WyzGuys Tech Talk

Here is a rare post on the subject of web design.  (I tend to focus on security issues.)  I just read a great post by Jessica Swanson at Shoestring Marketing University, titled “50 Power Words That Sell.”  In web design, and especially the SEO area of web design, we are always harping on the importance of using “keywords” to make your copy more relevant to Google and the other search engines.  Sometimes in out pursuit of page rank ...

A recent study by the Ponemon Institute on behalf of security firm Sophos, and another by Ernst and Young took looks at the cyber crime situation in American and around the world.  What these studies found is:

• Cyber crime costs US companies about $1600 per year per employee.  So count up your employees and multiply by $1600.  That is what cyber crime is costing your company. For a ten person firm that is $16,000 per ...

I have had McAfee security software products on my DO NOT RECOMMED list for several years now, due to recurring and strange network connectivity and system performance issues that I have solved by uninstalling the McAfee products I find on the affected systems.  And lets not forget the surprisingly bad virus signature update that incorrectly marked Windows processes as malware and disabled tens of thousands of Windows PCs in April 2010.

Anyway, Intel bought McAfee in 2010 (a coincidence?) and has ...

One way that cyber criminals use to get personal information, such as user IDs and passwords, from unsuspecting computer users is to trick them out of it.  These sorts of methods are called “social engineering” in the computer security trade.  Social engineering is using trickery, deceit, or fraud to get the victim to help the cyber criminal in their exploit, and relies on the natural human tendency to help, cooperate, or comply with authoritative sounding requests.  Unfortunately, the weakest link ...

I have been writing about the latest threat, CryptoLocker, and promised I would report what ever Carbonite replied to my inquiry about whether CryptoLocker could encrypt online backups.  Here is what they said:

Computers infected with the CryptoLocker virus would indeed be at risk to having their online Carbonite backups also encrypted. In fact we see this on a daily basis unfortunately. Carbonite recognizes when a file previously backed up changes and automatically seeds it for backup. Assuming the client software ...

I recently wrote about the threat that CryptoLocker is to your personal files and data.  After doing more research into it, this is what I know so far:

Information I am reading about this says that CryptoLocker only can encrypt local drives (those installed in your computer and USB external drives attached to your computer) and connected shared network drives (drives located on another computer or shared drive that shows up on your computer as a mapped drive).

I am not ...

I got a fake “your email box is full” message from my “Email Administrator.”

I know this is fake, because we have our own email service and I am the administrator.   One of the things I like to do is hover (DO NOT CLICK ON LINK) over the link to discover the actual destination of the link.

In this ...

Trend Micro has a nifty series of 9 – 5 minute videos that show just how dangerous the world could become with everything becoming network connected and moving to “the Cloud” (the Internet).  Check it out here.  With names like Switched Off, Stay Calm, We Didn’t See It Coming, it makes for interesting viewing.  Trend Micro is releasing one episode a week during Cyber Security Awareness Month and into November.

Go check it out.  This is very, very possible.