According to USA Today. A “premier hacker’s toolkit” called SpyEye has recently been made available for anyone to buy. The program is capable of giving commands to thousands of “bot computers” that have been highjacked by a cyber criminal. Once your computer is highjacked it can be used to send spam, for hacktivist attacks, and most notably can steal your bank information and invisibly transfer money from your account to the hackers, deleting all traces that it ever occurred.

The application has been cracked and is being sold by 3rd party’s and is being sold for as little as $95, and may even be available to download for free via bittorrent. This toolkit has existed since late 2009 but until now cost over $6,000 to buy and was only being used by 14 rings of criminals. Since the application is now more widely used the chances of being infected are increasing. The chances of the hackers being caught are decreasing as well since the toolkit is now being used by more people.

To protect yourself you should have up to date anti spyware and antivirus installed and running on your computer, but keep in mind this does not guarantee your security. You can also download the Firefox addon “HTTPS everywhere ” which will enable the more secure protocol on all websites that support it.

Last month was using an emachines laptop for my primary PC, which wasn’t ideal to say the least for what I do. I was using it for everything from Sony Vegas video editing to gaming (older games of course) to everyday internet browsing.

Computing power was an obvious issue. As it only had a 2Ghz dual core processor (which really isn’t bad for a laptop), but when editing HD video, and sometimes performing everyday tasks my laptop struggled. Hard drive space was also an issue, a 250GB hard drive fills up quickly when working with HD video files.

Another issue was screen real estate. With only a 15″ screen I had trouble fitting everything I needed onto the screen. Especially when using software like Sony Vegas or Cubase.

I know more powerful laptops exist, I could have gotten a laptop nearly as powerful as the computer I built, however it would’ve cost me almost twice as much and screen real estate still would’ve been an issue.

Now I’m not saying in any way that laptops are not good, they have many uses, but for me it simply wasn’t satisfactory. If I had the money I would like to have a laptop to use as a secondary PC, however I ended up selling my laptop to help pay for parts.

I decided I was going to buy a barebones kit from TigerDirect. I had one picked out and I was planning on buying it the next day, however then next day when I went to buy it, it was sold out. I found another kit (which was quad core rather than 6 core), but I liked the look of the case much better, I went ahead and bought it for $350. Here is what it included:

NZXT M59 Case
600W ATX POWER SUPPLY
Biostar A880GU3
AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition (3.2Ghz)
Corsair XMS3 4GB Ram
Seagate 1TB Hard Drive
Samsung DVD Writer

Looking at this on paper the specs are pretty decent. I knew I needed a more ram though, added another 4GBs of ram ($40), knew I needed a mouse and keyboard, added one to my cart ($25), I also needed a monitor. I chose an Acer 23″ LED monitor ($150).

So everything I needed ended up costing $617 after tax.

When the average person thinks of “building a computer” they think that its something you have to be “really smart” to do, or have a lot of experience. There really isn’t much to it. Watch some youtube videos, or read an online guide. You’ll find the parts simply won’t fit in the wrong place and many are color coded. This was not my first PC to build as I built one over the summer at an IT camp, but it took less than an hour.

Next came wanting to buy upgrades, I bought quite a bit of stuff I didn’t necessarily need, but I really “wanted” them. They didn’t cost much. But it really adds up when you start buying them.

First came the executive office chair since I would no longer be working on the couch. ($60, half price at Staples)

Then the video card. I couldn’t stand to have a computer that powerful without a decent video card to play some games with. Got an Nvidia GTX-550 Ti ($140).

Fans and cathode lights..who could have a nice looking case with a side window without some pretty cathode lights? Not me. ($10). With all those free spots for fans, why not fill them up? ($15)

The fans and lights arrived..oops, they didn’t come with the right kind of connectors. Instead of ordering adapters, why not order a nice looking fan controller that cost slightly more? ($30)

HD webcam at Walmart on sale for $25. Who could stand to pass that up while they’re in the process of building a computer? ($25)

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Now maybe I just got caught up in the whole thing and spent a lot of unnecessary money. But if your building a computer of your own, make sure you figure everything in. If you don’t have the money to spare fight the temptations of those pretty addons.

Even though I spent so much more money then I had planned, I’m still happy with my system. Still glad I bought it, but if I could buy and build again I might go for a little less bling and a little more raw computing power.

1. Before you can do any of this your iPhone needs to be jailbroken (if your already jailbroken you can skip to step 2). There are various guides around the web on how to do this. I suggest referring to this jailbreak matrix to find out how to jailbreak your phone.

2. Once your jailbroke you need to create a Google Voice account. It is relatively quick to do considering that it links with your other Google accounts such as Gmail. Simply head over to https://www.google.com/voice to get started.

3. Once you have a Google Voice account you will need to download the Google voice iPhone app from the App Store and set it up with your Google account. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-voice/

4. Next you will need to open Cydia on your phone and install the app “SMS GV Extension”. This will convert the Push Notifications you receive for your Google Voice app into text messsages that will be routed to your SMS app. Just do a quick search and you will find it, it’s in the Big Boss Repo. It will cost you $3 but is well worth the price and will support the developer. If for some reason you cannot buy the app, you could get a cracked version from the xsellize repo (cydia.xsellize.com/)

5. Once that is installed you can install “Tlert” or “Quickreply”. Both cost a small amount of money to support the developer but can also be obtained from the xsellize repo for free.

6. Share your Google voice number and enjoy your free SMS. You can go ahead and cancel your text messaging package with your phone company if you like, you won’t be needing it anymore. You could also setup calls to your Google voice number to be routed to your actual number, or even setup your outgoing calls to be made with google voice using the “Phone GV Extension” from Cydia.