Recently, Microsoft issued its usual batch of updates for Windows. Many users of 32-bit Windows system started having trouble and would receive the dreaded BSOD error (Blue Screen of Death) and then would be not be able to restart their computer. Shortly thereafter, Microsoft announced that these issues were in fact due to the computers being infected by the Alureon rootkit.
Alureon is a malware package that contains several pieces: a rootkit (which is used to hide the procesess and actions of the virus), search hijacking, and DNS modification. One of the main actyivities of Alureon is to make changes to a specific driver in the Windows system, the ‘atapi.sys’ miniport driver.
Microsoft’s Scott Molenkamp addresses the issue in his Technet blog. “As part of the February security updates, an update (MS10-015) resolving a vulnerability in Windows Kernel was released. This update included a new operating system kernel. Inspecting the updated kernel at the same VA, we observe that this address no longer corresponds to the start of the “ExAllocatePool” API. In the updated kernel, the VA of “ExAllocatePool” has changed. Therefore, after applying MS10-015, Alureon will now be attempting to make an invalid call.”
The invalid call made by the Alureon then results in the BSOD. The easiest fix for system crashes due to this is to simply replace the infected files with new ones via the system console. Easy step-by-step instructions can be found at on this website.
Now that you’ve got your website on Google, let’s get you signed up for Google Analytics. This is a free tool that helps you track visitors to your website – the visitors need to have JavaScript enabled but anymore, that is about 90% of web users. With the continual evolution of modern technology, people are doing a lot more over the internet than they use to ….make an internet payment, conduct research, etc. and JavaScript is practically a necessity to doing these things. Signing up for a Google Analytics account is quite easy but getting it to track all of your pages within your website can be a little tricky so it might be a good idea to contact your developer or technician if you are not sure how to do this.
Let’s start by signing up for a Google Analytics account. To do this, go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and follow the steps to sign up for an account. Once you’re signed up and into Analytics, click on the Add Website Profile link (it should be below the table in the main area of the window). Enter your domain name, country and time zone, then click finish. You will now be given a tracking code that you need to associate with every page that you want tracked. Follow the instructions for adding tracking. If you are using some sort of Content Management Software (like drupal or joomla) or shopping cart software, there might be an area in the software to add this bit of code and then have it automatically added to every page in your website. You will need to check your software manual or ask your developer to figure out how to add the appropriate code to your website. Once the code is on your website, Google will start tracking peoples’ usage of your site and data will be populated into the application for your use.
For now, let’s just let these tools gather some information from your website so next time there will hopefully be some useful data to explore when we go over how to use some of the tools.
