to see the roads read of closures obtain current ac-cident information and travel time estimates As well I can see what Parleyrsquos Summit looks like before I ever leave my home or office The NOAA graphical forecasts are a differ-ent way of looking at weather forecasts and complement the regular weathercast infor-mation for me

Next I showed two sites that Don Nendell requested of me The first SearchAutomatorcom is home to a new search engine that reminds me of the meta-search engines that Mike Crawford showed to UCS This program takes that idea and really improves on it They have made a real powerful search engine that searches the mainstream search engines (Google Al-tavista Yahoo and so on) They arrange the results and allow you to select from catego-ries that group the search results in areas of html pages documents images sound clips and so on This is a really powerful method of searching the web and winnowing out the chaff Lastly we visited the Makau training site This was to show off the types of training materials they had to offer

UCS President Rick Gregory showed the Craigslist website to the group It started in 1995 in the Bay area and is now localized to most of the large cities in the US It became available for Salt Lake in September 2004 It is a very rich and complete listing of services such as jobs events wishlists classifieds public services and various other topics It re-ally defies a simple concise description Check it out at wwwsaltlakecitycraigslistorg

Larry Lamph talked about several of his favorite sites First was Salt Lake gas prices (wwwsaltlakegaspricescom) In brief it is a listing of the cheapest (and

highest) places to buy gas and diesel in the Salt Lake metro area You can also link to other areas in case you are traveling and want to gas up inexpensively on the road Larry next showed his favorite weather site wwwweathercom which features many different pieces of weather info Larry also quickly showed sites for Ghost Towns of Utah UFO Hunters of Utah DriverZone (for computer hardware drivers) Repair Clinic (for repair if just about anything) and TerraServercom which features pictures of the earth from space This last service has pictures of your neighborhood so you can see what your house (or your neighborrsquos or any street address) looks like

The May meeting was called to order by President Rick Gregory

Announcements and Open Access The meeting began with a message from

President Gregory about Freecycle and Salt Lake Recycle These two organizations both work to exchange or giveaway items you no longer want but do not wish to discard Search for them in Google to find out more

COMDEX has been cancelled for the Fall of 2005 This is the second year without a COMDEX show Show organizers say they are going to offer a show in 2006

Rick said that Microsoftrsquos Internet Explorer version 70 beta is to be released this summer Rick also talked about the recent security flaws in the new browser from Mozilla called Firefox Firefox has been getting patched immediately upon the disclosure of these security bugs

Rick reminded users again about the office supply store rebate programs Most purchases at Office Max Office Depot and Staples return a portion of the cost of the goods to the Utah Computer Society This is an easy way for members to support Utah Blue Chips Contact President Gregory if you have questions about the program

Wi-Max was discussed briefly It is a newer implementation of Wireless Network-ing which operates in the 24 GHz band at roughly twice the speed of 8211G or 108 megabits per second

SIGrsquos - UCS members should think about their SIG interests and pass them along to the UCS Board members At the April SUG meetings only the presenters showed up for the meetings If this effort is to be continued then members need to come to the meetings Needless to say it is discouraging for the presenters to prepare the meeting and then have no one show up for the session

Page 10 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Do you shop at Office Depot Office Max or

StaplesIf so use the following numbers for Blue Chips

to receive credit for your purchases

Office Depot Advantage1100058898

OfficeMax MaxPerks1026-77099

Staples Business Rewards34567 91452

Main PresentationGene Barlow of User Group Relations

(wwwusergroupstorecom) and his wife Linda came to present to the Utah Blue Chips Gene said that although he speaks to over one hundred user groups per year the Utah Computer Society feels like his ldquohome user grouprdquo to him The products that Gene talked about are available at his web site listed above at a discount to user group members

Gene Barlow and Dave Whittle who spoke to Utah Blue Chips ear-lier this year both have products listed at wwwusergroupstorecom Gene has product in the areas of computer organization secu-rity and backup Dave Whittle lists products for photo and video editing text and office editing and accessories for computers and mobile phones

Gene began with the Disk Director Suite 90 a tool to help you organize your hard disk drive(s) It has similar functionality to Partition Magic Gene feels that Disk Director has become a better and more useful product

Optimal Desktop Pro 40 is a powerful tool that combines the functions of a web browser (such as Internet Explorer) with the file manager (such as Windows Ex-plorer) and other functionality (RSS feed manager) all into one tool This lets you use one program to manage your local file system and web information seeking in one self contained package

Since many people are now upgrad-ing or migrating to newer more powerful PC systems today the next tool demon-strated Spearit Move Me 25 is a natural for minimizing the trouble of shifting to a new system It moves application programs configuration settings and data from an old computer to a new computer The elements moved are completely under your control This greatly reduces the pain of having to set up your new system all over again to get it

set up just the way you like it The program features an Exclude capability to mark pro-grams that you do not wish to move to your new system It also allows you to de-install old programs thereby cleaning up your systems This program is licensed to one computer the source machine It moves in-formation from the source system to another machine which is running the same version or a newer version of Windows It does not move to an older version of Windows than the one on the source system

Gene next talked about security prod-ucts from White Canyon Software My Password Vault is a program that allows you to consolidate all your passwords into one encrypted file and just have to remember one password A ldquoCopy and Pasterdquo process makes simple work of the need to use differ-ent passwords for each system Using one password over and over is a serious security hazard Secure Clean is a program that per-forms a selective overwrite of deleted files on your system so they cannot be recovered White Canyon Wipe DriveMedia Wiper is a program that completely obliterates all data on drives and removable media so you can safely discard them or sell or give them to another person Powerful data recovery pro-grams exist that can recover data you have merely ldquodeletedrdquo Wipe Drive allows you to feel confident you have really removed your data from disk drives and removable media (zip drives LS-120 drives tapes CD-RW etc)

Acronis Privacy Expert Suite 80 is a set of security products that help to keep your system free from spyware adware and annoying pop-ups This suite also in-cludes some disk wiping utilities It has an update service with an annual subscription charge

Spearit Associate This is a program that monitors your file associations and prevents them from being hi-jacked by other programs This approach is used to alter your selections at best and run mal-ware at worst

Gene took a minute to tell us about his training CD-ROMrsquos He has two CDrsquos which are instructional videorsquos showing you how to organize you hard disk drive and explains the system backup process and how to set up your backup and recovery process for fast and effective handling

The second part of Genersquos presentation covered Backup strategies and practices The frequency of backup all depends upon on how often your data is changed and what would be the ldquocostrdquo to you of re-entering the data since the last backup A typical scenario would be to backup your data daily and the full system on a weekly or monthly basis depending on how often it changed

CD-ROMrsquos and DVD-ROMrsquos were the new backup medium of choice just a few

years ago These were widely believed to have an archival shelf life of 25 years or more This is coming into serious question in the last year as many disks are failing even before 5 years have elapsed These are no longer a recommended long-term backup medium Cartridge tapes are widely used in the computer industry but are considered too expensive for home use

A new choice has appeared - hard disk drives These are long term becoming cheaper by the day and extremely fast when compared to optical or tape These can take the form of internal storage network storage or external disk drives

A backup strategy can take several forms One can use a file-oriented strategy This requires the operating system to be working in order to recover the data One can use a partition based copy utility This will be faster to write and recover from media It is a bit by bit copy of the original disk partition

Lastly one can use an Imaging pro-gram It can copy data in a full partition format or an incremental approach This is considered the optimal approach to save time and media (and money)

Lastly Gene used Acronis True Image 80 to illustrate the process of using imaging software to backup one of his disk partitions and how to recover files from it This method has the advantage of backing up even Linux disk partitions

Gene Barlow once again provided Utah Blue Chips with a timely topic and an inter-esting evening of computer talk

JulyRenewals

Preston Anderson David Bernhardt

Rick Gregory Stuart Gygi

LeRoy Johnson Jim Roberts

Robert B Stock

Page 11 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

CounterSpy HomeDetect and Protect Yourself Against SpywareDetect and Protect Yourself Against Spyware

Windows Review

Reviewed by Don Nendell

ManufacturerSunbelt Software USA(Americas Asia Pacifi c Rim)101 North Garden AvenueClearwater Florida USA 33755Tel 727-562-0101Tel 888-688-8457Fax 727-562-5199Sales salessunbelt-softwarecomCredit Card Tel 800-336-3166URL httpwwwsunbelt-softwarecom

buycfrnCost $1995 per machine (includes a one year

subscription with updates upgrades and real live human technical support)

Software Supportsupportsunbelt-softwarecom ltor visit

websitegtOn-Line Knowledge Basehttpwwwsunbelt-softwarecomSupport-

HomeOffi cecfrnTel 877-673-1153Minimum System Requirements

Windows 98SEMEXP2KPentium 11 Processor with 64MB24MB Hard Drive SpaceInternet Explorer 5 or Higher

Why choose CounterSpytrade

CounterSpy is a powerful anti-spy-ware tool that detects deletes and pro-tects your personal computer against recurring spyware threats from a broad range of malicious software Sunbelt Software claims ldquoYou can think of it as a lsquospy-wallrsquo that protects you in real-time [with] the best spyware database in the industry and the fast-est scan timesrdquo They go on to state that CounterSpy is the only anti-spyware that gets its regular spyware threat database updates from three different sources 1) Sunbeltrsquos own Spyware Research Team 2) CounterSpy users that are volunteer members of Counterspyrsquos ThreatNet Community and from 3) Microsoftrsquos Spyware Research Group

In order to effectively fi ght spyware you need a ldquocounterspyrdquo they say And possibly by sheer coincidence() their fl agship consumer product CounterSpy just might seem to fi ll that bill nicely now wouldnrsquot it

Note There are two versions of CounterSpy currently available through Sunbelt Software 1) CounterSpy for home users that works to protect a single computer and 2) CounterSpy Enter-prise which protects computers across an entire network Both can be ordered through their website and downloaded over an Internet connection which will allow you to have advanced protection installed and running on your PC within just a few minutes And also worthy of note each product comes with one yearrsquos worth of free maintenance upgrades and live tech support

According to PC World Counter-Spy has the best spyware database in the industry It was chosen as both PC WORLD ldquoWORLD CLASS 2005rdquo and ldquo2005 BEST BUYrdquo

