As finals week approaches, everyone needs to find something to do to unwind. It’s not my usual tech angle, but here are some relaxing and in some cases, downright addictive games to play.

Candy Crush

Candy Crush is a Bejeweled clone with a sweet twist – almost everything in the game has to do with sugary treats. You play this game by matching 3 or more candies of the same type in a row to make them disappear. Matching more than 3 gives you powered up candies. 4 candies in a row give you striped candies that destroy all candies in a row or column. Five or more candies in a row creates a color bomb – a candy bomb that destroys all candies on the board of a specific color. The game currently has about 350 levels but they’re added 15 at a time in groups of ‘episodes’ so it’s unlikely there’ll be an end to this game any time soon. Available to iPad, Android and PC users (usually on Facebook), the time consuming matching of Candy Crush Saga can be played virtually anywhere.

Minecraft

With over 20 million copies sold across multiple platforms, Mojang created a winner with Minecraft. Unlike Candy Crush Saga, Minecraft is an open world game, meaning it has no actual goal. Minecraft isn’t the prettiest game out there, but it really doesn’t need to be. The game revolves around harvesting, refining and placing blocks while trying not to get shot by skeletons, eaten by zombies or blown up by creepers. Players are limited in what they can do only by their imagination. The roller coaster video below is a great example.

Top 5 Minecraft Xbox 360 Structures – ROLLERCOASTERS

Minecraft is available on IPhone, Android, Xbox 360 and as of February, UK’s Raspberry Pi.

Subway Surfer

A popular Temple Run clone by Kiloo Games, Subway Surfer is an endless game about a kid with a can of spray paint running away from a security guard and his dog. In this game, you run between 3 sets of track, dodging cones, signal lights, trees, barricades and parked or moving trains while you collect coins and special items to complete challenges and unlock new characters. The game has some interesting power ups like jetpacks, hover boards and super sneakers though they occasionally do more harm than good. The longer you play, the faster you run making the game less about actual difficulty and more about reaction time – still, it’s extremely addictive and a great way to pass a train ride. Subway Surfer is available for any device running Android or iOS.

Angry Birds

Rovio’s Angry Birds is one of the most popular mobile games ever to be created. With 4 games in the Angry Birds series (Seasons, Rio, Space and Star Wars), a spinoff (Bad Piggies) a slew of Angry Birds merchandise, and a TV series (Angry Birds Toons), it’s more than an understatement to say the series is popular. Angry Birds is a puzzle game where players launch birds across levels of varying difficulty in an attempt to hit green pigs that have stolen their eggs. Different birds have different abilities – blue birds split into 3 smaller (but weaker) birds and yellow birds speed up when tapped. First released on Apple’s iOS, Angry Birds has since been released for Android, Symbian, Window’s Phone, PC, Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360.

Plants vs. Zombies

“There’s a zombie on the lawn”. No, really. In PopCap’s hit tower defense game, it’s your job to plant a 9 by 5 garden of zombie fighting garden to protect your brains from an interesting array of zombies. Players collect sunlight from random drops or from sunflowers as energy to power plants with different abilities that can range from standard peashooters (the name speaks for itself) to ‘Gloom-shrooms’ (useful mushrooms that shoot bubbles in every direction around them).The strategy of this game is in figuring out which plants are most effective against which types of zombies and in what layout. Certain plants don’t do well on the front lines, but work great as support. Plants vs. zombies is another game it’s easy to get lost in. A game of endless mode can last anywhere between 5 minutes and 5 hours so anyone short on time beware. Plants vs. Zombies is available for almost everything including Nintendo DS, PS Vita, and Blackberry.

Image Credits:

• http://www.techpaparazzi.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/mobile-games-developers.jpg
• https://lh3.ggpht.com/GAhK6Zy7LzhanD-naSrPYAXwYr21fmlZoHicZZSBtTtWmawNmZcv0Xa8Zq1vkKRzdOk=w124
• https://lh3.ggpht.com/wnJIWJ7KlHhOR2rnu3BhZMZ90YdulOLNiNg6DEXlBQPgf7S9ddJ5-E97HGsXapMapvI=w124
• https://lh5.ggpht.com/yRUw11DbeZ-XgJG-a1lBViQxH7UjwBsy8QhH0ur9VejpLZK6tNLLarpuRqestCiB6W4=w78-h78
• https://lh3.ggpht.com/rjvMzwpRBmsufrA0MEmHkwu4iGOj0hO1qgQo8h2IHbWGDcOBmozRk0FUs-bbxg9_6fs=w78-h78
• https://lh4.ggpht.com/NVIvvxvyL9uXZBop_DpmcqEcJ5JDd2BbVKQVrMxSlhdoSGDMO4EefJNKBmE2vsAqdTc=w124

Earlier this week, various computer lab classrooms on the 4^th, 6^th and 9^th floors were infected with a worm called W32.Downadup (more commonly known as Conficker), so anyone who plugged into a computer anywhere should scan any device they plugged in (be it USB or mobile phone) as well as any computers they may have connected them to afterwards. In short,anyone who has used a campus computer should get their devices checked out as soon as possible. If you think that just having an Antivirus on your computer will keep you from possible infection, think again. This particular worm is very easy to spread, especially by USB and almost everyone on campus has one.

Transmission

Inconvenient? Yes. Irritating? Very, but this worm wouldn’t deal nearly as much damage if it weren’t so easy to spread. On an infected computer, Conficker will copy itself into an infected computer the second the AutoPlay program runs. More specifically, Conficker will create a ‘.inf’ (short for Setup Information File) on any USB device connected to an infected computer. Generally, inf files are text files used by Windows to install software in drivers – in this case, used to install the worm on new computers. The Auto Play setting can be disabled on a computer, but that’s a moot point if a user opens the infected USB anyway.

