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Hello Folks, Part of what I do is security. I am naturally careful with what I look at on the Internet, and realize that part of what we do exposes us (FaceBook). Don’t publish content on social media that you do not want in court or for your mother to hear. I realize that we have some control over what we do, and I work on letting my family of computer users know what they might do to improve their personal and business privacy and security....Continue reading

Good Morning, Pro Support Family, There are a LOT of phishing e-mail messages flying around now, I've received almost 200 of them in the last week. Some of them are designed to get you to open a file or a link that will then encrypt all your files. Always, the message is from a name that might have sent you a message in the past (or even someone you may not know), but the email address it is from is wrong. Common anti-virus programs and firewalls can't stop these infections.... DO NOT OPEN or save any of these messages. Delete the mail message immediately, and clean out your deleted messages file. All of these messages have a small MS Word file or MS Excel file (doc/docx/xls/xlsx) attached. They contain a macro that downloads a ransomware infection that will encrypt your computer or your entire network. The only course of action if infected is to: 1) Pay the ransom and hope they send you the decrypt instructions (no guarantee this will work), or 2) Re-format all of the computers on your network and restore from a full backup (if you have one). The bug seems to gets through firewalls and anti-virus programs by operating in the background from a macro, and assembling the actual infection in the computer that opened the file, then triggering after some period of time. If think you have opened one of these things, we need to get you backed up immediately, before the encryption happens. The only inline defense against this is the Sophos XG Firewall Security Appliance with the Sophos Intercept-X anti-virus system. If you do not have these measures in place, backup is your only solution, if you take the bait. Call us to hear about this solution. Educate your employees to not open any Word or Excel files that are attached to incoming e-mail messages. If we already have an automated backup program in place for you, then we have this covered, all but the education part. Let's test your restore plan, to be sure we can recover from infection. Call us for help getting an ongoing backup structure setup as your best insurance policy.

You are your best defense dealing with cyber-security. Yes, we can install an excellent managed AV solution, but that will not stop everything. Educate yourself, stay aware of what phishing and spoofed messages look like. There are many articles out there to help you to spot these things. Best if you can see the traffic before you open it, and delete the questionable traffic. There is no message so important that you should pay for it with your entire system. Oh, and talk to us about managed backup, as your next layer of protection.

Telephone Users: Coming soon to your phone! We just learned that soon (we cannot nail down a date) the phone exchanges/companies will require all of us to dial the whole 10-digit telephone number to make a call, even if it is to the building next door, or to your home. I guess we should have seen this coming, with all of the out-of-exchange cell phones that are floating around. Just to let you know...more inconvenience coming to your more convenient world.

Notice today that "FireFox Quantum" has released. I unloaded the old and installed the new on my test machine, it looks like the standard FireFox v57.0.4 - this browser has been getting faster, and we really appreciate teh ability to add the uBlock Origin ad-blocker. We suggest our clients and friends use FireFox with Ad Blocking installed to avoid unnecessary Internet traffic and fight back infections. Browse in good health, and call us when you have issues - we can help. 223-3333