To remove Antispyware Soft, first you have to reenable internet connection first. To do so:

1. Reboot into safe mode with networking.

2. Launch your internet explorer and make sure your internet connection does not uses proxy server. Do so in other browsers as well

3. Download Spyware Doctor using this link (it should not be blocked by Antispyware Soft). Run and perform full scan.

If it fails, try blocking Antispyware Soft manually.

The best way to do so is start task manager (or, for example, process explorer) and stop all Antispyware Soft processes. The processes typically end in tssd.exe.

Afterwards, I would recommend doing full scan  with Spyware Doctor or Malwarebytes anti-malware.  It is critical to have a security suite that provides real time protection against such infections like this.

Today I want to talk about really unproductive topic – that is how to code poorly. Or, more exactly, I am going to pick on my unfavorite  piece of social site again, that is Boonex. We will talk about how one should not implement user sessions and how to do it better.

Boonex uses unencrypted cookies to store session data, that is member ID and hashed member password. Each request Boonex checks database for memberID and password combination. This is to ensure that the person would be logged off the system if password is changed by someone else.

Thus, what is the problem with this approach?

Well, what about making hashed passwords save on PC user logs in? These passwords remain available till user explicitly logs out.  And the hash used is a simple md5 hash which is fast one-way function. You cannot reverse it, but it is susceptible for dictionary or brute force attacks. There are databases for such md5 strings as well.

You could partly solve that problem by using a seed with the hashed password. However, it would make the password guessing game more complex but not impossible. Also, you do not need the password for being logged in, just the cookies. And it is quite simple to change values in them with Firefox.

Another problem we had is with effectiveness of this password checking. It is one of multiple requests that are done on each page load. Even when they are fast, they affected boonex performance, which is quite bad anyways. But caching this information makes a security hole open:  ID could be changed and your system could be compromised.

It is much safer to save session information on server side.  PHP native session management is much better than what boonex has to offer, thus you should switch to it in the code (I have demo version of boonex  7 on August, it still has this problem).   It is quite some work, but it is worth it. Or, even better, look for some other social network script.

I am using mywot for couple of days, and I would say I kind of like it, though its not something unexpected. Sure, I am happy, that most of sites belonging to firms I work with do well.

My main concern was that community-driven opinions might be incorrect regards some of the product vendors due to popular opinion and not facts. This still remains true. WOT still votes out some of the commercial sites that have low reputation in non-commercial or competitor/managed communities in security field. Some of relatively good product vendors still suffer for their former actions and public opinion years after they corrected (more or less) their behavior. Well, nothing surprising.

The good thing is nice warning system I use both for avoiding bad sites and looking for them when I want to spot new threats. I like search result enhancement the most, and it helps me distinguishing sites I need when I browse security related search results.

What would improve MyWot? Here are my thoughts:

1. Allow user to browse site without warnings WHEN he is on it. Its quite annoying to close warning screen on each page. Or give an option "this session only" to disable the screen.

2. More consistency on what are good sites and bad sites, some guidelines as different people rate same level sites quite differently. To confirm this, I checked couple of poker rooms, rated quite high in industry (ratings from poker works room ratings  ) . The WOT ratings vary from very bad, to good although these rooms provide more or less same level of service, and I have not heard any specific complaints on the bad rated ones. Interesting enough, best ratings are for rooms that DO NOT complies with UIGEA, which prohibits accepting money from USA players, and worst ratings are for the rooms that prohibit American players from playing. Revenge? Well, More like distribution of WOT users.

WOT (Web of trust) is firefox add-on for voting on security of sites and getting warnings. It was recommended in one blog, and I wanted to give it a try.

The idea of the software is quite nice, a community based votes on sites and warning system. The single fear is that it might happen to become a web tool of revenge between competing security advisors, companies and tool developers. Everyone in this market has strong opinions what is legitimate and what is not, and this might be imposed on users. I have yet to know what stoppers are in WOT to protect from this behavior.

That’s why I have tried to install the add-on and ultimately failed. First time it installed, my firefox hanged in the background on restart and I had to kill it. It looked like that the WOT is installed, however it was not activated and no ratings were given.

Thus I have decided to reinstall it. The reinstall went smooth, and an agreement screen appeared, where I confirmed that I want to participate. Sadly, nothing changed, and I still can’t rate anything, or even see ratings.

The funny thing is that to access forum and (probably) the support, you need to be a member, and that means you have to have an active working copy of WOT. Thus I am not sure I’ll want to try fixing WOT installation again.  Even if they might be caused by VISTA or firewall settings (no warnings though, and I assume in the 1mb download there is the site list).

Also, WOT settings page works interestingly, it looks like the apply button is disabled, but that’s might get caused by installation problems.

More information can be found at http://www.mywot.com.

UPDATE

Couple of restarts later the extension started to work. And props for mywot.com support. Will post the results of testing the extension later.