“Please find attached a statement of fees as requested, this will be
posted today.

The accommodation is dealt with by another section and I have passed
your request on to them today.

Kind regards.

Hannah ”

Yes it is a virus the attached .doc.exe file seems to vary daily in it’s choice of virus.

So far it has been:

TROJ_AGENT.ANID
TROJ_ZBOT.WB (No page exists for this variant at the moment)
WORM_SYSTEM.AA

All 3 of which were not detected in the most uptodate pattern from trend, having to instead resort to their CPR release (Controlled Pattern), after emailing these samples to their labs (Another unknown variant was received today, and sent to Trend labs).

This brings into question the validity of “Honey pot” accounts to catch these viruses, the only reason I am able to attain these “samples” before they become a problem is due to the fact I have a “Honey pot” email account with a generic often spammed address format for this purpose.

This is making “Honey pots” more of a NEED now instead of an “Über Techies” box of tricks the end user is afraid to go within 30 meters of.

If you run a windows based network I suggest you do some research into how to setup a good honey pot (DO not use an account on your exchnage server that would be REALY stupid), you can also post a comment or use the contact for for advice.

Once setup make it part of your daily routine to test samples as they some in against your anti virus solution, making sure you know how to send samples to the providers labs for analysis.Tweet

An international office on permanent VPN connection to where I work would experience extremely slow load times of office documents even if they were local to the machine, strangely this only occurred when connected to the network (and hence to the domain).

What was eventually found by the afor mentioned fellow tech was that every time an office application would load (i.e. open a new document) it was “polling” the entire domain for listed printers and folders, not a problem in the local office with Gigabit connectivity, but a major problem for an international office with several employees over a low bandwidth line …

So how to fix this?!?

 (Assuming windows XP & Classic Menu)

START > CONTROL PANEL > Folder Options > View

 Uncheck “Automatically search for network printers and folders” > OK

 Now make sure you exit all office applications (better yet just reboot)

If this does not solve the issue, or only provides a slight gain it’s time to remove the “recent files” list, from within excel

TOOLS > OPTIONS > General

 Uncheck “Recently use file list” … Exit all office apps (or reboot).

And try again, this _appears_ to solve the slow down.

Any problems drop me a comment.Tweet