• Tasks for the Weekend – December 19, 2020

    Posted on December 19, 2020 at 18:35 CST by • Comment in the Forums

    Youtube video here

    Do you know about the program Autoruns?  A Microsoft blog post reminded me about it.  The other day a network management software tool called SolarWinds was “backdoored” by an attacker.  As an aside, I don’t think you or me were specifically targeted in this attack but certainly our key infrastructure was a target, it’s a disturbing trend that we need to watch out for.  No longer do our attackers need to send human soldiers to battle us, they can send stealthy software to do it.  So this, long term, is a … to put it mildly… a big fat hairy deal and a concern to all of us.  Not necessarily to the data that is our on our personal PCs, but rather the deep information and government secrets that are on key critical infrastructure machines.

    But that’s not what this Task for the weekend is all about.  This Microsoft blog post, which pointed out that once the attackers SAW that security programs like Autoruns were installed on a machine, it ran away from that computer,  reminded me to remind you about Autoruns.  In general Autoruns is a good program to remember to have and install especially if your computer is slowing down or slow booting.  It shows you, albeit a bit cryptically, the running processes and the software slowing down your computer.  Even if you can’t figure out it, it’s a good one to install to then go to the Askwoody forums and say “hey, I see I have yadda yadda running here…. What does that mean?” because it gives you more insights into what your mysterious computer is doing.  So check it out and as always if you have any questions you can ask here.  You can also read more about it on BleepingComputer

    (And we’ll keep an eye on what’s going on with the SolarWinds attacks and related information, there’s more to come I’m sure)

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