I had a client ask me recently how she could know she was safe while surfing the Internet on the free wi-fi networks available in the various coffee shops around the city. I went through the general comments of a good firewall, malware and virus protection, but also offered a few other ideas for her to think about.

One of the things that immediately makes me start wondering about whether a wi-fi network at an establishment is legit, is whether or not the name of the wi-fi network being broadcast matches or at least is similar to the business name.
For …read more

If you’re quick, you should go follow @MSNBCHeadlines on twitter. They’ve had their account hacked and let’s just say the person that’s in control of the account is having a little fun with the media outlet.

I’m not sure how it is all these accounts on twitter have been getting hacked so prolifically lately. I don’t think all of these people have simple passwords that are getting cracked, so what’s happening? Are there machines infected with other malware that’s collecting login information?
Aside from the major PR issues that a entity like MSNBC is going to have to deal with after this …read more

The successor to Live OneCare has already been released by Microsoft known as Security Essentials 1.0. SE 1.0 was initially labeled as Morro, has retained the core features of OneCare but has removed some of its bloated features which includes the firewall, performance tuning, backup and restore options. The selling point for Security Essentials 1.0 is its price tag — “free”, yes it doesn’t cost anything. Live OneCare showed a lot of promise but the price tag wasn’t appealing enough to abandon the more branded, stable security applications coming from Norton, McAfee, and the rest of security vendors. Microsoft being …read more

Microsoft has released the new Microsoft Security Essentials software for download and install on Windows PC’s everywhere! The new Microsoft Security Essentials software is a replacement for what was known as Windows Live OneCare.

The installation file for the new software was pretty light. Total download size was only 8.61MB. Sitting less than 9MB, it places it less than a third of my least favorite application, Adobe Reader. Oh, and this is a full-blown security application, not just a PDF reader.
Once downloaded the installation process couldn’t have been much easier as well. The general installation steps were expected, there was a …read more

I’ve written regularly about my selection of Windows Live OneCare as my anti-virus and anti-malware software application of choice. At the time of needing my own new application, I was able to purchase the software for use on three machines. At the time, I believe they were the only company to provide this purchase option. Many followed afterwards.

Microsoft has now released their Microsoft Security Essentails application that will be completely replacing Windows Live OneCare as their security application of choice.
The big change between the two application is that Microsoft Security Essentials will be offered as a free download. Compared …read more

I received an email today that was a phishing scam using the popular online payment website, PayPal. My Outlook client caught it as Junk Mail, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to show people how a legitimate “looking” email can really lead you to places you don’t want to go.

As you can see from the image above which is a screen capture from my email Inbox, everything looks normal and appropriate and legitimate right? However, if you hover your mouse over the links you’ll see that the link is actually going to direct you to a bogus …read more

I haven’t had a real virus or malware issue on my computer in quite awhile now. I think the key to this effort hasn’t been the brand of anti-virus or anti-spyware I use. Neither has it been based on the fact that I’m a PC or Mac user. Keeping yourself safe online is more of a mental task than software.
You can follow these five steps to keep yourself safe on any system with any software installed.

Know Your Links: Too many times I think people just click on anything that’s blue and underlined in their browser. Take a minute and read …read more

I must be completely out of touch with computers. Apparently I have absolutely no clue about the big Conficker virus that’s been all over the news. I’ve seen it in headlines, but I never really heard many details about it so I didn’t even know it was a virus I needed to worry about until yesterday.
The question is did I need to be worried?
Conficker.C began using a new algorithm on Wednesday to look for instructions from its creator, prompting speculation that it might be readying for an attack. According to security experts, however, the worm has been quiet so far.
Am …read more

One of the challenges experienced today was to move all the photos around on my family’s PC and aggregate them on a single partitioned drive located on the secondary hard drive in the system. For some reason I could never really get the access to the photos I wanted. I could see them, but couldn’t move copies of them to my local laptop for editing or use as I desired.
After I moved all of the photos and images to the new drive I couldn’t get my local machine mapped to the new drive so I could access the photos as …read more

In a recent post I asked what you readers chose as your preferred security and maintenance tools. These are the applications you consider indispensable when trying to keep your systems in top running shape and secure from the variety of potential attacks and intrusions from nefarious entities found on the intarwebs!
Here’s my list of applications that I used even today as I was cleaning up my family’s desktop PC.

CCleaner which is short for “CRAP” Cleaner. It does a great job of finding all the hidden pieces of installed applications that sometimes don’t get removed with the program’s default uninstall function.

Revo …read more