SYMANTEC REPORTED RECENTLY ON A Tojan horse that mimics the Microsoft I Windows activation interface. Called trojan.Kardphisher, it doesn’t do most of the technical things that Trojans usually do: It’s purely a social-engineering attack, aimed at stealing credit card information.

In a sense, it’s a standalone phishing program. Once you reboot, Kardphisher asks you to reactivate your copy of Windows, citing piracy issues at and telling you that another user has activated your copy. Though it assures you that you will not actually be charged, it asks for credit card information. If you don’t enter the credit card information, Kardphisher shuts down the PC.

The Trojan also disables the Windows Task Manager, which makes it more difficult to shut the malware down.

Running on the first reboot is clever. It makes the process look more like a legitimate message coming from Microsoft, and it won’t seem to occur as a result of the user clicking on a new file. The program even runs on versions of Windows that were made prior to XP and do not require activation. That’s a bit of a red flag, although I bet there’s a strong correlation between people running pre-XP versions of Windows and people who aren’t as well educated about malware as they could be.

With a nearly 1MB executable. Kardphisher is not a sneak attack. But if you find yourself infected, disable the Trojan in Windows Safe mode by removing the Registry keys described in Symantec’s write up (at www.symantec.com. search on the malware name) and deleting the program they point to. Updated anti-virus software should also remove it.

I bet many of us have reformatted our hard drives, reinstalled Mircosoft Windows, reinstalled all of our software applications, and reset all of the Windows settings, etc, you know what a time-consuming and generally a heinous task it can be. But sometimes, after a nasty spyware attack or when Windows has accumulated too much sludge, that kind of radical reconstruction is absolutely necessary. And Vista will only amplify the problem. before you move to Vista, make sure you back up your system.

Many PCs come with recovery CDs that will restore your system to factory-new conditions, but you can get the job done a whole lot faster and add all your favorite programs and system settings to the restoration point by creating a recovery partition. A partition of course, is a cordoned-off section of your hard drive that gets its own drive letter. All you need is the right software and enough available space to hold your information and its applications.

The “right software”, in this case, is a partition utility and a backup program that can create a compressed “image” of your newly reformatted and reloaded hard drive.

I’ve used Symantec’s Norton PartitionMagic 8.0 and Norton’s Ghost 10.0 which allows you to mirror copy your information over to the partitioned drive. However you can use any nondestructive partitioning utlity and back up applications of your choice. And all you need to do is create a partition that’s large enough to hold your infomration; then backup your primary drive to the newly made partition. If and when the time comes to restore your system, run Norton’s Ghost or any other kind of mirror imaging transfer software and expand the backup image to your primary drive. Bingo: You’re back in business before you know it.

1 Get started
For the best results, start with a fresh install of Windows, then load your software applications that you use regularly, utilities, drives. Make sure to install all of the latest updates for Mircrosoft Windows and your Security Software; firewall and anti-virus, etc. Finally tweak your system so it’s exactly the way you like it: video resolution, wallpaper, and all that kind of stuff.

2 Create the partition
Start up PartitionMagic (or a similar utility) and create a partition with enough available space to hold Windows and your apps. Ten Gigabytes should be ample for most users (remember, the backup imiage will be compressed), but consider making it larger if you have a lot of installed programs or storage space to burn.

3 Options Options
Unless you’re going to dual-boot with Windows 9x, which can’t read NTFS, NTFS is the right file system. As for the partition type, the active partition is the one that boots the system. You need to create a logical drive (that is, one you can assign a drive letter to), which will live in an extended partition, the application takes care of that part.

4 Set up Ghost
Run Ghost (or a similar utilty) to create a new backup. Don’t bother with scheduling, as this particular back up is a one-time-only affair. Disabling your anti-virus and firewall prior to starting the backup is a good idea as these can tend to get in the way and ruin a perfect backup.

5 Scheduling backups
Incidentally, take advantage of Ghost’s backup schedules to update your backup incrementally every week or so. That way you’ll always be sure that your information is constantly being backed-up when it comes to restore. If you’re using an external hard drive, make sure to leave it on and plugged in. For the record, this really isn’t a subsitute for off-site or off-PC backups, especially if the partition is on the same hard drive as your data and programs. If the drive goes belly uyp, you’re out of luck.

6 Recover
To use the recovery partition, make sure you’ve backed up all your vital data to another drive or removabe media, then boot your PC with the Ghost CD loaded in the optical drive. You’ll then be able to restore from the partition to your primary drive resulting in a ready-to-roll PC wtih all your applications, dirvers and settings loaded.