Another method used and abused by this worm is social engineering. Students in the computer systems major probably already know this, but social engineering can include anything from calling a person and pretending to be an IT worker to get a password to a developer making an application to manipulate people into giving them their banking information. In the event a computer isn’t infected though Auto Play, Conficker can disguise an executable file as a folder by changing the icon to look like a folder, leading users to unknowingly infect their computers.

What’s the Risk?

There are multiple versions of this worm floating around the net and nearly all of them make it difficult for infected computers to detect and/or remove them. Most version of Conficker disable Windows update and blocks users from visiting anti-malware sites but nastier versions take it a step further, disabling safe mode and killing any anti-virus, patch or diagnostic processes it comes across it. While most symptoms of the Conficker worm only affect the computer, the defining issue for students is this worm’s ability to corrupt flash drives. That project you’ve been working on all semester? Gone. It can’t be stressed enough. Back up your work.

Symptoms of Infection

Symptoms can include slow internet, forced redirection to ‘not safe for work’ sites, disabled folder options (unable to view hidden folders), and potential damage to USB drives. While most symptoms of the Conficker worm only affect the computer and whatever network it’s on, the defining issue for students is this worm’s ability to corrupt flash drives. Students have reported missing files and folders, new files that they didn’t add and occasionally a completely corrupted flash drive.

While it’s unknown whether or not the school at large has been infected, it should be common practice for anyone using portable storage devices to routinely check for viruses and malicious programs. So for the people to stick their drive in the nearest computer without taking any security precautions, the question remains, what are you carrying?

Sources:

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conficker
• http://www.usbvirus.com/usb_virus/remove-usb-worm-virus.html
• http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2008-112203-2408-99&tabid=2
• http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/autoplay-worms
• http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/worm_w32_autorun.shtml

Image Sources:

• http://canerator.deviantart.com/art/USB-virus-139656994
• http://www.zdnet.fr/i/edit/ne/2009/04/autorun-windows7.jpg

According to an infographic published by Go-Gulf.com in 2012, there are over 91.4 million smartphones in the US and that number is expected to balloon up to 252 million by 2016. Smartphones, being the plethora of personal information that they are, have managed to become sizeable targets for computer hackers, becoming more and more attractive as targets as smartphones and their applications become more and more integrated in your everyday life. So how does the average user (with Facebook, banking apps, email and all) protect their information?

Why you shouldn’t jailbreak your iPhone

Questionably legal but generally convenient, jailbreaking your phone allows you to do many things, including accessing apps that aren’t allowed on the Apple or Google marketplaces, uninstalling bloatware (the useless irremovable software that comes pre-installed on your phone) and illegally swapping that $800 phone to a the carrier with the cheapest prices. While those are all tempting reasons to jailbreak a phone, the cons far outweigh the pros. The third party apps available to jailbroken phones do not have to measure up to the same standards as app store or market place applications. A great example is the Australian born ikee worm that infected jailbroken phones that had a Secure Shell(SSH) app installed. While harmless, it would replace your phone background with a picture of Rick Astley but the fact that it could change anything on a phone at all made it a huge security risk. Another issue with jailbreaking your phone was the risk of ‘bricking’ it – meaning that somewhere in the process of tampering with your phone, you corrupted its firmware making the phone unresponsive to touch or button presses. While there is a chance a phone can be fixed, if it can’t be unbricked, you’ll have to shell out for a new one. Last but not least is the all-important warranty issue. If you tamper with your phone it voids your warranty. End of story.

Reading is fundamental. Really.

When you download an app on an android phone you’re given a list of all the permissions that application will need to use after it’s installed. Those permissions can include tracking your location via GPS, reading your phones contact data, editing your personal information (calendar data, etc.) and sending text messages on your behalf. Generally speaking, if an application is asking permission to use thing it shouldn’t require to function properly, you shouldn’t download it. While it’s true that many non-malicious apps ask for extra permissions, there are – an alarming number are. Trend Micro a reputable internet security company made an early claim that there would be at least a million cases of malware in android apps in 2013 and then backed it up by scanning 2 million apps. 1 in 10 of 2 million scanned apps were suspected to be malware.

Permission related threats to android phones.

Add an Antivirus

Hands down, Android phones are the most vulnerable phones on the market. With so many versions of the operating system out, it is difficult to issue patches for security vulnerabilities that pop up and that leaves the job of protecting the phone from viruses to good antivirus software. For the android users: some good apps to look into are AVG Antivirus, Lookout Security, Norton Security Antivirus and Antivirus and Mobile Security by TRUSTGO INC. Non-jailbroken iPhones don’t have to worry about antivirus software as the few loopholes in iOS are fixed quickly and efficiently when found.

Sources

• http://kschang.hubpages.com/hub/Do-Smartphones-Get-Viruses-Why-iPhones-Android-Phones-and-Others-Are-Only-as-Smart-as-Their-Users
• http://www.neowin.net/news/trend-micro-claims-1-in-10-android-apps-are-malware
• http://www.esecurityplanet.com/views/article.php/3890346/iPhone-Security-Apps-Buying-Guide.htm
• http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2010/01/11/banking-malware-android-marketplace/
• http://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/iphone-ransomware-dutch-hacker-exploits-jailbroken-iphone-bug-and-asks-for-money/
• http://www.brighthub.com/mobile/iphone/articles/93890.aspx
• http://amovilcomunicacion.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/smartphones.jpg?w=640