Counterspy Flexibility

Spyware is a vicious fast-growing malig-nancy that can no longer be ignored It used to be that viruses received more public-ity than spyware because viruses move over the In-ternet so quickly throughout the world But Spyware is actually the more dangerous of the two and sadly the world is only just now really waking up to this plague Herersquos the bottom line If you value your per-sonal data at all - and protecting that data is of any importance to you - then you absolutely must repeat must use current and up-to-date versions of 1) An anti-virus software 2) A fi rewall and equally as importantly 3) An anti-spyware utility

The onset of any perceived trouble can be insidious and may actually be unobserved but when your computer fi nally does slow down or seems ultra-sluggish or it may seem like it has sud-

denly become possessed by pop-up ad-vertisements et al odds are excellent that spyware has infiltrated your system Anti-spyware utilities like CounterSpy will identify spyware on your hard disk help you remove it and protect your computer against new infections CounterSpy allows users to remove or even keep if desired spyware programs andor utilities on a case-by-case basis

More CounterSpy Defense Mechanisms

CounterSpy searches for 36 catego-ries of spyware Some examples are Tro-jans spyware adware malware hacker tools keyloggers and hijacker compo-nents Without anti-spyware utilities like CounterSpy spyware can lurk in the background waiting to be triggered by a user When triggered the spyware can steal passwords fi nancial data and personal information and literally anything it wants It can also open up backdoor entrances that hackers can use to manipulate your computer directly Which brings us face-to-face with my biggest problem and greatest fear of any of the spyware imfection(s)

Page 12 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

KeyloggersSunbelt Software warns us ldquoIf you

think spyware is just a nuisance then you are not familiar with the keylogger pro-grams that have made their way from the Internet to many peoplersquos home comput-ers in the last few years When people think about spyware they usually envi-sion those programs that lurk behind the scenes and post popup advertisements while users surf the Internet This type of spyware is annoying but keylogger spyware is downright dangerous

ldquoKeylogger spyware monitors every stroke of the keyboard you make on your computer That information is transmit-ted back to the spyware creator where hackers can analyze keystrokes for any information that they can use for nefarious purposes Passwords credit card numbers banking information and much more can be found buried within keylogger messages back to its creatorrdquo

Such is the case with the Desktop computer I am presently using to re-view CounterSpy In my initial Coun-terSpy scan it turned up four (4) pieces of spyware including two (2) very much dreaded Commercial Keyloggers embed-ded somewhere This is really scary to me personally as I have installed on this PC alone No-Adware Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE Personal SpywareBlaster Pandarsquos Platinum 2005 Internet Suite (with over 1058K virus signatures identified and protecting me with TruPrevent (See also my TruPrevent review in BCM June 2005 issue archives ltwwwucsorggt)) and a separate P2P LAN firewall manned

by IPCop Whorsquoda thunk itCaveat I must truthfully admit how-

ever that I hadnrsquot run any of the spyware programs for approximately 30 days - for some unknown reason Shame on me for being so slothful and careless

Also I had originally intended to run Spy Sweeper on this machine too but actually got started on this review of CounterSpy before I got to that point Pretty wide open here Irsquod say But then all-in-all it still is really surprising to me to come up with such a sick computer so fast Live and learn they say But then again isnrsquot that why I am supposedly do-ing these spyware reviews anyway - to help everybody out there in La-La land plus moi Truthfully if this opens even one eye and saves many others it will have been well worth the effort Silently I pray however it will make a big differ-ence to a great many persons

Heavens ldquoPhysician Heal Thyselfrdquo I keep scolding myself

Stopping Keylogger Spyware

The only way to stop keylogger (or any other) spyware is by installing (and m a i n t a i n i n g AND USING) a high-quality anti-spyware program in your PC Anti-spyware programs scan your hard

drive for spyware signatures buried deep within pro-gram files or hid-den amongst harm-less files on your hard drive Sunbelt Software advises us ldquoNo spyware is safe if you are running top-notch anti-spyware softwarerdquo ldquoCounterSpyrdquo they say - No doubt about it I would have to agree whole-

heartedly Remember ldquoHappiness is a working computerrdquo I keep saying Now I have a whole slew of spyware programs to guard my premises and perimeters Whew

Not Surprisingly - Enter Organized CyberCrime Stage Right and Left

Sunbelt Software warns us ldquoOr-ganized cybercrime has become one of the biggest challenges facing companies that specialize in protecting computers from viruses spyware and Trojans At one time the viruses that spread across the Internet were created by individuals who were more interested in notoriety than they were in crime Todayrsquos viruses are of a different breed Criminals have now realized that viruses can be used for much more than proving computer development skills Organized criminals can now create networks of lsquobotsrsquo that can be installed on vulnerable PCs and remotely controlled The word lsquobotrsquo re-ally means a personal computer owned by an unsuspecting home user that is now in reality owned by a hacker and can be used for their criminal goals Recent data shows that the number of IP addresses associated with lsquobotrsquo net-works has increased by more than 1000 percent in just one yearrdquo

It can happen to you me and any and everybody Actually no one is safe For example take a gander at this Herersquos the latest update on the subject of spyware By now we all are quite fa-miliar with The Salt Lake Tribune Sat-urday June 18 2005 front page story (plus every newspaper TV newscast

Page 13 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

etc in the world) which highlighted ldquoMillions at risk as data are hacked Cardholders Security is breached at a transaction company fraud could affect bank customersrdquo And on June 20 2005 at MSNBCcom ldquo40 million credit cards exposedrdquo as reported by Bob Sullivan who wrote ldquoMasterCard spokeswoman Sharon Gamsin said a computer virus was not to blame for the data theft She said she couldnrsquot provide details of how the systems were hacked but did say that lsquoan unauthorized entity put a spe-cific code into CardSystemsrsquo networkrsquo enabling the person or group to gain ac-cess to the datardquo Which was also duti-fully reported in InformationWeek June 20 2005 News Scan p 12 ldquo One gets the nagging feeling We havenrsquot yet seen the worst of itrdquo Amen

Fighting Organized CyberCrime and Spyware

To fight organized cybercrime and spyware both companies and individu-als need to utilize the best anti-virus and anti-malware utilities available Visit Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy Documents web site to learn more on how we can all get together to fight this crime wave Their CounterSpy Docu-ments URL is lthttpwwwsunbelt-softwarecomCounterSpy-docscfmgt Also please visit their Resource Li-brary for additional information on spyware and ldquoSpyware in the Newsrdquo The Resource Library URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomresource_librarycfmgt

Critically Important Visit Sun-belt Softwarersquos ThreatNet web site to actively participate in the spyware fight The ThreatNet URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomthreatnetcfmgt

So Whatrsquos It All About AlfieA few outside review comments are

in order here

ldquoSpyware Sneaks InIn a nationally-representative sur-

vey of more than 2000 households with at-home Internet access CR found that 36 percent reported that their home page had been changed - a common symptom of spyware Spyware isnrsquot a single type of software The term cov-ers a diverse range of applications Like spam spyware is often used by third-party marketers associated with reputable companies whose products they are hawking To avoid spyware Consumer Reports recommends that consumers

- Download and install software only from trusted online sources

- Adjust the Web browserrsquos security settings to the medium or high level

- Use updated antispyware software to scan the hard drive regularlyrdquo- Consumer Reports Consumer Reports Investigates How to Protect against Spam Spyware and Phishing Report Includes Survey Results Software Rat-ings and Tips to Avoid Online Hazards Such as ID Theft dated 892004

ldquoCounterSpy had the highest detec-tion rate in our tests The most effective scanner - CounterSpy - was also the fast-est taking only a minute to perform a complete scan of a system with 27 GB of data Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy proved the most capable of the bunch finding and stopping 93 percent of all the running processes created by our 45 test programsrdquo- PCWorld April 2005

Last HoorayCounterSpy has a couple more

features up their sleeves that are really ldquoKnock-Your-Socks-Offrdquo items System Tools - Secure File Eraser and System Tools - My PC Checkup The graphics tell it like it is

Overall Conclusion

Very seriously I have not actually intended for these two (2) BCM spyware reviews this month to be a ldquoWinner Take Allrdquo comparison of two (2) great spyware programs CounterSpy and Spy Sweep-er They are both simply ldquoAbsolutely Superiorrdquo companies and programs

and they deserve to be evaluated each on their own merits and by each and everyone of you out there individually They both are very inexpensive and they each have trialware downloads so you have absolutely nothing to lose by try-ing both of them Besides yoursquoll get a ldquosqueaky cleanrdquo PC out of the deal at least once in this or any other of your lifetimesFYI For further clarification purposes I would also like to add a comment from an article dated July 29 2004 I ran across on eWeekcom entitled SpyAdware The New Real Security Problem by Larry Seltzer He writes ldquoThere are a large number of programs to detect and remove the much larger number of attacks Since some of the best ones are free (asking for donations) it may be a good idea to run more than one rdquo To which I would further add ldquoThe lsquofreersquo ones donrsquot get all the dirt out either So lsquoGo for Brokersquo Getrsquoem all and then for sure be surerdquo

I am truly beholden to both com-panies for helping me to ldquoget the word out there as best I canrdquo about spyware spyware problems pitfalls and dangers and especially their own wonderful spy-ware programs Each company is doing an outstandingly admirable job in per-forming its part in the new now and en-suing battles of WWIII The CyberWar Thank you sincerely from the bottom of my heart Job ldquoWell Donerdquo

Talk about a powerhouse Internet-bound PC Irsquove got it all now ldquoHappi-ness Happiness Happinessrdquo

Ciao

Page 14 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Presidents CornerThoughts on Member Recruitment

To encourage word-of-mouth recruitment of new members an incentivereward program may be used One incentive would be the waiv-ing of membership dues for one year of any member who recruits a new paid membership Suggested guidelines include a limit of one waiver per year no waiver of multiple years for multiple new memberships and some method of formally attributing credit for the new membership

Use of flyers at community events could raise awareness of the organiza-tion Key features of the flyer are use of the word ldquofreerdquo ldquono experience neces-saryrdquo and no mention of any need for commitment such as annual member-ship dues A related method using post-ers would combine these features with artwork to catch a personrsquos attention and multicolored ink on heavy stock Plaster-ing an area within a half-hour drive of the meeting location in the days prior to a meeting requires coordination of members to come up with the most ef-fective and efficient advertising

