Monthly Archives: January 2012

What’s new for 2012?

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To start off 2012 Vernon’s Excellent Blog remains ad free, PPC free, and for the time being an outpost of free speech with an Electronic and Software Engineering bent. In anticipation of the new Year and with a Prosperous 2011 drawing to a close, I began the process of forming a new Business Venture “Engineer LLC“. With a portion of my earnings from Contract work, I have formed a new LLC organization to serve as a foundation for the several business ventures that I have been incubating or planning over the course of 2011.

    • Vernon Johnson Engineering Services has been consulting with private Inventors in 2011 to assist in bringing new inventions to life!
    • Spidersource Unlimited is my vision for a provider of Consumer and Technical Software in the mobile marketplace. It has yet to be officially launched as of this writing.
    • dc-johnson.com was created in January of 2008 in response to an inquiry by a Ferrari restorer and as a tribute to my Father’s invention of aftermarket emission control devices for the Automotive “Grey Market” of the United States in the early 1980s. The site serves as a source of information for owners of these now antique Automobiles. Occasionally, a request comes in for assistance to this site which will now be a division of Engineer LLC.

There may be other ventures in the future that will emerge as projects or ventures of Engineer LLC.

The new web presence for Engineer LLC is hosted by Dreamhost. I have been using them for 7 years (ever since I started publishing public web content). This blog you are reading right now is hosted on Dreamhost. If you are considering opening a new web Hosting account, I strongly recommend Dreamhost. Should you choose to use thier services, use the promo code NEWUSER2012 and you will get an additional discount when you create a new account with Dreamhost. Full Disclosure: I do receive a small referral fee for referring new customers.

Vernon Johnson

January 24, 2012

Malware never sleeps

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Malware and Trojans and Viruses, oh my!

Oh geez, again? This crap is really annoying.

So I just launched a new web presence for Engineer LLC (my new encompassing venture for business). I set up a WordPress blog on the site. So I was checking out the “official” themes on the “official” WordPress website a bit later and I saw one that looked interesting. Curious to see more I selected the hyperlink for the theme Author…

!!! AHHHRGH !!! Malware Attack !!! AHHHRG !!!

Malware

Luckily, Microsoft Security Essentials trapped it right away. However, it had apparently left the tentacles. Next day… OK the computer starts fine, but wait there’s more! Now my browsers (all of them) keep getting the home page hijacked to some Spanish language Movie website? Gimme a break!

(Update 01/07/2012) The annoyance took a bit of work to get rid of, but now it’s gone. While the anti malware stuff caught and killed the threats immediately, it left behind 2 executables in the temporary and program data folders, set to run on startup and lurk until a browser was run. Then the registry was overwritten with the offending url over and over again. Narrowing it down was a hassle. Shut down all the browser add-ons, nope. Run msconfig and deselect all suspected interlopers and possibly compromised legit apps. OK that stopped it. reactivate the browser add-ons one by one, nothing there. Delete the startup items that are not recognizable and enable the suspected legit apps. Restart again and it’s still OK. OK then it was one or more of those unrecognizable .exe files. Stinky malware…