Earlier this week, a student walked into my office with his Dell XPS 15 9550 in hand. Sometimes his computer would behave, and sometimes, during heavy load, it would die with a CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED BSOD. Dell’s own recovery DVD image was unable to restore the computer to a working order. The support personnel at Dell suggested […]

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Kryptowire announced on 2016-11-15 the discovery of malware in Android-based smart phones sold by, among others, Amazon US and BestBuy. The malware was allegedly created by Shanghai ADUPS Technology Co., Ltd. Kryptowire claims the malware sends all your text messages, all your contacts, all your call history, etc., to the domain names listed below. The […]

Read More → Kryptowire’s discovery of malware in Android-based smart phones

A student came to my office today. His browser showed our fronter.com instance protected by a peculiar SSL certificate issued by royalvulkan.com. The norm for fronter.com instances are SSL certificates issued by COMODO CA Limited. The intrusive SSL certificate has a validity period spanning from 1996 to 2056, which is very odd. The certificate probably […]

Read More → SSL Certificates issued by royalvulkan.com

I was installing Autodesk Vault Professional 2017 in the wee hours today, and I noticed the Autodesk Network License Manager was installed in C:\Autodesk\Network License Manager. That’s a bit strange when C:\Autodesk has until now been a temporary location for extracting the setup files. I can confirm moving the files to a saner location like […]

Read More → Autodesk Vault Professional 2017 and Autodesk Network License Manager