Some organizations have ldquoopen housesrdquo to attract new members One variation on that for a computer group would be to hold ldquoComputer Tune-Upsrdquo for free The tune-ups could include virus and spyware scans disk defragmentation and perhaps even a selective backup to CD-R Whether these tune-ups could be held at com-munity events probably depends on the personal contacts available via current members

Expand the use of free newspaper and magazine items to promote these ldquoTune-Upsrdquo Creation of a press release both printed and electronic for distri-bution to calendar editors in a timely manner is essential Local community radio stations often provide assistance with the creation of Public Service An-nouncements and may reach an entirely new audience Local community access cable channels sometimes have scroll-ing calendars of local events Whether assistance with creation of a promo-tional video or 15-minute infomercial is available probably depends on the

local franchise agreement Lawn signs at high traffic locations with the monthly program feature may be effective if the message is concise enough to be read quickly from a distance

All of these suggestions have com-mon requirements Consistency Dedi-cation and Lots of Hard Work All mem-bers must be involved in these activities not just the Board or a single volunteer Itrsquos a case of many hands making light work The purpose of this advertising is to create awareness and kindle interest It requires Repetition and Saturation to build credibility and the appearance of solidarity

Although a Board may be able to oversee this operation a Recruiting Coordinator is strongly recommended This person would also maintain the list of potential members or the ldquoMaster Re-cruiting Listrdquo

My thanks to Pete Wex and Chris Pinkham for the articles from which these suggestions were adapted

-- Rick Gregory 2 June 2005

Mail to Membership Secretary PO Box 510811 SLC Utah 84151

MEMBERSHIP REGISTRATION New Renewal Update Mem ________ Name___________________________________________ Address_________________________________________ Home Phone (____)_________________________________________________________ Work Phone (____)__________ City_____________________State______Zip___________

E-Mail_Home_______________________________________________ E-Mail_Work________________________________________________Would you like to have E-mail about coming UCS user events Yes___ No____ If yes send to____________ Please enroll me with the Utah Computer Society Inc (Utah Blue Chips) PCUG as one of the below membership categories Business ($35)_____ Personal ($25)_______ Student ($10)_______ Senior Center ($10)_____ Family Member ($10) ____ Does not include magazine

Signature____________________________________ Date_______________ Check _________Cash______

Visa ____________________ Exp Date________MasterCharge __________________ Exp Date________

SIGsUnion Bldg

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Blue Chips mdash Utahrsquos Computer Guide in the 21st Century

Utah Blue Chips Calendar July August 2005

ADOBE

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

General Meeting

MagazineDeadline

U of U700pm

PICNIC

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Page 8: s Presentation Picnic in the Parks Presentation Picnic in the Park R.S.V.P. on our Website: UCS.ORG Page 2 Blue Chips Magazine —July 2005 y liff illward, ditor cliffm@xmission.com

Page 10 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Do you shop at Office Depot Office Max or

StaplesIf so use the following numbers for Blue Chips

to receive credit for your purchases

Office Depot Advantage1100058898

OfficeMax MaxPerks1026-77099

Staples Business Rewards34567 91452

Main PresentationGene Barlow of User Group Relations

(wwwusergroupstorecom) and his wife Linda came to present to the Utah Blue Chips Gene said that although he speaks to over one hundred user groups per year the Utah Computer Society feels like his ldquohome user grouprdquo to him The products that Gene talked about are available at his web site listed above at a discount to user group members

Gene Barlow and Dave Whittle who spoke to Utah Blue Chips ear-lier this year both have products listed at wwwusergroupstorecom Gene has product in the areas of computer organization secu-rity and backup Dave Whittle lists products for photo and video editing text and office editing and accessories for computers and mobile phones

Gene began with the Disk Director Suite 90 a tool to help you organize your hard disk drive(s) It has similar functionality to Partition Magic Gene feels that Disk Director has become a better and more useful product

Optimal Desktop Pro 40 is a powerful tool that combines the functions of a web browser (such as Internet Explorer) with the file manager (such as Windows Ex-plorer) and other functionality (RSS feed manager) all into one tool This lets you use one program to manage your local file system and web information seeking in one self contained package

Since many people are now upgrad-ing or migrating to newer more powerful PC systems today the next tool demon-strated Spearit Move Me 25 is a natural for minimizing the trouble of shifting to a new system It moves application programs configuration settings and data from an old computer to a new computer The elements moved are completely under your control This greatly reduces the pain of having to set up your new system all over again to get it

set up just the way you like it The program features an Exclude capability to mark pro-grams that you do not wish to move to your new system It also allows you to de-install old programs thereby cleaning up your systems This program is licensed to one computer the source machine It moves in-formation from the source system to another machine which is running the same version or a newer version of Windows It does not move to an older version of Windows than the one on the source system

Gene next talked about security prod-ucts from White Canyon Software My Password Vault is a program that allows you to consolidate all your passwords into one encrypted file and just have to remember one password A ldquoCopy and Pasterdquo process makes simple work of the need to use differ-ent passwords for each system Using one password over and over is a serious security hazard Secure Clean is a program that per-forms a selective overwrite of deleted files on your system so they cannot be recovered White Canyon Wipe DriveMedia Wiper is a program that completely obliterates all data on drives and removable media so you can safely discard them or sell or give them to another person Powerful data recovery pro-grams exist that can recover data you have merely ldquodeletedrdquo Wipe Drive allows you to feel confident you have really removed your data from disk drives and removable media (zip drives LS-120 drives tapes CD-RW etc)

Acronis Privacy Expert Suite 80 is a set of security products that help to keep your system free from spyware adware and annoying pop-ups This suite also in-cludes some disk wiping utilities It has an update service with an annual subscription charge

Spearit Associate This is a program that monitors your file associations and prevents them from being hi-jacked by other programs This approach is used to alter your selections at best and run mal-ware at worst

Gene took a minute to tell us about his training CD-ROMrsquos He has two CDrsquos which are instructional videorsquos showing you how to organize you hard disk drive and explains the system backup process and how to set up your backup and recovery process for fast and effective handling

The second part of Genersquos presentation covered Backup strategies and practices The frequency of backup all depends upon on how often your data is changed and what would be the ldquocostrdquo to you of re-entering the data since the last backup A typical scenario would be to backup your data daily and the full system on a weekly or monthly basis depending on how often it changed

CD-ROMrsquos and DVD-ROMrsquos were the new backup medium of choice just a few

years ago These were widely believed to have an archival shelf life of 25 years or more This is coming into serious question in the last year as many disks are failing even before 5 years have elapsed These are no longer a recommended long-term backup medium Cartridge tapes are widely used in the computer industry but are considered too expensive for home use

A new choice has appeared - hard disk drives These are long term becoming cheaper by the day and extremely fast when compared to optical or tape These can take the form of internal storage network storage or external disk drives

A backup strategy can take several forms One can use a file-oriented strategy This requires the operating system to be working in order to recover the data One can use a partition based copy utility This will be faster to write and recover from media It is a bit by bit copy of the original disk partition

Lastly one can use an Imaging pro-gram It can copy data in a full partition format or an incremental approach This is considered the optimal approach to save time and media (and money)

Lastly Gene used Acronis True Image 80 to illustrate the process of using imaging software to backup one of his disk partitions and how to recover files from it This method has the advantage of backing up even Linux disk partitions

Gene Barlow once again provided Utah Blue Chips with a timely topic and an inter-esting evening of computer talk

JulyRenewals

Preston Anderson David Bernhardt

Rick Gregory Stuart Gygi

LeRoy Johnson Jim Roberts

Robert B Stock

Page 11 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

CounterSpy HomeDetect and Protect Yourself Against SpywareDetect and Protect Yourself Against Spyware

Windows Review

Reviewed by Don Nendell

ManufacturerSunbelt Software USA(Americas Asia Pacifi c Rim)101 North Garden AvenueClearwater Florida USA 33755Tel 727-562-0101Tel 888-688-8457Fax 727-562-5199Sales salessunbelt-softwarecomCredit Card Tel 800-336-3166URL httpwwwsunbelt-softwarecom

buycfrnCost $1995 per machine (includes a one year

subscription with updates upgrades and real live human technical support)

Software Supportsupportsunbelt-softwarecom ltor visit

websitegtOn-Line Knowledge Basehttpwwwsunbelt-softwarecomSupport-

HomeOffi cecfrnTel 877-673-1153Minimum System Requirements

Windows 98SEMEXP2KPentium 11 Processor with 64MB24MB Hard Drive SpaceInternet Explorer 5 or Higher

Why choose CounterSpytrade

CounterSpy is a powerful anti-spy-ware tool that detects deletes and pro-tects your personal computer against recurring spyware threats from a broad range of malicious software Sunbelt Software claims ldquoYou can think of it as a lsquospy-wallrsquo that protects you in real-time [with] the best spyware database in the industry and the fast-est scan timesrdquo They go on to state that CounterSpy is the only anti-spyware that gets its regular spyware threat database updates from three different sources 1) Sunbeltrsquos own Spyware Research Team 2) CounterSpy users that are volunteer members of Counterspyrsquos ThreatNet Community and from 3) Microsoftrsquos Spyware Research Group

In order to effectively fi ght spyware you need a ldquocounterspyrdquo they say And possibly by sheer coincidence() their fl agship consumer product CounterSpy just might seem to fi ll that bill nicely now wouldnrsquot it

Note There are two versions of CounterSpy currently available through Sunbelt Software 1) CounterSpy for home users that works to protect a single computer and 2) CounterSpy Enter-prise which protects computers across an entire network Both can be ordered through their website and downloaded over an Internet connection which will allow you to have advanced protection installed and running on your PC within just a few minutes And also worthy of note each product comes with one yearrsquos worth of free maintenance upgrades and live tech support

According to PC World Counter-Spy has the best spyware database in the industry It was chosen as both PC WORLD ldquoWORLD CLASS 2005rdquo and ldquo2005 BEST BUYrdquo

Counterspy Flexibility

Spyware is a vicious fast-growing malig-nancy that can no longer be ignored It used to be that viruses received more public-ity than spyware because viruses move over the In-ternet so quickly throughout the world But Spyware is actually the more dangerous of the two and sadly the world is only just now really waking up to this plague Herersquos the bottom line If you value your per-sonal data at all - and protecting that data is of any importance to you - then you absolutely must repeat must use current and up-to-date versions of 1) An anti-virus software 2) A fi rewall and equally as importantly 3) An anti-spyware utility

