Prevent Leaving An Icon In System Tray On Program Exit

The Windows 7 taskbar shows a preview of the window. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

11-April-2018


Prevent Leaving An Icon In System Tray On Program Exit. I had a problem with one of my applications about this. I was able to minimize it to System Tray. The App Icon was removed from the Taskbar, alright. But when the application was restored and closed, the icon remains in the System Tray. What's worse, I didn't notice it!

This was complicated by the fact that I did a routine cycle of closing and opening the program using scripts and some free apps downloadable from the internet, so that for a period of time, System Tray was filled up with icons of the same program, all N-1 of which are invalid handles!

I got a good scolding from my boss about this. Why? When I researched this problem, I found out that it is a prevalent issue. There are a number of forums that discusses the same exact problem, as obviously, I am not the only one having it. No, I am not the first one, and I will not be the last.

What did I find? That it was, and it remains, an issue by MS. Yep. The software giant company MS. They have it as a bug, and it still isn't fixed. The full details, I cannot tell here. But if you are interested, and if it happens to you in the future, you will know and understand what I mean.

Of course, there were suggestions presented in the forums to remedy the situation, and some of them I actually followed. Unfortunately, they didn't work perfectly for me. That is why so many icons still get left behind. And worse, this was implemented in one of our customers. Customer complain, that is what I got. That is how I got a good scolding. What's the point? I followed and applied in my code something that is 'wrong'. Yeah, I kinda missed that.

Anyway, how was that problem remedied?

This is the surprising this. It really is very simple, and it isn't something hidden.

In the FormClosed event, put (or add) these lines:

myNotifyIcon.Icon = null;
myNotifyIcon.Dispose();
Application.DoEvents();
if (Application.MessageLoop) {
    // WinForms app
    Application.DoEvents();
    Application.Exit();
}
else {
    // Console app
    Environment.Exit(0);
}

Surprising, isn't it? You gotta try it to know it! And with that, You should be all set. Prevent Leaving An Icon In System Tray On Program Exit.

Till then!

[Late posting; drafted on 18-October-2017]

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6 ways to protect your data in cyberspace

English: A candidate icon for Portal:Computer security (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This one is a classic, not that it is old and ancient, but it stands the test of time... Perhaps it may be even more important and more relevant in the many years to come, who knows?
-----


BY LEONID BERSHIDSKY


This would be remembered as the Year of the Hack, if next year didn’t promise even more cyber security breaches. Ordinary users shouldn’t wait for businesses and governments to respond to the growing threat.

This year’s spectacular revelations include the theft of 145 million personal records from eBay, and the acknowledgment by JP-Morgan Chase that 76 million households and seven million small businesses may have been affected by a data breach.

On Monday, hackers claimed to have obtained millions of passwords from Dropbox. These reports followed news of tens of millions of compromised credit card numbers at Target, Home Depot, Walmart, PF Chang and Nieman Marcus.

Other as yet undisclosed thefts could be linked to two longstanding vulnerabilities in open- source software known as Heartbleed and Shellshock, discovered in recent months. In addition, we have seen the release of celebrities’ naked pictures stolen from Apple’s iCloud and images of ordinary youngsters lifted from Snapchat.

There was also the theft of classified data by at least two groups of Russian hackers, one using malware called Snake and the other dubbed SandWorm by the cyber security company that discovered it. Perhaps the best way to get a general picture of global information (in)security is an interactive map produced by Russian cyber security company Kaspersky Lab.

According to Pricewaterhouse-Coopers, which surveyed 9,700 executives in 154 countries in April and May, there were 42.8 million reported incidents this year, up 48 per cent from last year’s survey. The number of companies reporting losses of more than US$20 million (S$26 million) doubled compared with last year. At the same, investment in information security is down 4 percent from the year before.

In this game, innocent bystanders may be most likely to get hurt. Here are six rules for protecting yourself.

>> Keep nothing on any of your devices, or in the cloud, that you wouldn’t want the world to see.

These include Dropbox and iCloud, even if the former says no user credentials have been compromised and the latter has added two-factor authentication requiring access to a user’s phone.

All computer systems are vulnerable because humans write code. A vulnerability could lurk for years, as Heartbleed and Shellshock did.

It is much safer to keep your data under a loose floorboard than on a major company’s cloud service: Only someone who is intensely interested in you will search your apartment, but Internet services are subjected to generic, wholesale attacks.

>> Don’t send any sensitive information over the Internet.

Kids thought Snapchat was a safe way to sext because pictures and videos disappear after being viewed.

It turns out that an outside developer found a way to store the content and someone else broke into the storage.

Besides, government are watching, and even if you don’t believe Edward Snowden’s story of National Security Agency staff passing around naked photos obtained through blanket surveillance, it could happen.

>> Block e-mail messages from people you don’t know.

They are much more likely to be spam and phishing attempts than legitimate correspondence. Those who really need to reach you can contact you via social networks.

