When you own a website and if you need to get this icon you need to create a “favicon.ico” file and put in your root folder. Do remember to clear you temp file in IE and Chrome (not required in Opera, Firefox, and safari). To create .ico files Photoshop is not sufficient. You need a icon editing software. IconFx is a free icon editing software which I thought I should share.

Read more about How to Display Your Website Logo on the Address Bar?

But I am wondering how this happens since in 2009 I was pretty active blogging but it has been almost a year I stopped blogging. Great Thanks “Little Master Sachin Tendulkar” who’s keywords brought lot of impression and click to my site.  Apart from Sachin Tendulkar there have be very few key words that has brought in traffic to my site. It was not an intended effort but I am happy.

Finally a good complete solution

The malware script usually attacks web pages and sometimes even databases. You need to figure out which got attacked. If the attack was on your webpage follow these steps

1. Download the current content of the site and perform a security audit on every file of your site. Check through the code for IFRAME injections.
2. Clean any such injection by deleting the unwanted code.
3. Change your FTP passwords and in future make this a practice to frequently change your passwords to ensure high security.t
4. Scan your local system with a good Antivirus and Malware remover, to make sure that your system is infection free.
5. Upload the new files to the web server.
6. In your web server Avoid 777 permissions on any file or folder.

In case your database server was attacked delete the old contents and restore with a clean data dump.

Once you complete these steps your site will be clean and free from the infection.  It usually takes 2-3 days for search engines to mark your site as clean.

It will take 2-3 days sometimes a weeks time for search engines to index your infection free files.

If you are using Google Webmaster tools you will need to submit your site for verification. Doing this will reduce the time taken to fix the error displayed by your browsers.

Check your hard disk for errors Applies to all editions of Windows Vista. Which edition of Windows Vista am I using? You can help solve some computer problems and improve the performance of your computer by making sure that your hard disk has no errors.

1. Open Computer by clicking the Start button , and then clicking Computer.

2. Right-click the hard disk drive that you want to check, and then click Properties.

3. Click the Tools tab, and then, under Error-checking, click Check Now. If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.

To automatically repair problems with files and folders that the scan detects, select Automatically fix file system errors. Otherwise, the disk check will simply report problems but not fix them. To perform a thorough disk check, select Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors. This scan attempts to find and repair physical errors on the hard disk itself, and it can take much longer to complete.

To check for both file errors and physical errors, select both Automatically fix file system errors and Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors.

4. Click Start.

Depending upon the size of your hard disk, this may take several minutes. For best results, don’t use your computer for any other tasks while it’s checking for errors.

Note: If you select Automatically fix file system errors for a disk that is in use (for example, the partition that contains Windows), you’ll be prompted to reschedule the disk check for the next time you restart your computer.

1. Click Start, click Computer

2. Press Alt on your keyboard

3. Click Tools, then Folder Options

4. Choose View tab

5. Change the settings to:

>>> Choose Show hidden files and folders

>>> Remove checkmark from Hide extensions for known file types

>>> Remove checkmark for Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)

>>> Click Apply and OK

Now, right click on your external drive and choose Explore. Can you locate any file with “Autorun.inf” name. Delete this file.

Disconnect your external drive, and reconnect it back.

Resons for Re-install

I had a DNSChanger attack which changed my internet modem’s DNS value to 85.xxx.xx.xx series. My internet was working but I was not able to open eset.com (my anti-virus and firewall solution). Things worsened when windows updates failed. Google search results will be hijacked. Horrible attack. Iwas not sure that the problem was with my intenet modem(DNS issue) and hence I reinstalled the OS.

Vista After Fresh install

After fresh install, just as soon as I login the documents window opens and rest other things don’t appear. Screen will be black. Every Login I had to open the task manager and then run a new task “Explorer”.

If you are a beginner just use the export option to backup the current registry value. While saving ensure you choose the export range as all. Just a safety!! It is better you create a system restore point to make sure everything will be alright even if you go wrong.

1. Run regedit from the start/search line, go to this key:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\WinlogonLocate the shell entry in the right pane and double click it.

2. Replace the contents with just:

explorer.exe

3. Click ok, then close the registry editor and restart the system.

Note: In my case there were two values.

Original value – explorer.exe  C:/windows/system32/somefile.dll

Changed value – explorer.exe , C:/windows/system32/somefile.dll

Both the values should be separated by a comma

Just a six step wizards. You have options to take a sql dump or directly load table structure and data to mysql.  It is easy and cool. Kudos to bullzip.com. Great application.