The onset of any perceived trouble can be insidious and may actually be unobserved but when your computer fi nally does slow down or seems ultra-sluggish or it may seem like it has sud-

denly become possessed by pop-up ad-vertisements et al odds are excellent that spyware has infiltrated your system Anti-spyware utilities like CounterSpy will identify spyware on your hard disk help you remove it and protect your computer against new infections CounterSpy allows users to remove or even keep if desired spyware programs andor utilities on a case-by-case basis

More CounterSpy Defense Mechanisms

CounterSpy searches for 36 catego-ries of spyware Some examples are Tro-jans spyware adware malware hacker tools keyloggers and hijacker compo-nents Without anti-spyware utilities like CounterSpy spyware can lurk in the background waiting to be triggered by a user When triggered the spyware can steal passwords fi nancial data and personal information and literally anything it wants It can also open up backdoor entrances that hackers can use to manipulate your computer directly Which brings us face-to-face with my biggest problem and greatest fear of any of the spyware imfection(s)

Page 12 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

KeyloggersSunbelt Software warns us ldquoIf you

think spyware is just a nuisance then you are not familiar with the keylogger pro-grams that have made their way from the Internet to many peoplersquos home comput-ers in the last few years When people think about spyware they usually envi-sion those programs that lurk behind the scenes and post popup advertisements while users surf the Internet This type of spyware is annoying but keylogger spyware is downright dangerous

ldquoKeylogger spyware monitors every stroke of the keyboard you make on your computer That information is transmit-ted back to the spyware creator where hackers can analyze keystrokes for any information that they can use for nefarious purposes Passwords credit card numbers banking information and much more can be found buried within keylogger messages back to its creatorrdquo

Such is the case with the Desktop computer I am presently using to re-view CounterSpy In my initial Coun-terSpy scan it turned up four (4) pieces of spyware including two (2) very much dreaded Commercial Keyloggers embed-ded somewhere This is really scary to me personally as I have installed on this PC alone No-Adware Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE Personal SpywareBlaster Pandarsquos Platinum 2005 Internet Suite (with over 1058K virus signatures identified and protecting me with TruPrevent (See also my TruPrevent review in BCM June 2005 issue archives ltwwwucsorggt)) and a separate P2P LAN firewall manned

by IPCop Whorsquoda thunk itCaveat I must truthfully admit how-

ever that I hadnrsquot run any of the spyware programs for approximately 30 days - for some unknown reason Shame on me for being so slothful and careless

Also I had originally intended to run Spy Sweeper on this machine too but actually got started on this review of CounterSpy before I got to that point Pretty wide open here Irsquod say But then all-in-all it still is really surprising to me to come up with such a sick computer so fast Live and learn they say But then again isnrsquot that why I am supposedly do-ing these spyware reviews anyway - to help everybody out there in La-La land plus moi Truthfully if this opens even one eye and saves many others it will have been well worth the effort Silently I pray however it will make a big differ-ence to a great many persons

Heavens ldquoPhysician Heal Thyselfrdquo I keep scolding myself

Stopping Keylogger Spyware

The only way to stop keylogger (or any other) spyware is by installing (and m a i n t a i n i n g AND USING) a high-quality anti-spyware program in your PC Anti-spyware programs scan your hard

drive for spyware signatures buried deep within pro-gram files or hid-den amongst harm-less files on your hard drive Sunbelt Software advises us ldquoNo spyware is safe if you are running top-notch anti-spyware softwarerdquo ldquoCounterSpyrdquo they say - No doubt about it I would have to agree whole-

heartedly Remember ldquoHappiness is a working computerrdquo I keep saying Now I have a whole slew of spyware programs to guard my premises and perimeters Whew

Not Surprisingly - Enter Organized CyberCrime Stage Right and Left

Sunbelt Software warns us ldquoOr-ganized cybercrime has become one of the biggest challenges facing companies that specialize in protecting computers from viruses spyware and Trojans At one time the viruses that spread across the Internet were created by individuals who were more interested in notoriety than they were in crime Todayrsquos viruses are of a different breed Criminals have now realized that viruses can be used for much more than proving computer development skills Organized criminals can now create networks of lsquobotsrsquo that can be installed on vulnerable PCs and remotely controlled The word lsquobotrsquo re-ally means a personal computer owned by an unsuspecting home user that is now in reality owned by a hacker and can be used for their criminal goals Recent data shows that the number of IP addresses associated with lsquobotrsquo net-works has increased by more than 1000 percent in just one yearrdquo

It can happen to you me and any and everybody Actually no one is safe For example take a gander at this Herersquos the latest update on the subject of spyware By now we all are quite fa-miliar with The Salt Lake Tribune Sat-urday June 18 2005 front page story (plus every newspaper TV newscast

Page 13 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

etc in the world) which highlighted ldquoMillions at risk as data are hacked Cardholders Security is breached at a transaction company fraud could affect bank customersrdquo And on June 20 2005 at MSNBCcom ldquo40 million credit cards exposedrdquo as reported by Bob Sullivan who wrote ldquoMasterCard spokeswoman Sharon Gamsin said a computer virus was not to blame for the data theft She said she couldnrsquot provide details of how the systems were hacked but did say that lsquoan unauthorized entity put a spe-cific code into CardSystemsrsquo networkrsquo enabling the person or group to gain ac-cess to the datardquo Which was also duti-fully reported in InformationWeek June 20 2005 News Scan p 12 ldquo One gets the nagging feeling We havenrsquot yet seen the worst of itrdquo Amen

Fighting Organized CyberCrime and Spyware

To fight organized cybercrime and spyware both companies and individu-als need to utilize the best anti-virus and anti-malware utilities available Visit Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy Documents web site to learn more on how we can all get together to fight this crime wave Their CounterSpy Docu-ments URL is lthttpwwwsunbelt-softwarecomCounterSpy-docscfmgt Also please visit their Resource Li-brary for additional information on spyware and ldquoSpyware in the Newsrdquo The Resource Library URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomresource_librarycfmgt

Critically Important Visit Sun-belt Softwarersquos ThreatNet web site to actively participate in the spyware fight The ThreatNet URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomthreatnetcfmgt

So Whatrsquos It All About AlfieA few outside review comments are

in order here

ldquoSpyware Sneaks InIn a nationally-representative sur-

vey of more than 2000 households with at-home Internet access CR found that 36 percent reported that their home page had been changed - a common symptom of spyware Spyware isnrsquot a single type of software The term cov-ers a diverse range of applications Like spam spyware is often used by third-party marketers associated with reputable companies whose products they are hawking To avoid spyware Consumer Reports recommends that consumers

- Download and install software only from trusted online sources

- Adjust the Web browserrsquos security settings to the medium or high level

- Use updated antispyware software to scan the hard drive regularlyrdquo- Consumer Reports Consumer Reports Investigates How to Protect against Spam Spyware and Phishing Report Includes Survey Results Software Rat-ings and Tips to Avoid Online Hazards Such as ID Theft dated 892004

ldquoCounterSpy had the highest detec-tion rate in our tests The most effective scanner - CounterSpy - was also the fast-est taking only a minute to perform a complete scan of a system with 27 GB of data Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy proved the most capable of the bunch finding and stopping 93 percent of all the running processes created by our 45 test programsrdquo- PCWorld April 2005

Last HoorayCounterSpy has a couple more

features up their sleeves that are really ldquoKnock-Your-Socks-Offrdquo items System Tools - Secure File Eraser and System Tools - My PC Checkup The graphics tell it like it is

Overall Conclusion

Very seriously I have not actually intended for these two (2) BCM spyware reviews this month to be a ldquoWinner Take Allrdquo comparison of two (2) great spyware programs CounterSpy and Spy Sweep-er They are both simply ldquoAbsolutely Superiorrdquo companies and programs

and they deserve to be evaluated each on their own merits and by each and everyone of you out there individually They both are very inexpensive and they each have trialware downloads so you have absolutely nothing to lose by try-ing both of them Besides yoursquoll get a ldquosqueaky cleanrdquo PC out of the deal at least once in this or any other of your lifetimesFYI For further clarification purposes I would also like to add a comment from an article dated July 29 2004 I ran across on eWeekcom entitled SpyAdware The New Real Security Problem by Larry Seltzer He writes ldquoThere are a large number of programs to detect and remove the much larger number of attacks Since some of the best ones are free (asking for donations) it may be a good idea to run more than one rdquo To which I would further add ldquoThe lsquofreersquo ones donrsquot get all the dirt out either So lsquoGo for Brokersquo Getrsquoem all and then for sure be surerdquo

I am truly beholden to both com-panies for helping me to ldquoget the word out there as best I canrdquo about spyware spyware problems pitfalls and dangers and especially their own wonderful spy-ware programs Each company is doing an outstandingly admirable job in per-forming its part in the new now and en-suing battles of WWIII The CyberWar Thank you sincerely from the bottom of my heart Job ldquoWell Donerdquo

Talk about a powerhouse Internet-bound PC Irsquove got it all now ldquoHappi-ness Happiness Happinessrdquo

Ciao

Page 14 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Presidents CornerThoughts on Member Recruitment

To encourage word-of-mouth recruitment of new members an incentivereward program may be used One incentive would be the waiv-ing of membership dues for one year of any member who recruits a new paid membership Suggested guidelines include a limit of one waiver per year no waiver of multiple years for multiple new memberships and some method of formally attributing credit for the new membership

Use of flyers at community events could raise awareness of the organiza-tion Key features of the flyer are use of the word ldquofreerdquo ldquono experience neces-saryrdquo and no mention of any need for commitment such as annual member-ship dues A related method using post-ers would combine these features with artwork to catch a personrsquos attention and multicolored ink on heavy stock Plaster-ing an area within a half-hour drive of the meeting location in the days prior to a meeting requires coordination of members to come up with the most ef-fective and efficient advertising

Some organizations have ldquoopen housesrdquo to attract new members One variation on that for a computer group would be to hold ldquoComputer Tune-Upsrdquo for free The tune-ups could include virus and spyware scans disk defragmentation and perhaps even a selective backup to CD-R Whether these tune-ups could be held at com-munity events probably depends on the personal contacts available via current members

