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Ask DACS Moderated by Bruce Preston and reported by Jim Scheef Ask DACS is a Question and Answer session before the main presentation at the monthly General Meeting. We solicit questions from the floor and then answers from other audience members. This month I was away on vacation. Bruce moderated but is unable to write up the discussion. Q – My Windows 8.1 machine can't get on the Internet. I have McAfee antivirus so the machine is safe. It flashes back a message to reinstall Windows which I would rather not do. What's wrong? A – Naturally this generated a lot of discussion. First a member asked if other computers in the house have Internet access and they do. Next someone asked if the problem machine can send and receive email and the answer was yes. So we know that the router and its connection to the Internet are working, and we know that the problem machine actually can access the Internet. Since the machine can send and receive email, all the network software is working – the network adapter, DNS, etc. Now the problem is narrowed down the browser which "opens to an empty white window and nothing is ever displayed." This is a symptom of a browser hijacker but the questioner says he is using Google Chrome. Both Chrome and Internet Explorer (IE) have an option to return all settings to "factory specs". For IE this is found in the Internet Options applet in Control Panel. On the Advanced tab near the bottom is "Reset Internet Explorer settings". Click the 'Reset…' button and follow instructions. For Chrome, the 'Reset Browser Settings' button is found at the very bottom of the advanced settings portion of the Settings dialog. To get there, click the Options icon (a stack of 3 horizontal lines) at the top right on the Chrome window. [Note: the preceding is a distilled version of the actual discussion.] D – As the discussion ended, there were two good suggestions: The first was to scan the computer with the new version 2.0 of Malwarebytes. There is still a free version. The second suggestion was to take your machine to the Microsoft Store in the Danbury Mall. The Answer Desk will tune up your Windows 7 or 8 machine for ½ hour for free. It's best to make an appointment in advance. Q – What is a "zero day" vulnerability? A – From WikiPedia: "A zero-day (or zero-hour or day zero) attack or threat is an attack that exploits a previously unknown vulnerability in a computer application, one that developers have not had time to address and patch. It is called a "zero day" because the programmer has had zero days to fix the flaw (in other words, a patch is not available). Once a patch is available, it is no longer a "zero day exploit". It is common for individuals or companies who discover zero-day attacks to sell them to government agencies for use in cyberwarfare." The complete article is at wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-day_attack. My answer at the meeting said essentially the same thing, but this is better. Read the complete article for a more complete understanding.
Questions for the upcoming meeting can be emailed to askdacs@dacs.org. Disclaimer: Ask DACS questions come from members by email or from the audience attending the general meeting. Answers are suggestions offered by meeting attendees and represent a consensus of those responding. DACS offers no warranty as to the correctness of the answers and anyone following these suggestions or answers does so at their own risk. In other words, we could be totally wrong!
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