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You are at tk here: How Do You ExplainThese?

Looks like our spammer/phisher friend has been busy at work. If you have no idea what I'm talking about refer to my previous post.

For the past couple of days, people have been receiving Myspace links to his/her sites. And this didn't just start yesterday or the day before or even the day before that. Nope, it went back to at least a month ago, when the sites below were first registered. As always I don't link to the original sites, so they are linked to their whois results at godaddy.

• bestubelieve.com
• explainthese.com
• bestthisway.com

From the looks of it, I think it's BestUBelieve that this is not about to stop. If you think otherwise, how do you ExplainThese sites? Since you are likely to be exposed to these sites sooner or later (especially if you are on Myspace), I suggest looking at some ways of preventing it from happening (listed below). Since everything points to coolstuff2see.com, once you black hole this site, they'll all fall down like toy soldiers (Martika - Toy soldiers, it happened to be playing while I was typing this :) ). In my opinion, it would be BestThisWay.

In my last post, I listed out some ways of reducing the damage if you had already visited these sites. However, what should you do if you would like to stop yourself or others using your computer from visiting these sites? Well here are some ways you can do that.

• If you're using Internet Explorer, you should be able to add the sites into the restricted zone. This should prevent you from exposure to these sites, but if you install another browser, eg Firefox or Opera, I believe that you can still access these sites through Firefox or Opera. So this is not a totally foolproof method.


• Another way would be to add them to the HOSTS file on your system. By adding them such that they resolve to a non-existent ip address or your own computer, your computer will not be able to access these sites. These should work for any operating system that uses the HOSTS file, including windows, macs and linux. However, this is still not entirely foolproof if you use a router, but for most users, this method or the previous method should be adequate.
  
  If you use a proxy to resolve addresses, there is an extra step. You will need to configure your browser to access these sites directly. This is because connection through a proxy will bypass the HOSTS file, since the proxy is doing the resolving of addresses. Search for your proxy settings and add the sites addresses into "No proxy for" or "Do not connect through proxy" (it's different for various browsers) for your browser. By accessing these sites directly, your computer will use the HOSTS file and will be unable to go to these sites.
  


• Lastly, if you use your own proxy such as SQUID, or if you use a router, you should be able to add these sites into an access control list or a block list.

Know of other ways? Add them in the comments.