Expand the use of free newspaper and magazine items to promote these ldquoTune-Upsrdquo Creation of a press release both printed and electronic for distri-bution to calendar editors in a timely manner is essential Local community radio stations often provide assistance with the creation of Public Service An-nouncements and may reach an entirely new audience Local community access cable channels sometimes have scroll-ing calendars of local events Whether assistance with creation of a promo-tional video or 15-minute infomercial is available probably depends on the

local franchise agreement Lawn signs at high traffic locations with the monthly program feature may be effective if the message is concise enough to be read quickly from a distance

All of these suggestions have com-mon requirements Consistency Dedi-cation and Lots of Hard Work All mem-bers must be involved in these activities not just the Board or a single volunteer Itrsquos a case of many hands making light work The purpose of this advertising is to create awareness and kindle interest It requires Repetition and Saturation to build credibility and the appearance of solidarity

Although a Board may be able to oversee this operation a Recruiting Coordinator is strongly recommended This person would also maintain the list of potential members or the ldquoMaster Re-cruiting Listrdquo

My thanks to Pete Wex and Chris Pinkham for the articles from which these suggestions were adapted

-- Rick Gregory 2 June 2005

Mail to Membership Secretary PO Box 510811 SLC Utah 84151

MEMBERSHIP REGISTRATION New Renewal Update Mem ________ Name___________________________________________ Address_________________________________________ Home Phone (____)_________________________________________________________ Work Phone (____)__________ City_____________________State______Zip___________

E-Mail_Home_______________________________________________ E-Mail_Work________________________________________________Would you like to have E-mail about coming UCS user events Yes___ No____ If yes send to____________ Please enroll me with the Utah Computer Society Inc (Utah Blue Chips) PCUG as one of the below membership categories Business ($35)_____ Personal ($25)_______ Student ($10)_______ Senior Center ($10)_____ Family Member ($10) ____ Does not include magazine

Signature____________________________________ Date_______________ Check _________Cash______

Visa ____________________ Exp Date________MasterCharge __________________ Exp Date________

SIGsUnion Bldg

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Blue Chips mdash Utahrsquos Computer Guide in the 21st Century

Utah Blue Chips Calendar July August 2005

ADOBE

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

General Meeting

MagazineDeadline

U of U700pm

PICNIC

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Page 9: s Presentation Picnic in the Parks Presentation Picnic in the Park R.S.V.P. on our Website: UCS.ORG Page 2 Blue Chips Magazine —July 2005 y liff illward, ditor cliffm@xmission.com

Page 11 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

CounterSpy HomeDetect and Protect Yourself Against SpywareDetect and Protect Yourself Against Spyware

Windows Review

Reviewed by Don Nendell

ManufacturerSunbelt Software USA(Americas Asia Pacifi c Rim)101 North Garden AvenueClearwater Florida USA 33755Tel 727-562-0101Tel 888-688-8457Fax 727-562-5199Sales salessunbelt-softwarecomCredit Card Tel 800-336-3166URL httpwwwsunbelt-softwarecom

buycfrnCost $1995 per machine (includes a one year

subscription with updates upgrades and real live human technical support)

Software Supportsupportsunbelt-softwarecom ltor visit

websitegtOn-Line Knowledge Basehttpwwwsunbelt-softwarecomSupport-

HomeOffi cecfrnTel 877-673-1153Minimum System Requirements

Windows 98SEMEXP2KPentium 11 Processor with 64MB24MB Hard Drive SpaceInternet Explorer 5 or Higher

Why choose CounterSpytrade

CounterSpy is a powerful anti-spy-ware tool that detects deletes and pro-tects your personal computer against recurring spyware threats from a broad range of malicious software Sunbelt Software claims ldquoYou can think of it as a lsquospy-wallrsquo that protects you in real-time [with] the best spyware database in the industry and the fast-est scan timesrdquo They go on to state that CounterSpy is the only anti-spyware that gets its regular spyware threat database updates from three different sources 1) Sunbeltrsquos own Spyware Research Team 2) CounterSpy users that are volunteer members of Counterspyrsquos ThreatNet Community and from 3) Microsoftrsquos Spyware Research Group

In order to effectively fi ght spyware you need a ldquocounterspyrdquo they say And possibly by sheer coincidence() their fl agship consumer product CounterSpy just might seem to fi ll that bill nicely now wouldnrsquot it

Note There are two versions of CounterSpy currently available through Sunbelt Software 1) CounterSpy for home users that works to protect a single computer and 2) CounterSpy Enter-prise which protects computers across an entire network Both can be ordered through their website and downloaded over an Internet connection which will allow you to have advanced protection installed and running on your PC within just a few minutes And also worthy of note each product comes with one yearrsquos worth of free maintenance upgrades and live tech support

According to PC World Counter-Spy has the best spyware database in the industry It was chosen as both PC WORLD ldquoWORLD CLASS 2005rdquo and ldquo2005 BEST BUYrdquo

Counterspy Flexibility

Spyware is a vicious fast-growing malig-nancy that can no longer be ignored It used to be that viruses received more public-ity than spyware because viruses move over the In-ternet so quickly throughout the world But Spyware is actually the more dangerous of the two and sadly the world is only just now really waking up to this plague Herersquos the bottom line If you value your per-sonal data at all - and protecting that data is of any importance to you - then you absolutely must repeat must use current and up-to-date versions of 1) An anti-virus software 2) A fi rewall and equally as importantly 3) An anti-spyware utility

The onset of any perceived trouble can be insidious and may actually be unobserved but when your computer fi nally does slow down or seems ultra-sluggish or it may seem like it has sud-

denly become possessed by pop-up ad-vertisements et al odds are excellent that spyware has infiltrated your system Anti-spyware utilities like CounterSpy will identify spyware on your hard disk help you remove it and protect your computer against new infections CounterSpy allows users to remove or even keep if desired spyware programs andor utilities on a case-by-case basis

More CounterSpy Defense Mechanisms

CounterSpy searches for 36 catego-ries of spyware Some examples are Tro-jans spyware adware malware hacker tools keyloggers and hijacker compo-nents Without anti-spyware utilities like CounterSpy spyware can lurk in the background waiting to be triggered by a user When triggered the spyware can steal passwords fi nancial data and personal information and literally anything it wants It can also open up backdoor entrances that hackers can use to manipulate your computer directly Which brings us face-to-face with my biggest problem and greatest fear of any of the spyware imfection(s)

Page 12 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

KeyloggersSunbelt Software warns us ldquoIf you

think spyware is just a nuisance then you are not familiar with the keylogger pro-grams that have made their way from the Internet to many peoplersquos home comput-ers in the last few years When people think about spyware they usually envi-sion those programs that lurk behind the scenes and post popup advertisements while users surf the Internet This type of spyware is annoying but keylogger spyware is downright dangerous

ldquoKeylogger spyware monitors every stroke of the keyboard you make on your computer That information is transmit-ted back to the spyware creator where hackers can analyze keystrokes for any information that they can use for nefarious purposes Passwords credit card numbers banking information and much more can be found buried within keylogger messages back to its creatorrdquo

Such is the case with the Desktop computer I am presently using to re-view CounterSpy In my initial Coun-terSpy scan it turned up four (4) pieces of spyware including two (2) very much dreaded Commercial Keyloggers embed-ded somewhere This is really scary to me personally as I have installed on this PC alone No-Adware Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE Personal SpywareBlaster Pandarsquos Platinum 2005 Internet Suite (with over 1058K virus signatures identified and protecting me with TruPrevent (See also my TruPrevent review in BCM June 2005 issue archives ltwwwucsorggt)) and a separate P2P LAN firewall manned

by IPCop Whorsquoda thunk itCaveat I must truthfully admit how-

ever that I hadnrsquot run any of the spyware programs for approximately 30 days - for some unknown reason Shame on me for being so slothful and careless

Also I had originally intended to run Spy Sweeper on this machine too but actually got started on this review of CounterSpy before I got to that point Pretty wide open here Irsquod say But then all-in-all it still is really surprising to me to come up with such a sick computer so fast Live and learn they say But then again isnrsquot that why I am supposedly do-ing these spyware reviews anyway - to help everybody out there in La-La land plus moi Truthfully if this opens even one eye and saves many others it will have been well worth the effort Silently I pray however it will make a big differ-ence to a great many persons

Heavens ldquoPhysician Heal Thyselfrdquo I keep scolding myself

Stopping Keylogger Spyware

The only way to stop keylogger (or any other) spyware is by installing (and m a i n t a i n i n g AND USING) a high-quality anti-spyware program in your PC Anti-spyware programs scan your hard

drive for spyware signatures buried deep within pro-gram files or hid-den amongst harm-less files on your hard drive Sunbelt Software advises us ldquoNo spyware is safe if you are running top-notch anti-spyware softwarerdquo ldquoCounterSpyrdquo they say - No doubt about it I would have to agree whole-

heartedly Remember ldquoHappiness is a working computerrdquo I keep saying Now I have a whole slew of spyware programs to guard my premises and perimeters Whew

Not Surprisingly - Enter Organized CyberCrime Stage Right and Left

Sunbelt Software warns us ldquoOr-ganized cybercrime has become one of the biggest challenges facing companies that specialize in protecting computers from viruses spyware and Trojans At one time the viruses that spread across the Internet were created by individuals who were more interested in notoriety than they were in crime Todayrsquos viruses are of a different breed Criminals have now realized that viruses can be used for much more than proving computer development skills Organized criminals can now create networks of lsquobotsrsquo that can be installed on vulnerable PCs and remotely controlled The word lsquobotrsquo re-ally means a personal computer owned by an unsuspecting home user that is now in reality owned by a hacker and can be used for their criminal goals Recent data shows that the number of IP addresses associated with lsquobotrsquo net-works has increased by more than 1000 percent in just one yearrdquo

It can happen to you me and any and everybody Actually no one is safe For example take a gander at this Herersquos the latest update on the subject of spyware By now we all are quite fa-miliar with The Salt Lake Tribune Sat-urday June 18 2005 front page story (plus every newspaper TV newscast

Page 13 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

etc in the world) which highlighted ldquoMillions at risk as data are hacked Cardholders Security is breached at a transaction company fraud could affect bank customersrdquo And on June 20 2005 at MSNBCcom ldquo40 million credit cards exposedrdquo as reported by Bob Sullivan who wrote ldquoMasterCard spokeswoman Sharon Gamsin said a computer virus was not to blame for the data theft She said she couldnrsquot provide details of how the systems were hacked but did say that lsquoan unauthorized entity put a spe-cific code into CardSystemsrsquo networkrsquo enabling the person or group to gain ac-cess to the datardquo Which was also duti-fully reported in InformationWeek June 20 2005 News Scan p 12 ldquo One gets the nagging feeling We havenrsquot yet seen the worst of itrdquo Amen

