Jun 26

The activex control for flash player could not be registered

This error came up when I tried to install the newest Flash player for Internet Explorer. Here’s the fix. In Window XP open a command prompt and type:

secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\repair\secsetup.inf /db secsetup.sdb /verbose

Press Enter. Reboot the computer, reinstall Flash.

Sources: (highly recommend reading)
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/forum/ie8-windows_other/activex-control-for-flash-player-10-1-could-not-be/b038c4fb-42a9-4483-ae16-98930dd5d706

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313222

Jun 25

Easy Fix: Microsoft Security Essentials won’t update: Error 0x80248014

0x80248014 Error

Microsoft Security Essentials error 0x80248014 got you down? We’ve been there! We found an easy fix that should work great for you. Follow below for the simple fix.
I recently had a customer who got one of those “your hard drive is about to die” viruses. I removed the virus, fixed windows update that had been mangled, and thought he was ready to go. He called back though, and Microsoft Security Essentials would not update. It gave the error code 0x80248014. After doing some Google searches I came across a post on the Microsoft Answers website. Once I took these 4 steps it worked perfectly without even as much as a reboot.


The Fix

The 0x80248014 can be caused by the Windows Update cache needing a cleaning. This is very easy to do, and the results are usually instant. Open an Administrative command prompt by clicking Start, then type “cmd”. Right click on “Command Prompt” and click “Run As Administrator”. We’re going to turn off windows update service, clear the queue and restart it. You can copy and paste in the following commands:
net stop wuauserv
cd %windir%
ren SoftwareDistribution SDold
net start wuauserv

Now try to update Microsoft Security Essentials. It should immediately update without the 0x80248014 error. If it does not work, then you might try uninstalling Microsoft Security Essentials, running the fix again, and reinstalling it. If that still does not work, then it’s possible that the system has other errors causing Microsoft Security Essentials to fail. In that case, we recommend AVG Ultimate. You can get AVG Free, but it’ll nag you to buy it so you may as well just purchase a copy and be protected fully. Otherwise, you might consider reinstalling Windows, especially if the 0x80248014 error occurred after cleaning the computer of a nasty virus.

Jun 09

My technique for removing malware on PC’s that won’t boot

I’ve seen a few Windows machines that would not boot because of a rootkit and virus. Here is my quick way of knocking them out before I even get the system booted.

1) Boot up with Trinity Rescue Kit (Linux rescue disk) and select the menu option to mount all drives.
2) Go to a command prompt and open the folder that the drive is mounted to (eg /sda1, /sda2, hda1, etc)
3) Go to the Documents and Settings (XP) or Users (Vista, 7) folder and open the directory that contains the users files. We’ll say /sda1/Documents and Settings/bob for example
4) go to /sda1/Documents and Settings/bob/Local Settings/Application Data/ and delete any .exe files. In Vista/7 its Users/bob/AppData/Local/
5) I also like to go to the users/documents and settings folder and find all the .exe files and remove ones that look suspicious. They have random file names, are in appdata folders, temp folders etc.

cd /sda1/Users/
find . -name “*.exe” >exelist
nano exelist
(remove the lines that aren’t files you want to delete then save, close)

Now I just cat the list

cat exelist

and it gives me the list of the exe’s I want to delete. I usually do it by hand because there’s generally few but you could always write a quick command line script for it.

Now that the virus is probably out of the way, the computer probably has a root kit too. Reboot into the Windows XP recovery console when using XP and rewrite the master boot record with “fixmbr”. I can’t recall how to do it in Vista/7 but google it, it is trivial.

Now boot into the system with safe mode with networking. Install ccleaner and malwarebytes anti-malware (I use ninite.com its faster) and then run ccleaner first, then malwarebytes. Do the full scan if you have time. If not, the quick scan will be ok. The system should now be clean.

I hopes this works as well for you as it does for me. I generally can do this much faster this way. I had a system cleaned of rootkit/virus in 15 minutes yesterday. In Windows only, it generally takes me 30m-1hr to do.