I recently was blessed with a user who was fooled by an email about a package and tracking. The email of course had nothing to do with a shipping company, but contained Cryptowall, a variant of the Cryptodefender trojan. And it was methodical. After basically locking them out of all their databases for a day while it did its business, it popped up the obligatory message about all the files being encrypted with an RSA 2048 key, and if you did not give them $500 in bitcoins (that...
I am sorry, there is no nice way to put it. I have had the thing for 2 months now, and find about the only thing it is good for is playing movies. It is not even good to surf the web as you cannot load Java! I know MS hates that (preferring ActiveX), but unfortunately many sites use it. I also cannot use Logmein, VPN, VMWare View, or even OWA! There is no hard client for VPN, and since RT does not do Java, you cannot use the Anyconnect. VMWare View has a client i...
I had to post this as it made me laugh. I was surfing some restaurant reviews for my mother's birthday (she lives 800 miles from me, so a night out is what she wants these days), and happened upon a nice restaurant (great reviews). I clicked on the site (in IE, I usually am running 3 or 4 browsers at once) and got a pop up message - "It looks like you are using Internet Explorer. To view our site correctly, please update to a modern browser like Google Chrome or Firefox"
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It is with great sadness I just learned of the passing of Karen Kenworthy. many of you in the land of geekdom (Windows version) will know who Karen is, and mourn as well her passing as she was not only a source of some great utilities, but also insight into how Windows Worked. From the early days through the later years, she provided us with those "Why did I not think of that!" or 'Why did Microsoft not do that!" utilities that made computing just that much easier. I have many ...
Those damn malware writers are getting better,. I had the unfortunate opportunity to run into the latest. You know the ones - "Your computer is infected!!!" and the infection is the warning. This one defied all tricks that I have learned and even some picked up from here! 1, It infected the "all user" profile, so no booting with a different account. 2. It polluted the registry with tons of launch points and actually replaced windows launch points so simple deletion ...
A report out by NetSec Consultants Corp. is reporting that Samsung is installing a hidden keylogger on all their new laptops! While no official statement has been forthcoming from the company, a support person at the company has confirmed it. The key logger is invisible to the user and records every keystroke the user(s) makes. It can then send that information to any email it is set up to work with (or to any email that is hijacked by it). Keyloggers in a class room (...
I have several browsers on my desktop. I have XP at home (bought 3 years ago - BEFORE 7, and did not want Vista) so IE9 is not an option (work is Vista - I was right in my home purchase). So I am using IE8 both at home and work. When I use IE. I have Firefox which is my browser of choice, Opera, Safari, and Chrome. I know many will disagree with me, and that is fine, but my experiences show that no one is winning, just some are losing slower. Opera is fine if all yo...
Five (5) years ago, Katrina devastated the gulf coast. And in the world of "unintended consequences", the resulting rapid increase in gas prices pushed my wife to start using one of the remote Access software solutions on the market. The job she used it for was a part time one that required a bit of a commute and with gas over $3/gallon, it was not economically feasible to drive to this job. But it was very feasible to use one of these products that cost only a few dollars a mo...
Well, it has been about 5 months since my switch from Comcast to Verizon FIOS. And I had my first "incident" with FIOS over the weekend. 5 months and only 1 outage! That is definitely an improvement in service (with Comcast, outages were about once a month). So I tepidly called Verizon tech support to report the outage. Having been through 9 years of Comcast "service", I was expecting the worst. With Comcast, 9 times out of 10, when there was a problem, it was wi...
I have always loved Dells (well since about the mid 90s). And yesterday, I found I had an even better reason to love them! My sister-in-law suffered a fire at her house a couple of years ago. The house was a total loss (which is a shame - have you ever heard of the Hobbit House? That was hers.) By the time my wife and I got out there several months later, they had cleared the rubble and were fighting the insurance company over money. In that rubble apparently was...
Twice in the last week I have been called in to fix a computer that would not "browse" the Internet. The browser of choice was internet Explorer (one was 6 the other 7), and while the home page would launch when the browser would start, they could not then type in another URL and have the browser connect. But it was not 100%. In other words, type in a second URL, and it would not connect. Type in a 3rd and it woudl. 4th, would not, 5th would, etc. I checked for all ...
Does anyone out there have a recommendation or 2 about a good Motherboard that takes LOTS of RAM (at least 8gb folks - what good is 64bit processing if you cant use it?)? My wife asked me my christmas wants, and so I started looking. Not on my normal sites! Seems 4gb is the top end before you get to the nose bleed sections (we are not that rich). I am looking for Intel (bad taste from AMD) if at all possible.
Well, as Gideon says, Y2Kv7 has come and gone. ANd it was not without pain. From Solaris boxes that needed a lib-c and kernel patch, to firewalls that did not like a manual work around. it has been an interesting 2 weeks. 2 weeks to the day I returned. Cisco was the easiest. Just a one line configuration change, and voila! 200+ routers and a bunch of switches were patched. Ditto NetApp boxes (running a modified Unix core). Microsoft? Well, if yo...
LOL! I am learning about Linux (I used it in the past, and am going back to it). But I had to laugh. Broken laptop (out of warranty of course). So I used Linux to check out the stuff (good news! It uses very little memory!). So the problem is the stupid memory chip. Bad news? How do you shut down? Well in windows you go to Start. IN linux you go to log out! Same stupidity, different date! LOL
My wife decided to surprise me and clean my computer room yesterday. SHe did a good job, but in the process broke the Wireless Switch/Router I had in my room. A very fine Netgear, that had a few quirks, but had been very reliable. So last night off to the store I went for another. Since I had to pick up a couple of things at the big box office supply store, I decided to get it there. Unfortunately, they only had D-link and Linksys. I had bought a D-Link about thr...