Fighting Organized CyberCrime and Spyware

To fight organized cybercrime and spyware both companies and individu-als need to utilize the best anti-virus and anti-malware utilities available Visit Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy Documents web site to learn more on how we can all get together to fight this crime wave Their CounterSpy Docu-ments URL is lthttpwwwsunbelt-softwarecomCounterSpy-docscfmgt Also please visit their Resource Li-brary for additional information on spyware and ldquoSpyware in the Newsrdquo The Resource Library URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomresource_librarycfmgt

Critically Important Visit Sun-belt Softwarersquos ThreatNet web site to actively participate in the spyware fight The ThreatNet URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomthreatnetcfmgt

So Whatrsquos It All About AlfieA few outside review comments are

in order here

ldquoSpyware Sneaks InIn a nationally-representative sur-

vey of more than 2000 households with at-home Internet access CR found that 36 percent reported that their home page had been changed - a common symptom of spyware Spyware isnrsquot a single type of software The term cov-ers a diverse range of applications Like spam spyware is often used by third-party marketers associated with reputable companies whose products they are hawking To avoid spyware Consumer Reports recommends that consumers

- Download and install software only from trusted online sources

- Adjust the Web browserrsquos security settings to the medium or high level

- Use updated antispyware software to scan the hard drive regularlyrdquo- Consumer Reports Consumer Reports Investigates How to Protect against Spam Spyware and Phishing Report Includes Survey Results Software Rat-ings and Tips to Avoid Online Hazards Such as ID Theft dated 892004

ldquoCounterSpy had the highest detec-tion rate in our tests The most effective scanner - CounterSpy - was also the fast-est taking only a minute to perform a complete scan of a system with 27 GB of data Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy proved the most capable of the bunch finding and stopping 93 percent of all the running processes created by our 45 test programsrdquo- PCWorld April 2005

Last HoorayCounterSpy has a couple more

features up their sleeves that are really ldquoKnock-Your-Socks-Offrdquo items System Tools - Secure File Eraser and System Tools - My PC Checkup The graphics tell it like it is

Overall Conclusion

Very seriously I have not actually intended for these two (2) BCM spyware reviews this month to be a ldquoWinner Take Allrdquo comparison of two (2) great spyware programs CounterSpy and Spy Sweep-er They are both simply ldquoAbsolutely Superiorrdquo companies and programs

and they deserve to be evaluated each on their own merits and by each and everyone of you out there individually They both are very inexpensive and they each have trialware downloads so you have absolutely nothing to lose by try-ing both of them Besides yoursquoll get a ldquosqueaky cleanrdquo PC out of the deal at least once in this or any other of your lifetimesFYI For further clarification purposes I would also like to add a comment from an article dated July 29 2004 I ran across on eWeekcom entitled SpyAdware The New Real Security Problem by Larry Seltzer He writes ldquoThere are a large number of programs to detect and remove the much larger number of attacks Since some of the best ones are free (asking for donations) it may be a good idea to run more than one rdquo To which I would further add ldquoThe lsquofreersquo ones donrsquot get all the dirt out either So lsquoGo for Brokersquo Getrsquoem all and then for sure be surerdquo

I am truly beholden to both com-panies for helping me to ldquoget the word out there as best I canrdquo about spyware spyware problems pitfalls and dangers and especially their own wonderful spy-ware programs Each company is doing an outstandingly admirable job in per-forming its part in the new now and en-suing battles of WWIII The CyberWar Thank you sincerely from the bottom of my heart Job ldquoWell Donerdquo

Talk about a powerhouse Internet-bound PC Irsquove got it all now ldquoHappi-ness Happiness Happinessrdquo

Ciao

Page 14 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Presidents CornerThoughts on Member Recruitment

To encourage word-of-mouth recruitment of new members an incentivereward program may be used One incentive would be the waiv-ing of membership dues for one year of any member who recruits a new paid membership Suggested guidelines include a limit of one waiver per year no waiver of multiple years for multiple new memberships and some method of formally attributing credit for the new membership

Use of flyers at community events could raise awareness of the organiza-tion Key features of the flyer are use of the word ldquofreerdquo ldquono experience neces-saryrdquo and no mention of any need for commitment such as annual member-ship dues A related method using post-ers would combine these features with artwork to catch a personrsquos attention and multicolored ink on heavy stock Plaster-ing an area within a half-hour drive of the meeting location in the days prior to a meeting requires coordination of members to come up with the most ef-fective and efficient advertising

Some organizations have ldquoopen housesrdquo to attract new members One variation on that for a computer group would be to hold ldquoComputer Tune-Upsrdquo for free The tune-ups could include virus and spyware scans disk defragmentation and perhaps even a selective backup to CD-R Whether these tune-ups could be held at com-munity events probably depends on the personal contacts available via current members

Expand the use of free newspaper and magazine items to promote these ldquoTune-Upsrdquo Creation of a press release both printed and electronic for distri-bution to calendar editors in a timely manner is essential Local community radio stations often provide assistance with the creation of Public Service An-nouncements and may reach an entirely new audience Local community access cable channels sometimes have scroll-ing calendars of local events Whether assistance with creation of a promo-tional video or 15-minute infomercial is available probably depends on the

local franchise agreement Lawn signs at high traffic locations with the monthly program feature may be effective if the message is concise enough to be read quickly from a distance

All of these suggestions have com-mon requirements Consistency Dedi-cation and Lots of Hard Work All mem-bers must be involved in these activities not just the Board or a single volunteer Itrsquos a case of many hands making light work The purpose of this advertising is to create awareness and kindle interest It requires Repetition and Saturation to build credibility and the appearance of solidarity

Although a Board may be able to oversee this operation a Recruiting Coordinator is strongly recommended This person would also maintain the list of potential members or the ldquoMaster Re-cruiting Listrdquo

My thanks to Pete Wex and Chris Pinkham for the articles from which these suggestions were adapted

-- Rick Gregory 2 June 2005

Mail to Membership Secretary PO Box 510811 SLC Utah 84151

MEMBERSHIP REGISTRATION New Renewal Update Mem ________ Name___________________________________________ Address_________________________________________ Home Phone (____)_________________________________________________________ Work Phone (____)__________ City_____________________State______Zip___________

E-Mail_Home_______________________________________________ E-Mail_Work________________________________________________Would you like to have E-mail about coming UCS user events Yes___ No____ If yes send to____________ Please enroll me with the Utah Computer Society Inc (Utah Blue Chips) PCUG as one of the below membership categories Business ($35)_____ Personal ($25)_______ Student ($10)_______ Senior Center ($10)_____ Family Member ($10) ____ Does not include magazine

Signature____________________________________ Date_______________ Check _________Cash______

Visa ____________________ Exp Date________MasterCharge __________________ Exp Date________

SIGsUnion Bldg

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Blue Chips mdash Utahrsquos Computer Guide in the 21st Century

Utah Blue Chips Calendar July August 2005

ADOBE

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

General Meeting

MagazineDeadline

U of U700pm

PICNIC

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Page 10: s Presentation Picnic in the Parks Presentation Picnic in the Park R.S.V.P. on our Website: UCS.ORG Page 2 Blue Chips Magazine —July 2005 y liff illward, ditor cliffm@xmission.com

Page 12 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

KeyloggersSunbelt Software warns us ldquoIf you

think spyware is just a nuisance then you are not familiar with the keylogger pro-grams that have made their way from the Internet to many peoplersquos home comput-ers in the last few years When people think about spyware they usually envi-sion those programs that lurk behind the scenes and post popup advertisements while users surf the Internet This type of spyware is annoying but keylogger spyware is downright dangerous

ldquoKeylogger spyware monitors every stroke of the keyboard you make on your computer That information is transmit-ted back to the spyware creator where hackers can analyze keystrokes for any information that they can use for nefarious purposes Passwords credit card numbers banking information and much more can be found buried within keylogger messages back to its creatorrdquo

Such is the case with the Desktop computer I am presently using to re-view CounterSpy In my initial Coun-terSpy scan it turned up four (4) pieces of spyware including two (2) very much dreaded Commercial Keyloggers embed-ded somewhere This is really scary to me personally as I have installed on this PC alone No-Adware Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE Personal SpywareBlaster Pandarsquos Platinum 2005 Internet Suite (with over 1058K virus signatures identified and protecting me with TruPrevent (See also my TruPrevent review in BCM June 2005 issue archives ltwwwucsorggt)) and a separate P2P LAN firewall manned

by IPCop Whorsquoda thunk itCaveat I must truthfully admit how-

ever that I hadnrsquot run any of the spyware programs for approximately 30 days - for some unknown reason Shame on me for being so slothful and careless

Also I had originally intended to run Spy Sweeper on this machine too but actually got started on this review of CounterSpy before I got to that point Pretty wide open here Irsquod say But then all-in-all it still is really surprising to me to come up with such a sick computer so fast Live and learn they say But then again isnrsquot that why I am supposedly do-ing these spyware reviews anyway - to help everybody out there in La-La land plus moi Truthfully if this opens even one eye and saves many others it will have been well worth the effort Silently I pray however it will make a big differ-ence to a great many persons

Heavens ldquoPhysician Heal Thyselfrdquo I keep scolding myself

Stopping Keylogger Spyware

The only way to stop keylogger (or any other) spyware is by installing (and m a i n t a i n i n g AND USING) a high-quality anti-spyware program in your PC Anti-spyware programs scan your hard

drive for spyware signatures buried deep within pro-gram files or hid-den amongst harm-less files on your hard drive Sunbelt Software advises us ldquoNo spyware is safe if you are running top-notch anti-spyware softwarerdquo ldquoCounterSpyrdquo they say - No doubt about it I would have to agree whole-

heartedly Remember ldquoHappiness is a working computerrdquo I keep saying Now I have a whole slew of spyware programs to guard my premises and perimeters Whew

