September 2008 Archives

This one just gave me a big laugh. I remember hearing in the news that Senator Palin's personal email was hacked. I remember chuckling and not really thinking too much of it. Big deal lots of people's accounts have been compromised. The same story that reported  she was hacked didn't mention anything embarrassing or incriminating that was found so whats the big deal? Well its not really a big deal its just everyone in the world is obssessed right now with the candidates so anything with their name on it is front page news.  Well its been a few weeks and now the hacker was caught. Lets look into the technical details on how he did it.

Well if you are looking for a step by step guide on how to be a hacker like this guy you are going to be pretty disappointed. Palin's account was hacked using any special tools or some kind of new attack. The hacker - actually I have to stop using that word to describe this person, lets use 'computer user'. The computer user simply reset her password. How? Well we know its a Yahoo mail account and to reset a Yahoo mail account you need the users birth date and the answer to her secret question. Unfortunately for Senator Palin the answer to her 'secret question' was easily answered by a quick Google search. So that's it! Our computer user guy just reset her password by Googling where Palin met her spouse (Wasilla High).

Another bad move is the guy then bragged about his hack on a public website. He was smart enough to use an Internet proxy server but unfortunately he only used one so it wasn't hard for the authorities to find this guy. So what's next? Well probably nothing if faced with a misdemeanor he could get up to six months. For more legal information take a look here at the original article.

If you recently have been infected with a virus you may now be unable to change your desktop background. Typically the virus will replace your background with a big ugly. 'You are infected!' background. Of course it'll ask you to buy their 'cure' that will solve all of your problems. This is bad and we want to back to our World of Warcraft background. Here's how to do it.

I recently received this question.

"Thanks for providing the smitRem tool, it was great at getting rid of the installed program and pop-up.  After running it though, my display still stays with the basic blue background.  If I try to change the wallpaper in display settings, I cannot select any of the patterns and the scrollbar does not move.  I think that the "desktop" tab of the display settings has been faked somehow.  The various files like 'aquarium, ascent' aren't actually .bmp's in the Windows directory.  This is the same problem that I noticed before I ran smitRem.  I have used webshots for wallpaper and while that runs fine, it does not change the wallpaper image either.  Is there something else that I still have to remove?"

You can see in the above screen shot this user is unable to change their background. Fortunately for us this is actually pretty easy to fix and can be done with a simple registry edit. I have both of the registry files available for download here so here they are.

• Download 'Can't change background' fix