Never open any e-mail attachments unless you’ve discussed them with the sender. SandWorm used a previously unknown Windows vulnerability to get into Ukrainian and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member networks, but they needed a user to open a “weaponised” PowerPoint file.

That unnecessary click can get you fired and your organization robbed blind.

>> The credit card you use online should have a spending limit that reflects the amount that you would be comfortable losing to thieves and, perhaps, never recovering.
Virtual cards that are never used again are best for big purchases. The credit card you use offline should have a chip and require a PIN code to pay merchant.

If you don’t have a chip card, don’t use plastic to pay small merchants – few invest in data security.

>> Vault applications that store your many passwords are just as vulnerable as any other services, regardless of the claims they make about encryption and not storing your data.
True, none of the widely available vaults has been cracked, but every new breach is always a surprise. It might make more sense to minimise the number of services allowed to store your credit card numbers, only picking ones with two-factor authentication and committing the passwords to memory.

>> Don’t buy anything that could be maliciously reprogrammed with physical consequences.

That applies to most Internet of Things devices and, increasingly, to cars.

I don’t always follow these rules, but every time I break them, I know I’m taking a risk. The pre-Internet world was safer, if not as convenient. We have put way too much trust in the magic of technology.

BLOOMBERG


Taken from My Paper, Thursday, October 16, 2014

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Cyber-criminals targeting social networks, experts warn

Image via Wikipedia

And this issue of cyber security, as ever before, is more prone to attack, with more people/users now engaging in online networks and forums.

Read that news article here: Cyber-criminals targeting social networks, experts warn

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Cybercriminals in the Cloud

Charlotte Dunlap,Forbes.com

Posted: 17 May 2009 2049 hrs

Security breaches continue to plague organizations, causing CIOs to question whether their traditional network security solutions are adequate for protecting against increasingly sophisticated cybercriminals.

Recently, it was reported that foreign hackers broke into the Pentagon's $300 billion fighter plane weapons program, a security breach apparently achieved through contractors' computers. The news is particularly disheartening to CIOs, because if the federal government--with all of its brain power and billions in funds--is still grappling with keeping its data secure, how can organizations and enterprises expect to avoid Internet threats and costly data breaches?

In a bit of serendipitous timing, security vendors discussed a new type of threat protection as they gathered at the annual RSA security conference in San Francisco last month. The much-discussed methodology included "in-the-cloud'' security intelligence, as it borrows from reputation services--an effective security technique that has primarily been used to verify sender data in e-mails. Specifically, CIOs will begin to see a major trend this year whereby infrastructure companies integrate reputation services with traditional networking devices such as Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) and firewalls.

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Reputation services can check, score and block IP addresses. These services have proved themselves to be critical to e-mail security and Web security solutions because they can block as much as 90% of bad traffic at an organization's gateway, alleviating the burden of filtering unwanted communications.

The point is that cybercrime and malware have become so advanced and relentless that trying to maintain a database with hundreds of thousands of signatures will no longer cut it in keeping companies up on the latest threats. Reputation services, on the other hand, dynamically use behavioral techniques in-the-cloud to weed out suspicious IP locations and behaviors.

So in the same way reputation services have significantly shored up secure messaging security by blocking bad IP addresses at the gateway, the intelligence services can also eliminate the need for IPS and firewalls to scan and inspect Internet-based content on the network. The services can intelligently block unwanted data in real-time in the cloud before it even approaches customers' networks.

Cisco is the first vendor to announce this type of "Global Correlation,'' which links its reputation services with security offerings, including its IPS and firewall products. Other major network security players will follow suit, probably even by this year. Cisco is offering a hybrid approach to its traditional IPS, which sits on the customer premise, but is now able to tap the intelligence of Cisco's Security Intelligence Operations to check for the latest Internet threats. (Cisco acquired e-mail security leader IronPort two years ago, primarily for its reputation service.)

Other IPS leaders expected to follow similar strategies include TippingPoint, McAfee, IBM ISS, Check Point and Sourcefire. Unified Threat Management (UTM) providers, including Fortinet, WatchGuard, SonicWall and Netgear, whose solutions include intrusion prevention, are also able to tap cloud-based reputation services to improve security.

So here's what CIOs need to keep in mind: Who's providing your IDS/IPS, UTM and firewall technology? Does the vendor have a strategy for integrating reputation services into its solutions? Better yet, does the vendor have access to a solid reputation service? These are questions to ask current or prospective technology partners, and as part of your homework, read up on how reputation services, including SenderBase (IronPort/Cisco), TrustedSource (Secure Computing, now McAfee), Trend Micro Network Reputation Services and the Commtouch Reputation Service, have improved e-mail security and Web security dramatically.

(Charlotte Dunlap is vice president of Research at Synergy Research Group. Her expertise is in network security and threat protection. )

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.