Diary of a mad McAfee antivirus victim

As if McAfee's bad antivirus update last week wasn't bad enough, some customers were none too happy with how the security vendor's tech support handled the situation either.

David Hellen, an independent contractor for the U.S. Navy who heads his own SAP configuration business, says last Wednesday when he noticed that his Dell Latitude running Windows XP wouldn't boot straight into Windows, he knew he had to try and figure out what was going on. He saw news stories about the McAfee antivirus update snafu, which involved the faulty DAT 5958 file, and called his McAfee Gold Service phone number for help.

"After waiting 20 minutes in the queue, they connected me to India and I got a service technician," says Hellen, whose business is called David J. Hellen & Associates. "The first thing they said is, 'You have a virus.' I said I think I have that DAT thing. They told me to run scans."

"I phoned the McAfee guy back and we ran the McAfee scan, and we came up with nothing," Hellen says. "We tried the SuperDAT tool and that didn't work, and the 5959 update. It still didn't solve it." The McAfee technician told him he needed to escalate to "Tier 2 support."

Due to his work schedule, Hellen had to postpone more attempts at remediation until the weekend, so when he called McAfee tech support back then, he was surprised to learn that Tier 2 support doesn't work on Sunday. "I said, you have to be kidding me," he notes.

On Monday, April 26, McAfee tech support did contact Hellen and a technician took full control of his computer and uninstalled the antivirus software using what Hellen viewed as a "special cleaner they have to uninstall." McAfee was completely uninstalled and then reinstalled, he says.

While he appreciated that, and McAfee's effort did seem to restore his computer to full service, "what ticked me off' was that he got an e-mail from McAfee about his case, which he believes doesn't accurately represent his interactions with the vendor.

The McAfee e-mail stated: "Customer called in that computer is infected by virus" and that the "severity rating" was "Business not affected."

Hellen is also upset that McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt issued a formal apology for the faulty antivirus update, saying that thousands of McAfee employees were working around the clock. But from Hellen's experience Tier 2 tech support didn't seem to be working on Sunday, even in the wake of a situation that McAfee itself caused.

McAfee had no immediate response related to McAfee Tier 2 support, but a spokesman did say the company is "investigating" Hellen's case.

McAfee does not intend to release the number of customers impacted by the faulty DAT update. The vendor announced Tuesday it will offer a free one-year subscription to its automated security health-check platform, an assessment of the security in the organization, on a case-by-case basis, to eligible corporate customers.


Source: networkworld.com

Firewall Configuration

A firewall is a device or a set of devices, which can be implemented in any of the hardware, software or both. All the messages passing through the firewall are verified to meet some level of security criteria.

It acts as a computer security barrier, which analyzes all the incoming and outgoing traffic to and from your computer or network based on the firewall settings. There are some common types of firewalls like: Application level gateway, Packet filtering firewall, Circuit gateways and Hybrid firewall.

Application level gateway firewall works on the application layer of the protocol stack. It works more intelligently than the packet filtering firewall. Packet filtering firewall examines the information contained in the header of the message packets.

There are some factors based on which the filters can be added or removed from the firewall:

1. IP address

2. Ports

3. Protocols

IP address: Every computer connected to Internet has a unique IP address. The firewall configuration can be customized to block any IP address so that your computer will not allow any kind of communication to take in between.

Ports: The firewall can be configured to allow or block messages from any port number.

Protocols: There are some commonly used protocols like IP, HTTP, TCP, FTP, and SMTP etc., which can be included in the firewall filter.

Some operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows offer built-in firewalls that are turned on by default to block all the incoming threats from Internet. There are several other third party firewalls available. You can choose any one the firewall to replace the default firewall in Windows.

Computer optimization

Computer optimization can be understood as the vital tonic to boost up the system. It has become the major area of concern for the users. Many computer tech support firms are making campaign for computer optimization. They are making use of troubleshooting techniques and implantation of third party software to resolve the issue.
I will concentrate this blog to resolve some general issues. Unfortunately you may face issues where your screen freezes and programs stop responding. Even you are unable to close the windows of some application. This is the disgusting situation. The reason behind could be scarcity of RAM, infection of virus or fault in windows registry.
Notice the time of the freezing, in majority of the cases your system will be able to restore the normal condition by default without any attempt. But if the things are not in favor bring out the Task Manager utility with simple keyboard activity: Press the ‘Alt’, ‘Ctrl’ and ‘Del’ buttons all at the same time. You would land to a Window format, now scroll down the program which is causing the error and choose to end the program. Now, again you can start the program and get the normalcy.
Note: Lower value of RAM is the prime reason behind hence to avoid regular repetition you may upgrade the RAM.
However, you may not be lucky every time. If the concern is not addressed with the Task Manager then the root cause may be virus infection or corruption of Windows registry.
If you don’t have any compatible anti-virus, than opt for the best one available in the market. Some trusted names includes, McAfee, Bitdefender, Kaspersky and so on. Before making download, make sure that they are compatible to your windows platform. The role of the anti-virus program is to scan and remove any virus, spyware, malware, keyloggers, rootkits and so on and do the computer optimization.

