Category: From the Help Desk

This thing is nasty. I’ve seen what I can only believe is a variant of WORM_VOBFUS.SMIS as defined by Trend Micro. Here’s what’s happening: an infected computer on your network looks for any shared folders (network shares, USB flash drives, etc…) and hides all of your real files. It then will replace the “hidden” files, with .EXE’s of the same names, to try and trick people in to clicking on them, and causing the worm to spread further. I’ve already seen this thing a few times and have developed a good plan of action for fighting it off.

Finding the infected computer and Cleaning the Infection

Skip ahead if you want to unhide your files, but I want to cover this virus a little further in depth. Continue reading “Virus hid files, "Hidden" Attribute grayed out – Solved!”

It really happened. I kind of thought it might, and addressed this once before, but I hoped it wouldn’t. Microsoft failed so badly at explaining Windows 8, people actually need to search the internet to figure out how to do it. If you’re reading this, and you came here asking how, DO NOT FEEL BAD! It isn’t your fault at all. Microsoft changed things too much and just assumed we would all just figure it out. So, if you’re asking how do I shut down Windows 8? Here’s how:

1. Bring up the Charms Bar (the menu on the right). Here are 3 ways to do it:
   -On a computer with a mouse, place your pointer in the upper or lower right corner of the screen.
   -With no mouse, only a keyboard, you can press “Windows Key + C” to bring up the Charms Bar.
   -With a touch interface, swipe in from the right hand side of the screen.
2. Click Settings – yes, the cog/gear icon.
3. Click Power.
4. Click shut down.

Have you ever noticed that, sometimes when you’re on DHCP, you can have more than 2 DNS addresses? Perhaps you have a need to set 3 or 4 – or maybe, you need to set your primary and secondary DNS servers statically through command line. Well, don’t you worry, there’s a command to do just that.

Even if your primary is already set, I’ve had the best luck setting it again, then setting your secondary DNS. For this example, I’m going to use Google’s well known public DNS servers, but you can use your own internal IP addresses, your ISP’s DNS servers, OpenDNS, whatever works for you. Simply open a command prompt, and enter the following commands.

This first command sets your primary DNS server:
netsh interface ip set dns "Local Area Connection" static 8.8.8.8

Here, we set the secondary:
netsh interface ip add dns name="Local Area Connection" addr="8.8.4.4" index=2

If you need to set a third, fourth, and so on, all you need to do is change the index number at the end of the line:
netsh interface ip add dns name="Local Area Connection" addr="208.67.222.222" index=3
netsh interface ip add dns name="Local Area Connection" addr="208.67.220.220" index=4

To verify the settings took, you can check your DNS settings with a quick command of ipconfig /all and check how many and what DNS servers you are showing. If you show a strange hexadecimal value, try resetting the primary DNS entry with the different command at the top again, then the second, third, and so-on…