One of the most common ways to be infested with malware is to visit a site designed to exploit some poorly written code on your computer and trigger a download of the stuff to your pc.

How do they get you to their site? It appears luring you with music lyrics and screensavers are the best way. McAfee released a study showing that music lyric sites are very risky to visit, along with more obvious ones like free screensavers, work from home plans, or free music.

There’s no easy solution to avoid these sites; just make sure you’re patched with the latest Microsoft and Adobe updates. We’re also using OpenDNS servers for our clients which we can program to block access to known bad sites.

This is a picture of a client’s 5-year old PC. It’s snuggly, but don’t think all that fuzz is doing it a favor. The most failure-prone element of any computer is the hard drive, and one of the biggest enemies of a hard drive is heat. I don’t advocate ripping a computer apart every other week, but if you notice it running particularly loud, and if you’re in an environment predisposed to a lot of dust, you may want to clean it out every half-year or so to keep things running well.

Solid state storage – like that which your camera or iPhone uses – is slowly making its way into laptops, as a speedy and reliable alternative to hard drives.

The biggest hurdles for our clients is the price – a 120 gig solid state drive (SSD) is usually a $300 option, not to mention a step down in size from the 250 or 320 gig drives that are standard nowadays.

The performance benefit can be impressive, however – on a fresh build I’ve seen boot times in the neighborhood of 15 seconds and Microsoft Office applications that load instantly.

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Outlook 2007 has been plagued with slow performance since its launch. After the first few months of release they issued a patch which helped, but it was still substantially slower than Outlook 2003.

Microsoft has released Office 2007 Service Pack 2 which brings substantial performance gains to Outlook 2007, both for startup/shutdown and normal operation. I also haven’t needed a time-consuming mailbox repair process appear since installation.

You can download it here. Microsoft will make it part of automatic updates in the coming months.

Cablevision announced today a new speed tier for their cable modem service – 101 mbps down and 15 mbps up. To be launched on May 11^th to residential customers, this represents the fastest speed available on any major carrier – and at a reasonable $99/month.

Of course, such speeds are pretty unnecessary unless you’re linking sites via VPN or working with large, large files. Even high definition videoconferencing tops out at around 2 mbps, beneath the 30 mbps down, 5 up offering Cablevision has today.

My Optimum business rep has no announcement yet on a business offering, but I’m hoping it will land at about $120-$130 month.

Our business clients can sleep well tonight: Dell has announced that they will be offering XP Professional on systems past June 30. They’re using a “feature” in the Windows Vista license which allows for the licensee to downgrade their OS to XP. For some models, this is a no-cost option; for their lower-end systems (Vostro, etc) there will be a nominal charge.

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When signing up for a free email account, you’ve probably encountered a CAPTCHA verification: it’s a graphic with characters partially obscured by random lines. The idea is that only humans can make out the text behind all the scribbles.

Unfortunately, malware has been spotted in the wild which has a fairly good success rate at reading these symbols, paving the way for spammers to generate thousands of accounts a day. From these accounts, they can blast out many messages before getting caught. And antispam services which depend upon identifying high-risk sources of spam are powerless against messages that come from reputable sources like Hotmail.

The battle might be waged on several fronts – with CAPTCHA using different approaches for validation, and webmail services starting to filter outgoing mail. Perhaps they will detect and shut down repeated attempts at account generation from the same computer.

The net of this for the average user is that they can expect their mailboxes to continue to be filled with spam for some time.

Check this blog entry for more information.

Back in 07, Google acquired Postini, one of the top mail security companies. We’ve been offering their antispam service for over a year and have been very happy with it. It works by intercepting mail, quarantining viruses and spam, and forwarding only legitimate mail onto the client’s server.

Google proceeded to take their offerings and severely undercut Postini resellers with rock-bottom pricing:

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Online backup services have become very popular over the past few years, with companies like iBackup, Carbonite, and EMC providing offerings that promise to whisk-away your data to storage hidden deep within the Internet. If something happens to your computer, not to worry – you’ll be able to restore your data without missing a beat.

And to be sure, online if effective – but like any service, it’s not flawless. Here are some things to look out for when finding a solution that works for you.

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A security company has released the results of a yearly content pitting popular operating systems against hungry hackers. The grand price is $20,000 as well as the compromised computer.

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