Although the Trojan is now only conducting click fraud scam by hijacking people’s search engine results inside their web browsers, it has the potential to do greater damage, such as stealing banking or login credential. If the botnet remains connected to computers, cybercriminals could send new malware to their systems that cause bigger problems.

What you can do?

Apple released a security patch few days ago, but its only for Mac OS X 10.6 and above. If you have not downloaded the patch, please do so now by clicking on your Apple Logo at the top left > “Software Update”. You will see an update called “Java for OSX”.

If you are using Mac OS X 10.5 or older

If you are using Mac OS X older than version 10.6 or you are not feeling safe even after applying Apple’s patch, F-secure released a free Flashback Trojan Removal tool yesterday that can detect whether your Mac is infected with the trojan and most importantly, remove it from your Mac.

To use the tool, simply unzip the downloaded zip file and run the FlashBack Removal app. Everything else will be automated. This is what happen after you run it (quoted from F-secure):

The tools creates a log file (RemoveFlashback.log) on current user’s Desktop. If any infections are found, they are quarantined into an encrypted ZIP file (flashback_quarantine.zip) to the current user’s Home folder. The ZIP is encrypted with the password “infected”.

This is what I see, lucky :)

Useful Links

1. F-Secure FlashBack Removal Tool Page
2. More (technical) information about the Trojan

NOTE:
This is not XAMPP / apache issue
This is not browser-specific issue

In fact, this is a simple problem with simple solution. However, this problem occurs when I am getting frustrated with the Facebook integration problem (after 12 hours of debugging). Therefore, I missed some simple but important steps to solve this problem. Here I list them down below:

1. Ping Localhost

For Mac OS users, open up your Terminal. For windows users, open up your command prompt.

• Type the “ping localhost” and press enter.
• You should get error messages like “unknown host” since you are having this problem.

• Next, type “ping 127.0.0.1″ and press enter.
• If you saw something like this, the ping is successful:
  ^?View Code CMD

  PING 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.118 ms 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.171 ms 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.167 ms

• If you get “unknown host error”, please check whether you have started your local server service.

2. Clear your browser cache

Modern browsers cache a lot of stuff, including DNS cache. They may have cached the erroneous DNS setting in etc/hosts, so you might want to clear your browsers cache and try loading localhost again. Clearing cache alone would already be sufficient, you can skip clearing cookies, saved session, etc.

If it still doesn’t work, try #3 below.

3. Did you just flushed the DNS cache?

I ran this command in terminal (Mac) to flush my cache before I get into this mess: “dscacheutil -flushcache”
For some reason, after I flushed the cache, the DNS setting is not being rebuilt – I cannot ping localhost but I can ping 127.0.0.1

After restarting my laptop (to rebuild the DNS settings & cache) and clearing all browser cache once again, I finally get my localhost displayed again.

Now I hope this helps some of you.

Fortunately, I found this youtube video that taught me how to setup the equalizer to boost the bass of sound output for at least 3 times more than the normal setting. All credits to the author of the video.

The Equalizer Settings for iTunes

Now setup your equalizer based on the pictures above and try it. I bet you will love it like i do. Share it out with your friends if you love it! :)

Remember to save it as a preset too, so that you can change to other preset setting without losing this setting.

P/S: I love my Audio Technica a lot more now!

When I submitted the form, the error returned was “Please enter at most 3 letters or numbers for county“.

However, the list of choices given by the form are all in two letters.

So the form failed to go through.

How to Bypass?

I spent 10 minutes playing with the form until I found this workaround:

• First, choose the first item from the list, in my case is “County”. This action is equal to choosing nothing for your County/Province. Submit the form.
• The form will now return an error message telling you that you did not choose any County/Province.
• Now, choose your correct County/Province and submit the form.
• It should go through like I did.

Does this method work for you too? Now enjoy browsing the App Store :)

As far as I understand, this has nothing to do with FTP settings. This problem occurs because the Apache HTTP service was being run as “nobody” while your Mac user name is a different name. Thus, it has no permission to add/edit your server files so WordPress attempted to use FTP to perform its job.

Editing httpd.conf as Admin

First of all, editing this file is not as easy as using a text editor program and edit it because this read-only file can only be changed by root or superuser, not even administrator. There are 2 or more methods that you use to edit such file:

1. Edit using vi editor in sudo mode using Terminal
2. Run Mac OS TextEditor in sudo mode using Terminal and edit the file

- Terminal is a command line tool just like Window’s CMD.
- Sudo mode refers to running the file as superuser or root.
- Vi editor is a command line editor that is very not user-friendly to use, edit and save (at least for beginner)

Thus we will use Method 2 to perform this task.

1. Run Mac OS TextEditor application in sudo mode using Terminal and edit the file

First of all, open up your Terminal by typing “Terminal” in your Spotlight search box (upper right corner)

Once the terminal is loaded, type this in: (copy and paste if possible)

sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit /Applications/XAMPP/etc/httpd.conf

- sudo command will run the TextEdit application as root
- Seperated by a space after the application path, is the path of httpd.conf (the file to edit)

Press enter, a TextEdit window should pop up and you can then freely edit the file as root.

2. Change the user name and group name

Now, look for these 2 lines:

User nobody
Group admin

Change them to:

User your-mac-username
Group staff

- Staff is the non-admin user group in Mac.
- If you are not sure about your mac username, open Finder > go to Macintosh HD > Users > Look for your folder’s name.

Now restart your XAMPP apache server and it should be working perfectly.