Many independent software are available for computer optimization which can fix, Error messages, slow performance, slow internet browsing and many more within few minutes. Some of the best are RegCure PC optimizer, XoftspySE.

A computer support consultant is a seasoned consulting role which involves contract programming and system administration. Quite a tedious job, a computer support consultant is basically hired on a contract basis and usually the consultants are experts in computer administration and dealing.

Functions

The basic concept behind hiring computer consultants is to fit into the role of the expert and get services which are otherwise not found in the employees of the company. This skill of the consultant is hired by the companies to fill in the gap and ensure smoother functioning of the company.
The computer support consultants are required to train the employees in the company who have been hired on a permanent basis. The whole idea is to train the permanent employees in such a way that they will take over the services rendered by the consultant after the training process is over.
After the underlying issues are resolved by the computer consultant, the contract usually expires. The contract can be renewed if there are other areas or department in the company which have similar issues. Otherwise the consultant leaves the company.

Prospects

While this whole process is also a learning curve experience for the computer support consultant, the consultant can earn more money in the process. The difference between a permanent employee and a consultant is that while the former has a job wherein years might be spend on a single project.
It is a reliable and less-demanding job as compared to a consultant's. Because the latter have contracts of up to 3 months or even lesser and will have to apply for jobs every few months. The chief criteria to be qualified as a computer support consultant are to possess good and specialized skills which qualify the person to be a hired giving expert advice to companies.

Windows 7 Guide- The Concept of VPN Reconnect, DirectAccess , Ipv6

Roaming users count on VPNs (virtual private networks) to offer a secure connection between their computer and the company Intranet. When a user is sitting in a hotel room, or in a conference room at a customer site, and makes a VPN connection, the user's PC will generally remain connected unless there is some other network issue that interrupts the connection.
However, users who count on wireless broadband connectivity to make a VPN connection while on the go are faced with frequent dropped connections and cumbersome process for reauthenticating and reestablishing the VPN connection every time.
The VPN Reconnect tool allows Windows 7 to automatically reestablish active VPN connections when Internet connectivity is interrupted. As soon as Windows 7 reconnects with the Internet, Windows 7 will also reconnect with the VPN. The VPN will still be unavailable as long as the Internet connection is not available, and the process of reconnecting will take a few seconds after Internet access becomes available again, but VPN Reconnect will make sure that users stay connected with the network resources they need access to.
VPN Reconnect is basically an IPSec tunnel using the IKEv2 (Internet Key Exchange) protocol for key negotiation and for transmission of ESP (Encapsulating Security Payload) packets. ESP is part of the IPSec security architecture that offers confidentiality, authentication of data origin, and connectionless integrity.
In situations such as viewing streaming video over a VPN connection while riding on a commuter train, users typically lose all buffered data and have to start the video over every time connectivity is lost.
The features of the IKEv2 IPSec tunnel and ESP help ensure a persistent connection even if the IP address changes during the reconnect and allows the streaming video to resume from the point it was at when VPN connectivity was lost.
Nothing is better than a VPN that automatically reconnects and retains its connection state? How about not needing a VPN in the first place? DirectAccess is one of the most compelling and game changing features of Windows 7, both for users and for administrators faced with a remote and roaming work force.
DirectAccess offers a persistent and seamless bidirectional connection between the internal network and the Windows 7 system, as long as that Windows 7 system can connect to the Internet. With DirectAccess, remote and roaming users experience the same access to corporate shares, intranet sites, and internal applications as they would if they were sitting in the office connected directly to the network.
IPv6 is required in order to use DirectAccess. DirectAccess connectivity is built on the foundation of globally routable IP addresses that IPv6 gives. IPv6 has been around for a while, and most systems and network devices are ready for IPv6, but the actual adoption of IPv6 as a replacement for IPv4 networking has been slow.
The software giant was aware that IPv6 is not available everywhere, so the company came with the DirectAccess to take advantage of IPv6 transition tools such as 6to4, Teredo, and ISATAP. Within the network, DirectAccess depends on NAT-PT (Network Address Translation-Protocol Translation) to provide connectivity between DirectAccess and IPv4 resources.
DirectAccess uses split-tunnel routing to intelligently route network traffic based on the intended destination. Only traffic destined for the corporate network is routed through the DirectAccess server, while traffic intended for resources on the public Internet is routed directly to its destination. Split-tunneling ensures that the resources of the DirectAccess server are not consumed by unnecessary network traffic.

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