Guarding Your Digital Doorstep: A Beginner’s Guide to Outsmarting Online Scams

In an era where our digital footprints are as significant as our physical ones, protecting yourself from online scams is not just advisable; it’s imperative. This guide demystifies cybersecurity for the everyday tech user, offering straightforward, actionable advice to fortify your online presence against digital predators. Drawing from expert insights, we’ll navigate the murky waters of online scams with a […]

The Top Things to Do To Avoid Malware

As a tech professional, it’s my job to clean up after computer “accidents.” But a more important aspect of my job is keeping them from happening. There is a lot of information on the web directed at cyber safety, and most of it is good.  But there is one thing that you can do more to keep you safe than any other […]

Critical Information on New Ransomware

Embed from Getty Images Hot off the press, there’s a new version on ransomware that is cheaper to unlock, and there’s bad news and more bad news. Yes, they charge only a portion of a bitcoin to get the key to unlock the files they’ve encrypted.  Except that they haven’t encrypted them. They’ve actually deleted the files. So if you […]

Limit Your Exposure

Unless you always save to your external drive or your mapped drive on your home server, you might consider disconnecting when not in use. The encrypting malware is getting really sophisticated and extends its reach to your mapped drives. That means if your offsite online backup solution operates as a mapped drive, your safety net could become no more useful […]

You Can Survive Most Crypto Attacks–For Now

Rule Number One: Don’t get infected. But if you do, follow Rule Number Two: Clean it off your system immediately. If you read my post on CryptoLocker, you’re aware that it’s not always just that easy. Without a good backup you run the risk of losing everything, and even with a good backup, you’re in for a lot of work. […]

What is “The Cloud” and Should I Be Using It?

This is a very simplified network drawing done in Microsoft Visio, using commonly accepted symbols. Something like this, only much more complex, would be used for planning a new network or an upgrade or change, or to identify where the technology components of a network are. In the center of the diagram, you see a Cloud symbol. This symbol has […]

Cryptolocker–there is no cure, so best prevent

There’s a nasty piece of malware out there called Cryptolocker. You won’t know you’re infected with it until you get the notice that your files are encrypted and if you don’t pay $300 by a certain date the decryption key will be destroyed, causing you to lose all your files forever. At this time only Windows operating systems are vulnerable, […]