One of the ways by which Computers get affected by viruses is through USB Pen drives. Anti viruses are unable to detect them and even if they do, in most cases they are unable to delete the virus. Following are the precautions you can take when plugging USB Drive on your Computer.

Whenever you plug a USB drive in your system (which you think is infected by virus), do not open it -  Do not click ‘OK’ !
click on ‘Cancel’. Now open Command Prompt by typing ‘cmd‘ in run box.
Type dir /w/a and press enter.
Above command will display list of files in pen drive. Check in the list if the files are not

* Heap41a
* New Folder.exe
* Autorun.inf
* svchost.exe
* Ravmon.exe
* or any other exe file which may be suspicious.

If any of the above files are present in the list, then your USB drive is infected. To remove these files, type the following command in command prompt
attrib -r -a -s -h *.* and press enter.
This will remove from files  Read Only, Archive, System and Hidden attributes .

The files which you will now be looking on are the junk files (viruses) and can be deleted using  del command. Delete all those files which you find suspicious. To be on a safer side, just scan again your  USB Pen drive using a anti virus to check whether it is free of virus or not.

What is Hot linking ?

The process of direct linking to websites files such as images, videos etc is called as Hot Linking. It is like using an image (tag/image link) which you have found on someone else web page, and would be using on your blog. Every time the blog is browsed image will be shown because it is Hot linked from it’s original source.

This becomes a point of concern when your website is Hot linked by someone else.

Let me explain
Every website has a fixed bandwidth (bandwidth - Amount of data transferred from website to a users computer). When any internet user browses a website and if that website is hot linked to your site then your website’s
bandwidth is used in transferring the requested data.
??? => This means you are paying for the bandwidth which is not used by you.

To overcome Hot linking(Bandwidth Theft) Hotlink Protection is used. It prevents other websites from directly linking to files (as specified above) to your website.
Hotlink Protection can be set from Plesk Control Panel as well.

Using Pass Phrases to Encrypt Data

A password that allows for spaces can be referred to as a pass phrase. The benefit of pass phrases is that you can make them meaningful and easy to remember. Instead of creating and managing encryption keys or certificates in your database server, you can encrypt data using only a pass phrase.The ENCRYPTBYPASSPHRASE statement uses the supplied pass phrase to generate a symmetric key, which is used to perform the actual data encryption. No key management is required, as the key will be recreated each time the same pass phrase is supplied.The common syntax of the ENCRYPTBYPASSPHRASE statement is as follows:

ENCRYPTBYPASSPHRASE ('PASSPHRASE', 'PLAINTEXT')

In this statement, PASSPHRASE specifies the data string to be used to derive an encryption key. PLAINTEXT specifies the data to be encrypted. No permissions are required to run the ENCRYPTBYPASSPHRASE statement.

The following syntax encrypts the string using the supplied pass phrase:

more…

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 does not install Collaboration Data Objects (CDO) for
NTS (CDONTS). Therefore, applications that use   do not function on a Windows
Server 2003-based computer.

Windows Server 2003 provides improved alternatives to CDONTS. To make CDONTS
functioning on a Windows Server 2003-based computer, use one of the following

solution:

more…

Here are some useful tools that help us in configuring IIS server to be more secure and less resource consuming:

1. IIS Passwords Sync:

IIS 6.0 web sites run under anonymous user accounts. It is IUSR_<machine name> (by default) or other user accounts created by your web hosting control panel. The users’ passwords are set automatically set and are never known. However, sometimes for some reason the passwords get out of sync or corrupted and need to be reset. The easiest way to reset these passwords is to use IIS Passwords Sync program. It extracts the passwords that Microsoft IIS 6.0 has in its metabase and updates the accounts in “Local Users and Groups” to use that passwords.

DOWNLOAD LINK

2. IIS Pool:

With IIS Pool tool we can easily search the problematic sites which have default application pool.

IIS Application Pools Monitoring and Analysis:

This program allows monitoring of IIS 6 application pools. All the monitoring data is stored in log files. It is possible to analyze a pool to find a website (or a virtual application) using too much resources. …

Overview -

IIS Application Pools Monitoring and Analysis:

* This program allows monitoring of IIS 6 application pools.

* All the monitoring data is stored in log files.

* It is possible to analyze a pool to find a website (or a virtual application) using too much resources.

Features -

* IIS application pools monitoring

* IIS application pools analysis

* Find websites using too much resources

DOWNLOAD LINK

3. IIS Report:

Overview -

IIS Report is a command line tool. It allows us to create different IIS related reports. For example it can get the list of all SSL websites and sort it by IP address, or get the list of all websites and sort it by application pool name and then by website name, …

There is no installation required. Just download and unrar the archive file. Then start the program with:

C:\>iisreport.exe /?

to get more information and see all the parameters available.

Benefits -

* Easy-to-use

* Fast

* It is possible to import the reports with Excel

* It is possible to parse the reports with VBS or BAT programs and other administration applications.

DOWNLOAD LINK