Not Surprisingly - Enter Organized CyberCrime Stage Right and Left

Sunbelt Software warns us ldquoOr-ganized cybercrime has become one of the biggest challenges facing companies that specialize in protecting computers from viruses spyware and Trojans At one time the viruses that spread across the Internet were created by individuals who were more interested in notoriety than they were in crime Todayrsquos viruses are of a different breed Criminals have now realized that viruses can be used for much more than proving computer development skills Organized criminals can now create networks of lsquobotsrsquo that can be installed on vulnerable PCs and remotely controlled The word lsquobotrsquo re-ally means a personal computer owned by an unsuspecting home user that is now in reality owned by a hacker and can be used for their criminal goals Recent data shows that the number of IP addresses associated with lsquobotrsquo net-works has increased by more than 1000 percent in just one yearrdquo

It can happen to you me and any and everybody Actually no one is safe For example take a gander at this Herersquos the latest update on the subject of spyware By now we all are quite fa-miliar with The Salt Lake Tribune Sat-urday June 18 2005 front page story (plus every newspaper TV newscast

Page 13 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

etc in the world) which highlighted ldquoMillions at risk as data are hacked Cardholders Security is breached at a transaction company fraud could affect bank customersrdquo And on June 20 2005 at MSNBCcom ldquo40 million credit cards exposedrdquo as reported by Bob Sullivan who wrote ldquoMasterCard spokeswoman Sharon Gamsin said a computer virus was not to blame for the data theft She said she couldnrsquot provide details of how the systems were hacked but did say that lsquoan unauthorized entity put a spe-cific code into CardSystemsrsquo networkrsquo enabling the person or group to gain ac-cess to the datardquo Which was also duti-fully reported in InformationWeek June 20 2005 News Scan p 12 ldquo One gets the nagging feeling We havenrsquot yet seen the worst of itrdquo Amen

Fighting Organized CyberCrime and Spyware

To fight organized cybercrime and spyware both companies and individu-als need to utilize the best anti-virus and anti-malware utilities available Visit Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy Documents web site to learn more on how we can all get together to fight this crime wave Their CounterSpy Docu-ments URL is lthttpwwwsunbelt-softwarecomCounterSpy-docscfmgt Also please visit their Resource Li-brary for additional information on spyware and ldquoSpyware in the Newsrdquo The Resource Library URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomresource_librarycfmgt

Critically Important Visit Sun-belt Softwarersquos ThreatNet web site to actively participate in the spyware fight The ThreatNet URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomthreatnetcfmgt

So Whatrsquos It All About AlfieA few outside review comments are

in order here

ldquoSpyware Sneaks InIn a nationally-representative sur-

vey of more than 2000 households with at-home Internet access CR found that 36 percent reported that their home page had been changed - a common symptom of spyware Spyware isnrsquot a single type of software The term cov-ers a diverse range of applications Like spam spyware is often used by third-party marketers associated with reputable companies whose products they are hawking To avoid spyware Consumer Reports recommends that consumers

- Download and install software only from trusted online sources

- Adjust the Web browserrsquos security settings to the medium or high level

- Use updated antispyware software to scan the hard drive regularlyrdquo- Consumer Reports Consumer Reports Investigates How to Protect against Spam Spyware and Phishing Report Includes Survey Results Software Rat-ings and Tips to Avoid Online Hazards Such as ID Theft dated 892004

ldquoCounterSpy had the highest detec-tion rate in our tests The most effective scanner - CounterSpy - was also the fast-est taking only a minute to perform a complete scan of a system with 27 GB of data Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy proved the most capable of the bunch finding and stopping 93 percent of all the running processes created by our 45 test programsrdquo- PCWorld April 2005

Last HoorayCounterSpy has a couple more

features up their sleeves that are really ldquoKnock-Your-Socks-Offrdquo items System Tools - Secure File Eraser and System Tools - My PC Checkup The graphics tell it like it is

Overall Conclusion

Very seriously I have not actually intended for these two (2) BCM spyware reviews this month to be a ldquoWinner Take Allrdquo comparison of two (2) great spyware programs CounterSpy and Spy Sweep-er They are both simply ldquoAbsolutely Superiorrdquo companies and programs

and they deserve to be evaluated each on their own merits and by each and everyone of you out there individually They both are very inexpensive and they each have trialware downloads so you have absolutely nothing to lose by try-ing both of them Besides yoursquoll get a ldquosqueaky cleanrdquo PC out of the deal at least once in this or any other of your lifetimesFYI For further clarification purposes I would also like to add a comment from an article dated July 29 2004 I ran across on eWeekcom entitled SpyAdware The New Real Security Problem by Larry Seltzer He writes ldquoThere are a large number of programs to detect and remove the much larger number of attacks Since some of the best ones are free (asking for donations) it may be a good idea to run more than one rdquo To which I would further add ldquoThe lsquofreersquo ones donrsquot get all the dirt out either So lsquoGo for Brokersquo Getrsquoem all and then for sure be surerdquo

I am truly beholden to both com-panies for helping me to ldquoget the word out there as best I canrdquo about spyware spyware problems pitfalls and dangers and especially their own wonderful spy-ware programs Each company is doing an outstandingly admirable job in per-forming its part in the new now and en-suing battles of WWIII The CyberWar Thank you sincerely from the bottom of my heart Job ldquoWell Donerdquo

Talk about a powerhouse Internet-bound PC Irsquove got it all now ldquoHappi-ness Happiness Happinessrdquo

Ciao

Page 14 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Presidents CornerThoughts on Member Recruitment

To encourage word-of-mouth recruitment of new members an incentivereward program may be used One incentive would be the waiv-ing of membership dues for one year of any member who recruits a new paid membership Suggested guidelines include a limit of one waiver per year no waiver of multiple years for multiple new memberships and some method of formally attributing credit for the new membership

Use of flyers at community events could raise awareness of the organiza-tion Key features of the flyer are use of the word ldquofreerdquo ldquono experience neces-saryrdquo and no mention of any need for commitment such as annual member-ship dues A related method using post-ers would combine these features with artwork to catch a personrsquos attention and multicolored ink on heavy stock Plaster-ing an area within a half-hour drive of the meeting location in the days prior to a meeting requires coordination of members to come up with the most ef-fective and efficient advertising

Some organizations have ldquoopen housesrdquo to attract new members One variation on that for a computer group would be to hold ldquoComputer Tune-Upsrdquo for free The tune-ups could include virus and spyware scans disk defragmentation and perhaps even a selective backup to CD-R Whether these tune-ups could be held at com-munity events probably depends on the personal contacts available via current members

Expand the use of free newspaper and magazine items to promote these ldquoTune-Upsrdquo Creation of a press release both printed and electronic for distri-bution to calendar editors in a timely manner is essential Local community radio stations often provide assistance with the creation of Public Service An-nouncements and may reach an entirely new audience Local community access cable channels sometimes have scroll-ing calendars of local events Whether assistance with creation of a promo-tional video or 15-minute infomercial is available probably depends on the

local franchise agreement Lawn signs at high traffic locations with the monthly program feature may be effective if the message is concise enough to be read quickly from a distance

All of these suggestions have com-mon requirements Consistency Dedi-cation and Lots of Hard Work All mem-bers must be involved in these activities not just the Board or a single volunteer Itrsquos a case of many hands making light work The purpose of this advertising is to create awareness and kindle interest It requires Repetition and Saturation to build credibility and the appearance of solidarity

Although a Board may be able to oversee this operation a Recruiting Coordinator is strongly recommended This person would also maintain the list of potential members or the ldquoMaster Re-cruiting Listrdquo

My thanks to Pete Wex and Chris Pinkham for the articles from which these suggestions were adapted

-- Rick Gregory 2 June 2005

Mail to Membership Secretary PO Box 510811 SLC Utah 84151

MEMBERSHIP REGISTRATION New Renewal Update Mem ________ Name___________________________________________ Address_________________________________________ Home Phone (____)_________________________________________________________ Work Phone (____)__________ City_____________________State______Zip___________

E-Mail_Home_______________________________________________ E-Mail_Work________________________________________________Would you like to have E-mail about coming UCS user events Yes___ No____ If yes send to____________ Please enroll me with the Utah Computer Society Inc (Utah Blue Chips) PCUG as one of the below membership categories Business ($35)_____ Personal ($25)_______ Student ($10)_______ Senior Center ($10)_____ Family Member ($10) ____ Does not include magazine

Signature____________________________________ Date_______________ Check _________Cash______

Visa ____________________ Exp Date________MasterCharge __________________ Exp Date________

SIGsUnion Bldg

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Blue Chips mdash Utahrsquos Computer Guide in the 21st Century

Utah Blue Chips Calendar July August 2005

ADOBE

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

General Meeting

MagazineDeadline

U of U700pm

PICNIC

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Page 11: s Presentation Picnic in the Parks Presentation Picnic in the Park R.S.V.P. on our Website: UCS.ORG Page 2 Blue Chips Magazine —July 2005 y liff illward, ditor cliffm@xmission.com

Page 13 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

etc in the world) which highlighted ldquoMillions at risk as data are hacked Cardholders Security is breached at a transaction company fraud could affect bank customersrdquo And on June 20 2005 at MSNBCcom ldquo40 million credit cards exposedrdquo as reported by Bob Sullivan who wrote ldquoMasterCard spokeswoman Sharon Gamsin said a computer virus was not to blame for the data theft She said she couldnrsquot provide details of how the systems were hacked but did say that lsquoan unauthorized entity put a spe-cific code into CardSystemsrsquo networkrsquo enabling the person or group to gain ac-cess to the datardquo Which was also duti-fully reported in InformationWeek June 20 2005 News Scan p 12 ldquo One gets the nagging feeling We havenrsquot yet seen the worst of itrdquo Amen

Fighting Organized CyberCrime and Spyware

To fight organized cybercrime and spyware both companies and individu-als need to utilize the best anti-virus and anti-malware utilities available Visit Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy Documents web site to learn more on how we can all get together to fight this crime wave Their CounterSpy Docu-ments URL is lthttpwwwsunbelt-softwarecomCounterSpy-docscfmgt Also please visit their Resource Li-brary for additional information on spyware and ldquoSpyware in the Newsrdquo The Resource Library URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomresource_librarycfmgt

Critically Important Visit Sun-belt Softwarersquos ThreatNet web site to actively participate in the spyware fight The ThreatNet URL is lthttpresearchsunbelt-softwarecomthreatnetcfmgt

