One key rule I try to teach is that you never trust anything your receive in email, in a text, or on the phone. You verify absolutely first.
The grandparent scam uses a combination of urgency, love, and fear to catch you.
Read more on The Walrus.
TechRepublic’s 10 Things blog has a pretty good rundown. I’ve recently had to explain the very basics of rootkits to an occasional curious customer.
Wordfence has an excellent post on this subject. While their post is aimed at WordPress users, the ideas are good for any password. My own comment is this: Use MFA – multi-factor authentication. This is accomplished in various ways, such as an app on your phone, a texted code, emailed code, and so forth. It takes…
I always tell users to be very certain of any attachments, not only checking who they’re from, but being certain that the person in question intentionally sent them. This e-card greeting spam (Washington Post article) should remind you of another thing: Links in an e-mail don’t necessarily go where the text says they go. Be…
“Turned” nasty? I think hacking is nasty in general. It has been hard to change people’s attitudes toward hackers and copyright violators, because the damage is generally not physical. But the fact is that hackers and spammers cost businesses money. These activities are not some sort of harmless joke–they do damage. Anyone who works in…
I’m going to link to a post from SmarterMSP.com, but I want to summarize here. Most of my clients won’t benefit that much from the linked article. They need to follow my much simpler rule set: This is only going to get worse. AI allows even people who are not very clever to create clever…
I cannot think of anything that will spare computer users more annoyance and hardship than being careful of what they install on their computers. I’ve cleaned up several machines recently, and in every case there were multiple toolbars, numerous search providers, and a number of utilities. In each case the users could not tell me…