April Newsletter

April on us already! Less than nine months until Christmas.

Sue and I had a great weekend away in Te Anau from Easter Saturday. To make it even better one of our granddaughters and son Richie and his amazing wife Anna were with us. What a great weekend with no pressure, lots of laughs – what I believe is called quality family time. It is great to have the grandchildren as part of the home and let the parents do the tough stuff like getting them to bed etc. The oldies just get the cuddles!!

The only problem was the weekend was too short! Sue and I might have to do it again sometime.

Life at CST continues to move along slowly. We can always do with an extra sale or an extra repair. Do not forget that I am down here about 8.00 am each morning and we would strive to get the repair back to you on the way home from work.

Scams and Viruses

A couple of things have popped up since last month’s article on security which are worth a mention.

As I said to someone recently, newsletters either just flow and are easy to write or I sweat blood doing it. Last month’s was one of those “sweat blood” varieties. I finished up talking about ransomware and Cryptolocker. As luck would have it, we had three Cryptolocker strikes within 24 hours of Dave publishing the newsletter and another a couple of days later. One was a local business where one of the head men in the business opened a dodgy mail because it piqued his interest. Obviously his computer was then infected but the nasty thing was that it quickly spread across the work network and infected the bosses system and the admin system. The others were in Dunedin and dealt to by the guys from ProSouth.

The message is, this rubbish is out there. Take care.

People ask me why their antivirus (usually NOD in our case) did not work and they became infected. There are two simplistic answers (they have to be simple so I can understand them!).

The first is that if some cretin in Siberia writes and releases a new virus at 9.00 am today, it is going to take a period of time before the clever people at NOD and other antivirus companies know about it and can write a fix. If you get infected in that period, you are probably in trouble.

The second is that when you open an infected mail for example, your system thinks you know what you are doing and allows the security override.

Layered Defence

While my team were rushing round dealing with these last month, I spoke with Jon and he had some words of wisdom which I thought worth passing on. Jon talked about having a “layered” approach to virus protection. This means not relying on any one means of defence. I got him to write this down as it seemed to make a whole lot of sense.

His thoughts were:

1. Make sure your operating system is up-to-date with all the latest patches.
2. Have a good antivirus installed
3. Use an adblocker with your browser to reduce the chances of clicking on a link that make take you to a malicious site or download
4. Be sceptical when browsing the net or opening emails and attachments. Back in the day, the advice was do not open anything unless you know the sender. Today, it is extended to do not open anything unless you know the sender AND you are expecting mail from them. These clever people can send you a virus in a mail which appears to come from Tony Simpson – it is called spoofing.
5. Be aware of scam callers purporting to be from Microsoft. Some speak poor English, but some are very well spoken. Remember Microsoft do NOT call me here at work – we are far too small time. Why would they call me at home just because I am one of the 1.25 billion Windows users in the world? If you have any doubts hang up and call us here at CST or call one of the team at ProSouth.
6. Let others know how to be safe on the net. Talk with your kids or others who have helpful advice and offer your advice to those with less experience than you.

Many thanks Jon for this common sense, practical advice.

Another of Those Just-in-time Photos

I presume this is not how it appears at first glance.

As I get Older I Realise:

1. I talk to myself because sometimes I need expert advice
2. Sometimes I roll my eys uot loud
3. I don’t need anger management. I just need people to stop p*****g me off.
4. My people skills are just fine. It’s my tolerance of idiots that needs work.
5. The biggest lie I tell myself is “I don’t need to write that down, I’ll remember it”
6. When I was a child, I thought nap time was a punishment. Now it is like a mini vacation.
7. The day the world runs out of beer or wine is just too terrible to think about.
8. Even duct tape can’t fix stupid, but it can muffle the sound.
9. Wouldn’t it be great if we could put ourselves in the dryer for 10 minutes and come out wrinkle free and three sizes smaller?
10. “Getting lucky” means walking into a room and remembering why I am there.

Phishing Scam

To continue the internet safety theme, one last comment about phishing scams – yes, I have spelt it correctly.

Phishing is an attempt to acquire personal information such as usernames and passwords, bank account details, credit card details etc, often for malicious reasons, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity. What this means is that you get emails which subtly ask for these details in such a way that you think they are for real. Don’t forget, the purpose of these things is to fool a few people into giving up personal details. If you put out 100000 emails and get a 1% response rate, then you have 1000 bank accounts to delve into.

A note has just come out about the one of the latest scams stating that the customer is eligible for a tax refund from IRD but must first send credit card details to receive it. Have a look at this article – very short and easy to read. Also the four links below the article are worth a read and show how sophisticated these scams can be.

Windows 10 Upgrades

The first six months of the free upgrade have been relatively event free for us but the last month has been a real problem. We have seen more problems in the last month than the first six.

If you are thinking of the upgrade, our advice would be to hang fire again for a while. Maybe it is a crook file or to somewhere that hopefully will be sorted.

3D Tattoos

A warning before you start. I thought long and hard about including these but finally decided to put them in the newsletter with a warning. They are however amazing tattoos – the people who did them are incredibly clever. But be warned again, some of them are a bit graphic if you are a bit squeamish. I did check it out with Sue first – she laughed at a few, showed amazement at some but as she says, none show bits they shouldn’t.