Microsoft Don’t Make Phone Calls!

Posted on 25 May 2017 by Bunkshyde

It’s 6:35pm on a normal weekday evening on the Kapiti Coast, dinner’s almost ready to serve and…….the phone rings. You pick it up and there doesn’t appear to be anyone on the other end. Suddenly after about 5 seconds a foreign voice comes on the line and quickly introduces themselves as “Microsoft Support”. They tell you that they’ve detected a problem on your computer and they want to connect to it and remedy the issue.

Does this all sound familiar – it should, because almost all of us will have encountered this targeted scam in the past few months – sometimes repeatedly! Continue reading →

You Don’t WannaCry… Do You?

Posted on 17 May 2017 by Bunkshyde

You’d have to be living in a cocoon to have missed the reports in the mainstream media this week about the WannaCry Worm which has infected vulnerable computers around the world. WannaCry is transmitted when people open infected email attachments and can spread itself quickly within organisations over their internal computer networks. Home PCs and laptops are just as vulnerable!

What is WannaCry?

It’s a computer worm categorised as ransomware! When a PC (or laptop) is infected by WannaCry or any of its variants, important files are encrypted (scrambled) and can no longer be read or used. The primary target is your documents and pictures.

Once infected, you have to pay a ransom to gain access to your documents and pictures.

How do I recover from a WannaCry Infection?

If you want to recover (decrypt) your documents and pictures, you have to pay $US300 in Bitcoins to some ratbag. If you take more than 3 days, they double the charge to $US600 and after 6 days, they simply walk away leaving your PC information completely inaccessible.

If you don’t want to pay the money, you better have a (recent) backup of your documents, pictures, music and videos. You’ll likely need to reset your PC (reinstall Windows!) to remove the infection and then restore your documents, pictures, music and videos from the backup.

If you want to avoid having to choose a recovery method then read on… Continue reading →

The end of Microsoft Vista!

Posted on 10 February 2017 by Bunkshyde

I want to draw everyone’s attention to the following article (below) which reports the end of Vista support in 2 months time – that’s April 2017! By definition this also means that Vista starts to become vulnerable to security attacks after that date. Continue reading →

TV time Extra

Posted on 15 January 2017 by Thor

At the request of one of our readers who asked for more information on uses of new TV, extra features and attachments to TV, I have compiled a few lines of info which may well turn out to be more than you’d wished for. It should be noted that On-Line available material can also be viewed on a TV with the right attachment, see later. You may be surprised at the mass of entertainment available to you on-line nowadays.