So Whatrsquos It All About AlfieA few outside review comments are

in order here

ldquoSpyware Sneaks InIn a nationally-representative sur-

vey of more than 2000 households with at-home Internet access CR found that 36 percent reported that their home page had been changed - a common symptom of spyware Spyware isnrsquot a single type of software The term cov-ers a diverse range of applications Like spam spyware is often used by third-party marketers associated with reputable companies whose products they are hawking To avoid spyware Consumer Reports recommends that consumers

- Download and install software only from trusted online sources

- Adjust the Web browserrsquos security settings to the medium or high level

- Use updated antispyware software to scan the hard drive regularlyrdquo- Consumer Reports Consumer Reports Investigates How to Protect against Spam Spyware and Phishing Report Includes Survey Results Software Rat-ings and Tips to Avoid Online Hazards Such as ID Theft dated 892004

ldquoCounterSpy had the highest detec-tion rate in our tests The most effective scanner - CounterSpy - was also the fast-est taking only a minute to perform a complete scan of a system with 27 GB of data Sunbelt Softwarersquos CounterSpy proved the most capable of the bunch finding and stopping 93 percent of all the running processes created by our 45 test programsrdquo- PCWorld April 2005

Last HoorayCounterSpy has a couple more

features up their sleeves that are really ldquoKnock-Your-Socks-Offrdquo items System Tools - Secure File Eraser and System Tools - My PC Checkup The graphics tell it like it is

Overall Conclusion

Very seriously I have not actually intended for these two (2) BCM spyware reviews this month to be a ldquoWinner Take Allrdquo comparison of two (2) great spyware programs CounterSpy and Spy Sweep-er They are both simply ldquoAbsolutely Superiorrdquo companies and programs

and they deserve to be evaluated each on their own merits and by each and everyone of you out there individually They both are very inexpensive and they each have trialware downloads so you have absolutely nothing to lose by try-ing both of them Besides yoursquoll get a ldquosqueaky cleanrdquo PC out of the deal at least once in this or any other of your lifetimesFYI For further clarification purposes I would also like to add a comment from an article dated July 29 2004 I ran across on eWeekcom entitled SpyAdware The New Real Security Problem by Larry Seltzer He writes ldquoThere are a large number of programs to detect and remove the much larger number of attacks Since some of the best ones are free (asking for donations) it may be a good idea to run more than one rdquo To which I would further add ldquoThe lsquofreersquo ones donrsquot get all the dirt out either So lsquoGo for Brokersquo Getrsquoem all and then for sure be surerdquo

I am truly beholden to both com-panies for helping me to ldquoget the word out there as best I canrdquo about spyware spyware problems pitfalls and dangers and especially their own wonderful spy-ware programs Each company is doing an outstandingly admirable job in per-forming its part in the new now and en-suing battles of WWIII The CyberWar Thank you sincerely from the bottom of my heart Job ldquoWell Donerdquo

Talk about a powerhouse Internet-bound PC Irsquove got it all now ldquoHappi-ness Happiness Happinessrdquo

Ciao

Page 14 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Presidents CornerThoughts on Member Recruitment

To encourage word-of-mouth recruitment of new members an incentivereward program may be used One incentive would be the waiv-ing of membership dues for one year of any member who recruits a new paid membership Suggested guidelines include a limit of one waiver per year no waiver of multiple years for multiple new memberships and some method of formally attributing credit for the new membership

Use of flyers at community events could raise awareness of the organiza-tion Key features of the flyer are use of the word ldquofreerdquo ldquono experience neces-saryrdquo and no mention of any need for commitment such as annual member-ship dues A related method using post-ers would combine these features with artwork to catch a personrsquos attention and multicolored ink on heavy stock Plaster-ing an area within a half-hour drive of the meeting location in the days prior to a meeting requires coordination of members to come up with the most ef-fective and efficient advertising

Some organizations have ldquoopen housesrdquo to attract new members One variation on that for a computer group would be to hold ldquoComputer Tune-Upsrdquo for free The tune-ups could include virus and spyware scans disk defragmentation and perhaps even a selective backup to CD-R Whether these tune-ups could be held at com-munity events probably depends on the personal contacts available via current members

Expand the use of free newspaper and magazine items to promote these ldquoTune-Upsrdquo Creation of a press release both printed and electronic for distri-bution to calendar editors in a timely manner is essential Local community radio stations often provide assistance with the creation of Public Service An-nouncements and may reach an entirely new audience Local community access cable channels sometimes have scroll-ing calendars of local events Whether assistance with creation of a promo-tional video or 15-minute infomercial is available probably depends on the

local franchise agreement Lawn signs at high traffic locations with the monthly program feature may be effective if the message is concise enough to be read quickly from a distance

All of these suggestions have com-mon requirements Consistency Dedi-cation and Lots of Hard Work All mem-bers must be involved in these activities not just the Board or a single volunteer Itrsquos a case of many hands making light work The purpose of this advertising is to create awareness and kindle interest It requires Repetition and Saturation to build credibility and the appearance of solidarity

Although a Board may be able to oversee this operation a Recruiting Coordinator is strongly recommended This person would also maintain the list of potential members or the ldquoMaster Re-cruiting Listrdquo

My thanks to Pete Wex and Chris Pinkham for the articles from which these suggestions were adapted

-- Rick Gregory 2 June 2005

Mail to Membership Secretary PO Box 510811 SLC Utah 84151

MEMBERSHIP REGISTRATION New Renewal Update Mem ________ Name___________________________________________ Address_________________________________________ Home Phone (____)_________________________________________________________ Work Phone (____)__________ City_____________________State______Zip___________

E-Mail_Home_______________________________________________ E-Mail_Work________________________________________________Would you like to have E-mail about coming UCS user events Yes___ No____ If yes send to____________ Please enroll me with the Utah Computer Society Inc (Utah Blue Chips) PCUG as one of the below membership categories Business ($35)_____ Personal ($25)_______ Student ($10)_______ Senior Center ($10)_____ Family Member ($10) ____ Does not include magazine

Signature____________________________________ Date_______________ Check _________Cash______

Visa ____________________ Exp Date________MasterCharge __________________ Exp Date________

SIGsUnion Bldg

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Blue Chips mdash Utahrsquos Computer Guide in the 21st Century

Utah Blue Chips Calendar July August 2005

ADOBE

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

General Meeting

MagazineDeadline

U of U700pm

PICNIC

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Page 12: s Presentation Picnic in the Parks Presentation Picnic in the Park R.S.V.P. on our Website: UCS.ORG Page 2 Blue Chips Magazine —July 2005 y liff illward, ditor cliffm@xmission.com

Page 14 Blue Chips Magazine mdashJuly 2005

Presidents CornerThoughts on Member Recruitment

To encourage word-of-mouth recruitment of new members an incentivereward program may be used One incentive would be the waiv-ing of membership dues for one year of any member who recruits a new paid membership Suggested guidelines include a limit of one waiver per year no waiver of multiple years for multiple new memberships and some method of formally attributing credit for the new membership

Use of flyers at community events could raise awareness of the organiza-tion Key features of the flyer are use of the word ldquofreerdquo ldquono experience neces-saryrdquo and no mention of any need for commitment such as annual member-ship dues A related method using post-ers would combine these features with artwork to catch a personrsquos attention and multicolored ink on heavy stock Plaster-ing an area within a half-hour drive of the meeting location in the days prior to a meeting requires coordination of members to come up with the most ef-fective and efficient advertising

Some organizations have ldquoopen housesrdquo to attract new members One variation on that for a computer group would be to hold ldquoComputer Tune-Upsrdquo for free The tune-ups could include virus and spyware scans disk defragmentation and perhaps even a selective backup to CD-R Whether these tune-ups could be held at com-munity events probably depends on the personal contacts available via current members

Expand the use of free newspaper and magazine items to promote these ldquoTune-Upsrdquo Creation of a press release both printed and electronic for distri-bution to calendar editors in a timely manner is essential Local community radio stations often provide assistance with the creation of Public Service An-nouncements and may reach an entirely new audience Local community access cable channels sometimes have scroll-ing calendars of local events Whether assistance with creation of a promo-tional video or 15-minute infomercial is available probably depends on the

local franchise agreement Lawn signs at high traffic locations with the monthly program feature may be effective if the message is concise enough to be read quickly from a distance

All of these suggestions have com-mon requirements Consistency Dedi-cation and Lots of Hard Work All mem-bers must be involved in these activities not just the Board or a single volunteer Itrsquos a case of many hands making light work The purpose of this advertising is to create awareness and kindle interest It requires Repetition and Saturation to build credibility and the appearance of solidarity

Although a Board may be able to oversee this operation a Recruiting Coordinator is strongly recommended This person would also maintain the list of potential members or the ldquoMaster Re-cruiting Listrdquo

My thanks to Pete Wex and Chris Pinkham for the articles from which these suggestions were adapted

-- Rick Gregory 2 June 2005

Mail to Membership Secretary PO Box 510811 SLC Utah 84151

MEMBERSHIP REGISTRATION New Renewal Update Mem ________ Name___________________________________________ Address_________________________________________ Home Phone (____)_________________________________________________________ Work Phone (____)__________ City_____________________State______Zip___________

E-Mail_Home_______________________________________________ E-Mail_Work________________________________________________Would you like to have E-mail about coming UCS user events Yes___ No____ If yes send to____________ Please enroll me with the Utah Computer Society Inc (Utah Blue Chips) PCUG as one of the below membership categories Business ($35)_____ Personal ($25)_______ Student ($10)_______ Senior Center ($10)_____ Family Member ($10) ____ Does not include magazine

Signature____________________________________ Date_______________ Check _________Cash______

Visa ____________________ Exp Date________MasterCharge __________________ Exp Date________

SIGsUnion Bldg

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Blue Chips mdash Utahrsquos Computer Guide in the 21st Century

Utah Blue Chips Calendar July August 2005

ADOBE

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

General Meeting

MagazineDeadline

U of U700pm

PICNIC

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Page 13: s Presentation Picnic in the Parks Presentation Picnic in the Park R.S.V.P. on our Website: UCS.ORG Page 2 Blue Chips Magazine —July 2005 y liff illward, ditor cliffm@xmission.com

SIGsUnion Bldg

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm

Blue Chips mdash Utahrsquos Computer Guide in the 21st Century

Utah Blue Chips Calendar July August 2005

ADOBE

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

General Meeting

MagazineDeadline

U of U700pm

PICNIC

UBCGeneral Meeting

U of U700 pm

UCSBoard ofTrustees

CampC BldgRoomN3005

630 pm