Tech Lab, Inc.

Rather than bore you with things we like, requirements, considerations, blah blah, let’s just get into looking at some cool laptops…

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While you are busy with your holiday preparations or swamped with the busy season at work, scammers are also busy taking advantage of the situation. At Christmas time, many parents may look for a way to deliver a letter from Santa. If you use a website for this service, please be careful which websites you choose. Sadly, scammers will even use parents trying to do good to get ahead. Here are some tips to keep in mind to determine if you are being scammed.

• Research- You can verify if the offer is legitimate by running a search on the topic with the keyword “scam” to see if the product itself is legitimate before you make a purchase.
• Phone calls- If you receive a phone call to make a purchase or inform you about a credit or banking issue, DO NOT ACT. Scammers often try to take you by surprise and if you act without taking a moment to consider if it is legit, it’s probably not. Always go directly to your bank or credit card company to handle your accounts. The phone number is always printed on the back of the card.
• Payments- When you do make a payment using a legitimate source make sure the connection you are using is encrypted to protect your information. An encrypted site uses https (note the S) in the address of their site and the padlock is closed.
• Be wary of any advertising via email. Unless you specifically signed up or expect to receive the marketing material or correspondence from a website, you should never trust anything you receive via email. Often times poor grammar is a tell-tale sign of a scam.

To learn more about this scam read the full article on bbb.org.

There are two methodologies in the world of security. Those who anticipate and prepare, and those who react after the fact. It’s becoming less and less desirable to be the “reactor”. Proper planning and the right security policies and procedures could be the difference between safety and total destruction of data. Lately, here’s why.

We recently have become aware of a new variant on a classic ransome-ware virus. You may recall a similar one, the FBI has locked your computer (it’s not the FBI) and in order to regain access, you need to wire-transfer money at CVS or Walgreens? That infection was simple to remove and no money had to transfer hands. However, hackers seem to be getting desperate to get paid. A new encryption virus has been released that is much, much more dangerous – to the point where the virus is guaranteed to win!

…unless you can avoid it in the first place.

This ransome-ware virus silently installs on your computer and gradually encrypts files. You don’t even know it’s there. Then after a period of time, puts a notification on your screen that says if you want your files, you have to pay. Here’s the kicker though, not only do the hackers lock up your files, the virus will also get into network drives and lock up those files too! So it’s not just the data on your computer that’s at risk, your entire home or business network is at risk.

The virus currently uses 2048 bit strong encryption. In simple terms, think of it as a two thousand forty eight character password that’s completely random. Unless you protect yourself and keep that virus from getting into your network in the first place, all your important accounting, customer records, contracts, design data, photos, videos, databases, everything… could be gone in a flash. “But encryption can be broken?” You ask, “People say they can break cyphers given enough time and resources.” Yes, this is true, but unless you want to invest the time and money into hacking into it, once you’ve been compromised, you might be better off accepting your losses because breaking in can take months or years to complete, it’s gotten to the point where it might not happen in our lifetimes. Oh and if you’re thinking of paying those people, please, PLEASE, DON’T! It will only support and encourage them to break in more and more. You would provide them with the resources to become even more destructive.

Encryption works almost perfectly. It is extremely difficult to decrypt anything that gets encrypted with very long, very strong keys. How can you protect yourself? Here are 10 principles that increase your ability to protect yourself before an incident occurrs. Read More »

Lately we’ve been seeing new variants on a serious malware infection. Once your computer is compromised, it runs constantly in the background eating up system resources. It will make your computer completely unusable. We’re also finding that there are several variations of this virus where a single tool to remove it doesn’t do the trick every time and only a variety of scanners used together can completely eliminate the threat and keep it from re-installing itself.

One of the symptoms of this virus can be found in the task manager. If you open it up and view running processes on your computer, you may find many many copies of the same program eating away at your system. The infection is designed to load as many web pages “behind-the-scenes” and click on internet advertisements, thus generating revenue for the hackers that infiltrated your system.

If you’re experiencing serious slow computing and would like us to check and clean your system, please contact us as soon as possible and stop the flow of money into the wrong people’s pockets and regain the full computing speed your system can offer.