Many times recently I’ve been met with the challenge of completing forms on line. This can sometimes be an absolute nightmare particularly when you’re completing them on behalf of someone else who isn’t “fond” of computers.
I’d tried hard to be patient and muddle my way through, as each website invariably asks for the same information, but unfortunately sometimes not in the same format. Government department forms are so long you almost give up completing them. Continue reading
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’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!
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
New Workshop – Avoidance of Scams
The Avoidance of Scams Workshop will cover various Scams that may appear on computers or in text messages. If you have questions bring them along, we will try to answer any questions on the day or we will get back to you! Put the date into your calendar now! Thursday 22 June at 1.30pm to 4pm (cost is $5.00 and places are limited – booking with Teresa is essential).
Computers – should we turn them “On/Off”
So what is best – leave your computer on all the time or turn it off when you’re not using it? And what about your printer and modem; should you be turning them off? Continue reading
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
