Friday, 8 May 2015

Virus Emails Scanned Tickets scan0079.xls from Rebecca De Mulder

Email from Rebecca De Mulder
milestoneholdings@yahoo.co.uk
with file scan0079.xls attached

Appears to be a macro virus inside the Excel document so don't open it!
 
Email text is as below:
 
Afternoon

 

Attached are the tickets  you have requested

  

Kinds Regards kath

 

Milestone Holdings

 

Tel:   01676 541133

Mob: 07976 440015

Wednesday, 6 May 2015

Email from Transport for London Virus / Malware


 There are many emails being sent today with this subject Email from Transport for London supposedly sent from email address noresponse@cclondon.com
 
These emails contain a Word document AP0210780545.doc that requires macros to be enabled to open it. DO NOT OPEN! This file contains a virus and will infect your PC, as of now (6 May 2015) it is not detected by the majority of Antivirus vendors.
 
 This virus appears to be ransomware and renames and encrypts files on your PC or network drives to demand money for the encryption key.
 
 It may well be a file called wiley5.exe that is the payload but this isn't yet confirmed.

Dear Customer,

 

Please open the attached file to view correspondence from Transport for London.

 

If the attachment is in DOC format you may need Microsoft Word to read or download this attachment.

 

 

Thank you for contacting Transport for London.

 

 

 

Business Operations

Customer Service Representative

Saturday, 3 January 2015

Microsoft Money Quote Updates

A great update to have - a new version of the updater from Gaier software has been released that now picks up more quotes for MS Money.

I've just downloaded the paid version as I think the developer deserves some benefit from their hard work.

You can view the details here:


The note from the developer is below:


I wanted to let you know I have released version 2.0 tonight! 

This version switches to an entirely new online quote service.  The new quote service was built for the new MSN.com and MSN Money websites, and is also used by the Windows 8 Finance app.  The new online quote service is more reliable, has better symbol coverage, and should be here to stay for a long time.  It is backed by a Morningstar quote feed.

The MSN Money team has communicated to me the “old” quote service will be shutdown Jan 5th.  It seems they pushed the date back from the originally planned date of Dec 22nd 2014.  Good for us because it gave me more time to update my program!

As discussed in my previous email, this change required a significant amount of re-work to MSMoneyQuotes due to the new “symbology” format.  And thus I changed MSMoneyQuotes’s major version from “1” to “2”.
The approach my program uses to access online quotes has changed.  Instead of a single step to get online quotes using the symbols as-is from the Money file, there are now two steps: 
1)      The first step is to “resolve symbols”.  That means my program needs to map the symbols in your Money file (e.g. $US:INDU)  to a symbol on MSN Money (e.g. 126.10.!DJI.126.$INDU).  It uses the same service used by MSN Money’s “Quote Search” auto-complete input box to perform the lookup.  See the “Help and Support” section at the bottom of this page for more information: http://gaiersoftware.com/Money/DetailsAndHelp
2)      If it can resolve the symbol, then it uses the special MSN Money symbols (e.g. 126.10.!DJI.126.$INDU) to fetch online quotes.

You can see the two steps above in action if you use the –v verbose option.

I have also fixed a couple problems reported to me with regards to the FT.com import feature.  Specifically my program now handles symbols that have a double suffix  (e.g. SLXX:LSE:GBP, IGUS:LSE:GBX) and symbols that are 2 characters long with a suffix (e.g. AI:PAR, OR:PAR).

And lastly, as part of the above online quotes re-work, I have begun the effort to include currency exchange rates as part of the online quote update.  Look for that soon in version 2.1.  If you are interested in the feature, I’ll be looking for some beta testers in the near future.  Send me an email if you’re interested in participating in the testing.

Tuesday, 23 December 2014

EE PDP authentication error

There is a general EE error with users getting both PDP authentication error and APN settings incorrect when trying to use data.

NEET WiFi Music Receiver Setup

After looking at options for playing digital music through my old HiFi separates amplifier and speakers I had decided that SONOS wasn't a viable option and came across the NEET WiFi Music Receiver on Amazon. There seems to be little other information available elsewhere on the NEET WiFi Music Receiver so I wonder if the Amazon distribution is an exclusive channel.

Once I get the NEET WiFi Music Receiver setup with my Nexus 5 phone and Netgear NAS I'll post some more details of how the configuration and setup is arranged.

Friday, 14 November 2014

Whos Heart 2014 - Last Voice Guessed as Nigel Kennedy

Whos on Heart 2014 has now been won with the final voice identified as Nigel Kennedy the classical violinist. The last voice has taken nearly 12 months to identify but the winner now gets a fantastic £100,000!

The other voices from Whos on Heart 2014 were Stevie Nicks and Ben Miller

Whos = Ben Miller
On = Stevie Nicks
Heart = Nigel Kennedy


Whos Heart 2014 Last Voice Nigel Kennedy
Whos Heart 2014 Last Voice Nigel Kennedy

Winshock Microsoft Windows Bug Patch - Old Windows Vulnerability Revealed

New Windows bug/vulnerability revealed called Winshock. This has been present in all versions of Windows since Windows95.

Nicknamed WinShock (like BASH that was nick named ShellShock), it is rated 9.3 on the CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) vulnerability scale.  However, there is no proof of concept code yet to show how it can be exploited.
Winshock Microsoft Windows Bug Patch - Old Windows Vulnerability Revealed
Winshock Microsoft Windows Bug Patch - Old Windows Vulnerability Revealed

I was made aware of this yesterday - Microsoft released a number of patches which are already being released to home PCs via the Windows Update process.

Interestingly when I googled WinShock, Google automatically thought you meant WinSock (which is a communications protocol), and you have to tell it you actually mean WinShock.

Link to BBC News story

Microsoft patches '19-year-old' bug.  Microsoft patches a critical bug in its software that had existed for 19 years, according to IBM researchers. Read more: