England’s NHS PCs Under Cyber Attack

Tags

cyber security, malware, windows

Note: the NHS is England’s medical/health system

The NHS has been hit as part of a global cyber-attack that threw hospitals and businesses in the UK and across the world into chaos.

The unprecedented attack on Friday affected 12 countries and at least 16 NHS trusts in the UK, compromising British IT systems that underpin patient safety. Staff across the NHS were locked out of their computers and trusts had to divert emergency patients.

…

“If large numbers of NHS organisations failed to act on a critical notice from Microsoft two months ago, then whose fault is that?” Anderson said. “This is the sort of thing for which the secretary of state should get roasted in parliament.”

Alan Woodward, visiting professor of computing at the University of Surrey, said that the attack’s success “is likely to be because some organisations have either not applied the patch released by Microsoft, or they are using outdated operating systems”.

Amazingly, NHS’s failure to maintain their Windows PCs is the reason they are in trouble today.

Link: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/may/12/hospitals-across-england-hit-by-large-scale-cyber-attack

Here’s some more info: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/a-massive-ransomware-attack-on-the-nhs/526524/

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Free, Legal Downloads of Adobe CS2 Software

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Adobe, creative suite, CS 2, free download, free software, legal free download, Software

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html

Adobe is offering free, legal downloads of Creative Suite 2. Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.  The current version of CS is 6, but hey, free is free.  I downloaded Illustrator and InDesign to play with.

If you get any of these, remember that Windows and Mac OS X are different downloads for each product. And the serial numbers are different for Windows vs. Mac.  The serial numbers are on the download page, you will need the correct serial number for each download to install the programs.

Thanks, Adobe!

 

Malware on Mac OS X

Tags

dns hijack, mac os x, malware, OSX.RSPlug.A, removal, trojan horse

On Friday I saw a Trojan Horse on an OS X (snow leopard) system in the wild. It was the first time I ever saw an infected Mac. Interesting, in the same way seeing a poisonous snake is interesting. Windows malware is common and is everywhere. This was different.

The infected Mac had a DNS hijack trojan. It changed the DNS server addresses to 85.255.116.150 and 85.255.112.148  A whois showed these to be shared hosts in the Ukraine. Going into the DNS settings (system preferences > networking > advanced > dns) and changing these to the desired dns servers did not “stick”, that is they would change back to the wrong ones by the trojan process. When web surfing, sometimes the Mac behaved normally and sometime it would go to seemingly random web sites.

A bit of google research turned up references to a trojan horse called OSX.RSPlug.A This cannot replicate itself, it was installed in error by the user who thought he was installing an updated codec. He was on a “questionable” site … ok he was trying to see a pornographic video and the site said he needed to install a codec update to see it. So here we have the crux of the matter, it was a user error that got this trojan on his mac. Self inflicted.

I found the removal solution at Macworld.com  here:  http://www.macworld.com/article/60823/2007/10/trojanhorse.html To prove the system has this trojan, use the terminal app and enter

sudo crontab -l

the last character is a lower case letter l, not the digit 1. cron is the unix/linux program that runs tasks or jobs at a specific time or interval. crontab is the program which lets you create, view, change, delete these scheduled tasks. If you see something like

* * * * * "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/plugins.settings">/dev/null 2>&1

you have this malware. This says cron will run the script named plugins.settings on a regular basis. To cancel this,  in terminal enter

sudo crontab -r

then delete the plugins.settings file.  I found it in ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins directory, not in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins. Do a search to see where it is and delete them all.

This worked, the infected Mac was cured.

WARNING!! Adobe Photoshop CS3 to CS4 on OS X

Tags

CS3 to CS4 update, CS4, photoshop

I just wasted much of my Saturday morning fighting with the brain damaged Adobe CS4 installer. Perhaps this post will save others some aggravation. I had Adobe Photoshop CS3 installed on my OS X 10.5 MacBook Pro. I got the CS4 update. Please be aware this is for Mac OS X only. I don’t know the traps the CS4 installer sets on windows.

• I did the install from the DVD. All seemed OK, except the installation process did not have the option to simply upgrade CS3 to CS4 – which is what I wanted to do. I did not want 2 versions of Photoshop on my system.
• After installing CS4, I tried it and it ran OK.  I ran the updater and it downloaded some new files OK. Next step, remove CS3
• On the older CS3, the readme pdf file gave these instructions for uninstalling: DO NOT drag applications to the trash to uninstall them. To safely uninstall on Mac OS X, double-click the product installer in Applications\Utilities\Adobe Installers. Authenticate as an administrator, then select Remove Components and follow the on-screen instructions.
• I did the above. It took a long, long time but finished OK.
• Next, I ran Photoshop again and got this message:
  

  adobe cs4 error

  Here’s the message in text so that a search might reveal this post. “One or more files in the Adobe Application Support folder, necessary for running Photoshop, are missing. Please run the Photoshop installer re-install Photoshop.” Not good. I followed the instructions an reinstalled from the DVD.

• After reinstalling, I got the same message. Very NOT GOOD.
• A search on Adobe’s web site returned no useful information.
• A web search gave some hints: The error message is referring to directory /Library/Application Support/Adobe    Note this is different from ~/Library
• There were over 17 thousand files in various folders inside /Library/Application Support/Adobe  Uh Oh
• After taking a break to eat, I decided to use Apple’s Time Machine to restore /Library/Application Support/Adobe  to what it was yesterday. There was 650 megabytes in 17,700 files. Time Machine did this easily. You are using Time Machine, aren’t you?
• Once this completed, I reinstalled CS4 Photoshop from the DVD. It worked!! No errors.

I hope this is of use to others.

Lightroom 2

Tags

digital photography, lightroom 2

We recently bought Adobe Lightroom 2. We’re learning our way through it, so far it seems to be “camera raw on steroids” plus some additional new functions. I like the ability to save presets – a set of parameters – and them apply them to images later on. On the downside, Lightroom 2 is a resource pig. This is the first program that feels slow on my MacBook Pro. It used all 2 GB of ram, so I bought 4 GB and this helped a lot. Memory has gotten inexpensive, I found 4 GB of PC5300 ram for less than $90 including shipping. Installed it this morning. The Macbook Pro has 2 memory slots, so I had to take out the original 2 GB  and replaced it with 4 GB on 2 simm’s. Anyone want to buy the original 2 GB?

I also bought an ebook on Lightroom from Michael Clark. I really like ebooks for anything but fiction. They are PDF files, so they are searchable. And trees do not have to die. I just started with the book so I don’t have an opinion on it yet.