As I had mentioned in a May 14th Post it’s dangerous to use software that you don’t know the origin of. it’s even more dangerous to use software that you THINK you know the origin of. 

Fortuneatly there are tools that exist to help you determin if a file has been damaged or changed between the time is ws published by the producer of the file and when it gets onto your system.

let’s get started. 

the first item you will need is a MD5 Summer  you can get one at http://md5summer.org/ .

the Second item is a file and a web site that have the MD5 Hash available. this is most comomonly seen in the Linux distrbution world there will be a folder on a site that has  text files that list all of the files usuallylike this:

 14:34:23     something051420081412.iso     MD5:1234543221237658923543  

that MD5 number is what you will use to verify that the file you have on your computer is the same. 

open up the md5summer application and it will ask for you to select the folder that contains the file  you want to verify . 

at the bottom there are two buttons one if to create sums the other is to verify sums.  if you are only looking at one file choose create sums. it will then show up a list of all the files in that folder , you must choose which file to add to the Right hand panel for the program to create a sum for and it click for it to start  NOTE: this can take some time for larger Image files in the case of a downloaded Linux distribution.  once this is complete you can  compare to the online version of this hash or you can copy this hash into its own

.MD5 file in this format 

HASH [space]path to file.

554685db743f669d9f4a9b8451da6da8 *Chipset/AsusSetup.exe 

There is a ton of info out there on this topic and this is just meant to get you started.

thanks for reading and if you have any feedback for me let me know at chris@christophersciumbata.com

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