Govvy.co.uk

Have you gotten this email recently, well I have had quite a few of them recently. I have a feeling that it is a phishing-scam. I warn you not to click on the link, I for sure haven’t. I hope egg.com are warning their customers of the scam also.

From the spam I have received regarding egg.com I think someone  (or a group) might have been trying to use email addresses with my domain name. Trying to create a number of credit card accounts trying to break into egg.com’s security. Alas attempting at fraud and other data-crimes of suspect nature.

So my suggestion to those who are Egg customers, your data and credit information might have been comprimised and for those who aren’t. Simple don’t get an Egg card and I hope you delete the email off your PC.

The body of the email contains:

On Internet forums there appeared messages of a powerful explosion at a United Kingdom nuclear power station located in the suburbs of London..
According to witnesses’ statements the explosion happened at about 3 pm on the 9th of September.
In particular, one resident of this town has made a call and had time to inform her relatives that connection in the town was being cut off in order not to let people phone somebody.
She insists that the explosion really took place at the nuclear power station, and that it was a really powerful one, and now the radiation cloud is moving.
This information is being unofficially confirmed in public agents’ private conversations.

The photo’s attached to this email!
Send this email to your friends!

And the attachment is a WIN32:Trojan-Gen virus, so don’t open it!

The style in which Google publicized their new browser seemed to be quite clever as they had all the major news networks talking about it. So a beta release is upon us and the new internet browser is called Chrome.

There are very few details that are different between Chrome and the major contenders of Internet Explorer and Firefox. But of what little there is, there are certainly some adaptations which are rather nice.

After all it is only a browser window, but I do rather like the thumbnail websites you see on load-up. That is a nice way to select the websites you use most as it will order by how much you use that website. Setting up desktop items which load what pages you like… well that just clutter in the end.

Search strings in the url bar was always a feature in a way, it would just use different search engines per browser.

But the best feature and one which beats IE and Firefox has to when the browsers crash. The tabs and all browser windows will be closed from a crash with IE and Firefox. (Firefox will at least remember where you have been visiting.) A new feature devolved into Chrome has this problem fixed. Because of the architecture created, Chrome runs each tab and each window like its own program and there-for avoids having to restart the whole lot. The added feature of the task manager gives you that extra power to deal with the crashes and fix problems.

Another feature which I can only assume is for people that look up porn and other dodgy stuff is the Incognito mode. That is where the window will not log the pages you view into the history, download cookies or do other bad stuff.

I still think Firefox runs better and feels less than a resource hog. But Chrome is in the early stages and may certainly take a while to get in gear with the internet crowd. For others this is just a wag of the tail. To me it is a long way off from being a contender and I will stick with the trusty Fox.

I read some websites that say braviax is just malware that installs itself on a PC with the red (X) in the system tray and popping up a message to say. Your PC is infected.

Well it was infected with braviax and not only that when following the removal instructions. Removing braviax.exe by shift deletion, then removing a friend of it in a file simply named as BRAVIAX.EXE-0B81BFC9.pf Well, the shit hit the fan. According to the virus scan, running AVG at the time along with Windows Defender and an out of date firewall called Sygate. There were a number of intrusions. 5 one scan, 2 another scan.

I started trying to remove the other stuff, but in two days what ever was left on the PC, a variation of braviax maybe. What it seemed to be doing was first to remove the start menu bar, then all the icons effectively taking away your desktop. The next thing the virus did was erase half the windows registry.

So all I could do and end up with was the task manager program which I could access with ctrl-alt-del string. I could see the processes which all looked innocent but could of possibly been taken over by fakes. I was pretty sure wuauclt.exe was copied over by that virus which does that. Because it was functioning in the processes without asking to update Windows. There was SHeur.cdsc which I don’t know what that did.

So instead of trying to remove any more malware, viruses it’s down to the good old format and start again. How inconvinient for one little braviax.exe and it’s friends.

I have no idea why this Russian website continues to register user accounts on my site. But very ofter maybe once or twice a month a username will register it’self on my site with an email of address ending in @komatoz.net

Now I am assuming is all to do with spam, trying to get it’s name across the internet to get it’s numbers up. So I believe they must be running a bot. Or someone is running a bot for them. I don’t know if it is just targetting me or is infact targetting others. But what I do know it is targetting wordpress which is what I am running.

So beware people, the komatoz.net is spamming.

I first phoned up three weeks ago when I had no internet and it had already been down a few days. I got through to one of those machines, “Press 1, press 2, ect.” I went through that system, they did their tests and that didn’t work. I told them I had tested my router, ADSL filters and I couldn’t work out the problem. I told them there was nothing wrong with the Netgear router they sent out to me. But alas, they wanted to send another one out, which I gladly tested and had to phone back up. Nope! That wasn’t the problem like I had explained.

The worse thing on the second phone call is that they had closed the ticket information thinking they had fixed my problem! WRONG! So basicly I have an extra router modem which might be of use somewhere. But the problem remained and I went through their tests again. Finally after 45 minutes on the third time I called up about not having a connect I got through to 3rd line support. This time the guy ran some sort of different tests and figured out the problem along with telling me lots of what I already know! Finally he set the speed to 3MBit and fixed the problem, even know I am suppose to get 16MBit, but I guess the BT systems round here do not support that.

So now I have my internet back with £15 compensation, I felt the tech-support service they have at Sky Broadband was long winded and not very good. Not very efficient and the 1st tech support level should be able to do what the 3rd level support guy can. Not a very good service, one can only hope it gets better.