Setting up Wordpress

In the last few blog post we talked about:

• How to Setup your Own Blog, The Easy Way


• Picking the Hosting Provider & Setting up your Domain

Now we can talk about setting up Wordpress, although this probably won't be a long topic.  I feel it is necessary to help people feel less stressed in setting up a blog.   Most of my family don't have a clue how I set mine up, and I am thinking they are uncomfortable because this is foreign to them.   I intend to try to easy everyone's stress levels by explaining it in a more relax atmosphere.

As most people will know I started my blog 3 Years ago, and haven't stop blogging sense.   Some would call this what a blogger does.   I call this an experience, because what I've learned over the last three years is priceless.  As you can tell when I started my blog I was clueless about how to blog.   Over the 3 years I've learned a lot and a glad to be part of the blogging community.   It's been a long process but a really fruitful one.

Photo by: Terry Mun

Now I am wanting to pass the experience onto new users on.  Most people will expect a website management to be hard.   Creating a website even harder, here I will talk about installing it.

One way to install Wordpress is through some Hosting providers website tools they offer to install Wordpress for free.   They basically use a script to install Wordpress.   Usually they are a version behind the last release of Wordpress, now since Wordpress has also integrated upgrades you can easily upgrade after your install the older version.

The other way is just as simple, You can install it using an FTP upload.  Now I am so glad Wordpress has a tutorial for this.  I had to use it at least once in the three years to install Wordpress.  You would however have to download the Wordpress zip file and make a sub directory, calling it WORDPRESS and extract into that then upload that whole directory to either your main or sub directory.   If you'd think it is hard, I would argue it isn't.    This way only took me 10 minutes at best to upload and install.

Anyway you choice is a quite a simple setup, If you follow the instructions and tutorial step by step.   There should be no problems.   Although no matter how good you are there have been problems in the past with installation and that might need to be dealt  by the hosting provider technical support.   Each hosting provider should have a way to contact them to resolve and you should not hesitate to call them for technical support they are there to make you succeed.

In the next blog post we will talk about Securing You Wordpress Blog and why.

Internet Security Companies Warn about Patch Tuesday and Valentines Day.

With Tomorrow being released some very highly rated Remote Code Execution to become Zero day in very short time. Some researchers are speculating about more viruses will be released in conjunction to Valentines day. According to this one post it will be likely to be E-cards being sent to try to lure you into downloading Malware.
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Various security vendors, including CA Inc, MX Logic Inc., Trend Micro Inc., and Panda Security, have issued alerts about new Valentine’s Day-themed spam campaigns that try to dupe users into installing the Waledec bot.

Researchers note that many websites which are affiliated to Waledac e-card scam have been recently updated with content based on the Valentine's Day theme.

Web sites distribute Trojan files which are commonly named love.exe; onlyyou.exe; you.exe; youandme.exe; and meandyou.exe and the list is not exhaustive.
[Via Express Buzz]

So which ones will likely be the exploits they will use? I have a few theories on that and One of them is the INTERNET EXPLORER vulnerability that will be patched and will try to get you to launch the link and will most likely try to launch it in Internet explorer, That would be my guess.    It seems to be Internet Explorer 7 and Below which will be patched so if you want to try out the IE 8 Beta,  You should be safe on that.  Although the best bet is to prevent users from clicking links in emails and also warning them not to open any attachments they are not expecting.    I'd also have the AutoPatcher ready to install the lastest patches for this Tuesday and schedule a time this week to update all the possible systems involved with the Databases.  Although this isn't one that tries to steal your data it is however a chance the writers to look at what you have and you know how that can be call a data breach.   So if your the IT for the department I'd suggest sending out warnings so they can keep from being caught with their pants down.   I'd also suggest having Anti-Virus and free Firewall installed on all the major systems and it wouldn't hurt to have the installed on minor systems if at all possible.

The Important Windows patches Released Today

As many of you know we talked about the Non-critical patches that Microsoft will release today.  IF you want to read those please go and check it out.   I'll be talking about the REALLY important ones that Microsoft has kept tight until now.    These are the more important ones but I will list the ones that I previous talked about to better help people recognize the non-important ones:



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KB955839

KB957388

KB890830

KB905866

These are just the tip of the iceberg. although this list are not A lot.  I'd wanted to let people know about what people coin "Exploit Wednesday".  I really don't know if this is a Myth or actually does exist but I'd figure we discuss the problems associated with installing the critical updates and try to tell you which ones should be installed As soon as possible.  Though people have in the past used a Virtual Machine to see if there is any problem, that should be your first step if you don't want to have any problems with these updates.  I don't suggest testing it more than a couple days.  Here are some good Virtual Machine software to try out yourself:

• Hyper-V (Microsoft Product)


• VMware Virtual Machine


• Virtual PC 2007 (Microsoft product)


• Virtual Box - Sun Microsystems (FREE)


• Kaffe Virtual Machine (Haven't Tried this one)

Here is the list of updates that are critical that Microsoft released today.   Each one of these are quite important and should be considered installed when you get a chance.

[ad#ad2-left]Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-073 - Critical
Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (KB958215)

This security update resolves four privately reported vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-071 – Critical
Vulnerabilities in GDI Could Allow Remote Code Execution (KB956802)

This security update resolves two privately reported vulnerabilities in GDI. Exploitation of either of these vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted WMF image file. An attacker who successfully exploited these vulnerabilities could take complete control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

[ad#ad2-right]Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-075 – Critical
Vulnerabilities in Windows Search Could Allow Remote Code Execution (KB959349)

This security update resolves two privately reported vulnerabilities in Windows Search. These vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user opens and saves a specially crafted saved-search file within Windows Explorer or if a user clicks a specially crafted search URL. An attacker who successfully exploited these vulnerabilities could take complete control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

KB952069
(not quite sure what this one is, when I go do a Google search this is what pops up. It was in German but Google translated it for me)

In the Windows Media Runtime to the default in Windows XP SP3 contains Windows Media Player (WMP) 9 were discovered vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to compromise your Windows-based system and gain control over it. See Security Bulletin MS08-076 ( englisch bzw. deutsch ) See Security Bulletin MS08-076 (English or German)

These are just ones that I found and wanted to let you know, the others have been explained on the other article.  So check them all out and I suggest installing them quickly as possible.

Vista and BSOD

I wanted to talk about Vista and the terrible BSOD scenarios that I have found around the network.  I also want to talk about them to a point.  So I went through and look and here is what I found:

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• NVidia Graphics Drivers -- That should be well fixed by now.  I  don't have an NVidia Computer with Vista on it and can't say one way or the other.  I do know that recently they added new graphics drivers for Vista and are out.   That alone should fix most of the problems.

• Vista's Blue Screen of Death -- This little website has some great information on the causes and fix for them.

• Installing two Anti-virus Softwares in Vista --  it is a Kernel and Memory Protection that causes that.  I also think they are right about it.  You can't have two programs try to use the kernel and the same memory spot. See Episode BOL Episode 793

Here are a few of them that I could find out lately.  Most of the Blue Screen of Deaths for VIsta should be over with.  Since the Release of Vista SP1, Microsoft has issued driver fixes and program compatibilities with that release.

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