So you are living in the city and your super fast, high speed connection isn’t fast anymore. Your first question should be, “do I have a wireless router?” and the second question is, “Is the wireless router secured with a password?”.  If the answer to the second question was either that you “don’t know” or “No”  then be assured that anyone living near you may be using your internet for free and bogging your connection down. It is a very common thing to happen.

Your wireless router should always have a password set to keep others off of your connection. There are a few reasons why.

1. Anything illegal they may be doing on that connection comes back to you. You are responsible for anything being done on your internet connection. Luckily there are cases where the owner was able to convince authorities that someone else was using the connection.

2. As we already talked about, your internet connection can become very slow and even as slow as an old dial-up connection if the the others using your connection are downloading a lot of material or using file-sharing software.

3. Your own internet traffic can be intercepted and read by anyone else using the wireless connection. This is a bit more technical, but be aware that there are plenty of programs out there for free that can accomplish this very easily.

4. If you are sharing files on your own computer with other computers on the network in your own home then there is also a chance that the person using your wireless connection is also able to view your shared files and even print on  your network enabled printer as well. Note that windows 7 has become more secure in this area. An XP machine on the other hand wouldn’t stop sharing these shared items.

One thing you may not know is that every computer has what is called a MAC address that makes each computer unique. The special mac address belongs to one computer only. The MAC address would be the same as a phone number that belongs to your home only. While the intrusion into your wireless connection is happening, your router may also keeping a record of the mac address that connected to it. Your intruder is not quite as anonymous as they might think.

Each router is different as far as logging in to change settings. Refer to your paperwork for your specific router. Many times running the supplied CD that came with your router will ask what password and security level you will want your router at. You may also want to set up your SSID to not show for public connection.

If you need help to secure your wireless connection then give us a call

The well known TDL4 Rootkit has been deemed indestructible by Kaspersky Labs researcher Sergey Golovanov. He goes on to say that it is “the most sophisticated threat today”

It attaches itself to the MBR or boot portion of the hard drive at sector 0 and remains hidden until it is called upon with instructions on what to do. It is not detectable by any of the store bought anti-virus software’s that are in use by most PC’s today.  You won’t even know you have it installed other than you may notice a slow down in your connection if the botnet decides to take action on a target.  When it does take action, your computer will be a part of the army of about four million PCs that have been infected.

TDL-4 itself downloads and installs other malware as well as gets rid of malware it doesn’t want on the computer. The most popular one that it installs is “Fake Anti-virus” scareware.

Here comes the good part though. We offer FREE detection to make sure you don’t have it on your system. Computer Whisperer also has special software to get rid of the TDL-4 Rootkit as well as anything it added to your computer.  We are the only repair shop to have this ability in the area.

You can read a more in-depth article about TDL-4 Here