WyzGuys Tech Talk

As we were discussing in the last article, the goal is to make the data on your old drive useless or unrecoverable by anyone who might get ahold of your computer after your are done with it.  Lets take a look at several methods from easy and weak to irretrievably strong and secure.

• Quick reformatting using Windows.  You can make Windows reformat the drive on a reboot, which will render the computer unusable on completion.  The quick reformat process on removes ...

When you are done with your computer, what happens to your hard drive?  When you properly recycle a computer, no one in the recycling crew is going to wipe that hard drive for you, unless you have made specific arrangements for that to happen. For example, my friends at Renovo Data Services in Eden Prairie MN will destroy your hard drive if you ask them to do it, for a fee.  But this is a procedure that at the very ...

Those of you who have subscribed to Comcast Business Class Signature Support, or on the consumer side, Xfinity Signature Support, it looks like Comcast has decided to get out of the computer support business.  You will want to check these links for more information.

• Business: http://business.comcast.com/ssr
• Consumer: https://signaturesupport.xfinity.com

At WyzGuys, we are authorized contractors for both of these programs, but frankly I am not going to miss the competition from Comcast.  In my humble opinion they should stick to ...

My friends at the San Jose Mercury News  and TechDirt have been reporting about Apple’s digital assistant Siri, and her charming if somewhat aloof personality quirks.  Patrick May took Siri to she the movie “Her”  recently and here is what Siri had to say about it.  To read the full article, click on the link above.

“Have you seen the movie ‘Her,’ Siri?” I asked.
“No,” she snapped. “I haven’t.”
“Why not?”
“I really have no opinion.”
“Her portrayal ...

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 ...