After investigating a bit I figured out that we changed the default for the “scriptErrorSentToBrowser” flag in IIS7. It’s now false and you always get the error above. Click Here to know how to change it.

Recently Iframe and obfuscated javascript exploits have become a serious threat.

It looks like the attack usually has two stages.

1. Account passwords harvesting. On the first state they collect passwords for the accounts. We will call this stage “account passwords harvesting”. Details on how they do that are fuzzy. The truth is that on a typical Linux server it might enough to get just one user account password to be in a reasonably good position to get the root via some king of little known or unpatched exploit. Zones and jails are better in this respect as they protect other users from easily compromised “suckers” who happily use passwords like 123456 or use infected with spyware PCs at home. Actually the complexity of the password should be beefed up to at least 8 characters. But this does not help if the user computer is infected with a keylogger. ISPs need to handle vastly difference classes of users and security is always as good as the weakest link.

2. Mass modification of index files. On the second stage the pool of passwords harvested is used to modify certain files. We will call this stage “mass modification of index files”. It looks like this stage was automated and they use a special tool, called MPACK, to install malicious IFrames. Usually only main site index documents were targeted (i.e. index.php, index.html, index.shtml, etc.). Malicious IFrames are usually installed at the beginning or at the end of the document. This attack stresses the fact that Web browsers should now be installed on VM and used with a special disposable image of Windows. Please consider using Microsoft Virtual PC or VMware and opening a separate instance of OS for browsing if you did not do it already. 

Sites attacked by malwares of this type are being Banned by search engines, The worst problems are ranking destructed, unwanted popups/redirections…

Also a new web based threat (drive-by installs) is currently spreading at a rate of about hundreds of site / day (may be more).

MacAFee has named this trojan as  JS/IFrame.gen

There is no official solution to get over this problem. Changing you FTP account password and using updated/latest FTP clients should solve this problem.

Windows users should make sure they have installed all security updates, and preferably upgrade to XP SP2 with IE7, or Vista. Running an active anti-malware guard can also help. That should just leave the people dumb enough to think they need to install a new codec to view porn.

Other ways is blocking the IP. Know more  here

http://www.softpanorama.org/Malware/Malicious_web/malicious_iframe_attack.shtml

URL Redirection is used primarily for redirecting from old URL to new URL.

My OLD URL was

http://entertainment.raptor.in/mirchi%20suchi/

which i needed to redirect to

http://raptor.in/?s=suchitra

Solution
Redirect 301 “/mirchi suchi/” http://raptor.in/?s=suchitra

Challenge
The challenge here was that my old url contained a white space which took me a lot of time to fix. Then I found a solution after googleing. To understand the solution I found was even more challenging. Since entertainment.raptor.in was a sub-domain I tried to put this redirect rule in .htaccess in the entertainment folder.

For those who don’t know how sub-domains work.
http://entertainmet.raptor.in is same as http://raptor.in/entertainment

I tried to put the solution in the .htaccess under entertainment directory and the rule didn’t seem  to work.
Redirect 301 “/mirchi suchi/” http://raptor.in/?s=suchitra

Then I came to understand that rewriteBase base was creating the problem. When .htaccess file is within a  directory(in my case entertainment directory) you can only redirect to the same directory(only to entertainment directory) and not the preceeding directory(my root directory).

This would have worked for me in the .htacess file under entertainment directory.
Redirect 301 “/mirchi suchi/” http://raptor.in/entertainment?s=suchitra
Redirect 301 “/mirchi suchi/” http://entertainment.raptor.in/?s=suchitra

Other Samples
Redirect 301 “/mirchi suchi/” http://raptor.in/?s=suchitra
Redirect 301 “/Sivaji – The Boss 2007/august news.htm” http://raptor.in/category/entertainment/
Redirect permanent /vista/default.htm http://raptor.in/category/computer/windows-vista

Even  with IE7 caching of images didn’t seem to happen. I felt in IE8 things would be better but it is not so. For every request images gets downloaded again and again. This is most irritating for any user. Rest other broswers like Mozilla Firefox, Chrome, Opera all seem to cache the common images and it gives a wonderful user experience. I don’t know why IE7 and IE8 doesn’t seem to have this feature. If there is a workaround I don’t know it now!!!

Without this very important feature I see that IE is further going loose the market.

2. Fix for the last saved path bug.

IE8 doesn’t remember last saved path. I believe this bug was there in beta version but it still persist even after release. I don’t know what is going on!!!