WyzGuys Tech Talk

As reported in the CompTIA Smart Brief on May 6th, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Symantec, the inventor of antivirus software, is declaring that host-based software security solutions can not stop enough malware exploits to be useful.  The problem with most exploits is that they take advantage of computer users’ trusting nature and gullibility to trick them in to permitting something that the software would usually like to block, or the malefactors gain access to systems ...

The latest bit of carnage in the Target Christmas Credit Card breach is the resignation of Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel.  He is being replaced at the helm by interim CEO John Mulligan, Target’s CFO.  The first call he needs to make is to the CIO and his information technology security chief to see where the company is in rectifying the lapses that allowed the security breach to take place.

We see this as a largely symbolic and useless act, a ritual ...

The CryptoLocker ransom-ware exploit remains on of the most difficult security challenges that we face, since once all your personal data is encrypted, the only way back is either from an uninfected backup, or paying the cyber-criminals to receive your decryption key.  The good news (well I guess it’s good news), is that the bad guys are playing fair and actually sending the decryption key and even providing a bit of tech support.  Not all attempts to recover this way ...

Microsoft has announced a serious flaw in all versions of Internet Explorer, and is working on a patch, but for the interim, until the patch is released in Windows Updates, its makes sense to use an alternative browser such as Google’s Chrome, Mozilla’s Firefox, or Apple’s Safari.  Maybe it’s a good day to try the Epic Privacy Browser, a Chrome variant.

Right now, using IE could allow an attacker to gain access to your computer by rerouting you or tricking you ...

Just a quick note that IBM is celebrating 50 years of mainframe computing.  So we have gone from mainframe and dumb terminals, to minicomputers and smarter terminals, to personal computers to client/server, and finally to “cloud services.”  In an interesting way that sort of gets us back to the beginning, where everything we want is located on the biggest “mainframe” of them all – the Internet.  But instead of dumb terminals we have smart everything, ubiquitous high-speed connectivity, and the ...

For the last eight weeks it has been my privilege to train twenty students in the fundamentals of computer and network support.  I have been working as an independent instructor in association with A Critical Path, CompTIA, and their non-profit foundation Creating IT Futures.  The eight weeks of instruction that I delivered is designed to provide lecture and hands-on instruction in computers, networks, protocols, operating systems, security, user administration, and the like.  All of the instruction ...