Sudbury Computer Repair Blog

To keep your business  running smoothly, you need computer and network security. It is important to maintain your network and systems, making sure they are virus and malware free,  current with security patches, and running at optimal performance.

Ransomware is a type of malware that prevents you from using your computer or accessing your data until you pay a certain amount or "ransom" to a remote entity. There are two types of ransomware:

• Lockscreen ransomware, which displays a full-screen image or webpage that prevents you from accessing anything in your computer, and
• Encryption ransomware, which encrypts your files with a password, preventing you from opening them

Most ransomware displays a notification, saying that the ‘authorities in your location have detected illegal activity in your computer’. To avoid prosecution, and regain access to your files, ransomware demand payment from you in the form of a "fine".

Paying the "fine" does not necessarily return your computer to a usable state. We do not advise that you pay. With ransomware, the threat of prosecution does not come from the legitimate authorities.

FAQ’s about ransomware

Q: Is it true that the legal authorities in my area have detected illegal activities in my computer?

A: No. These warnings are fake and have no association whatsoever with the legitimate authorities. The operators of ransomware abuse the tone, images and logos of legal institutions to give their scam an air of legitimacy.

Q: I cannot access my computer or my files. Should I just go ahead and pay these people to regain access?

A: No. Do not pay, regardless of how legitimate or threatening the claims look. You will only end up giving money to criminals, who have no intention of giving you back access to your computer or files.

Q: What should I do if I've paid the scammers?

A: In all cases, you should contact your financial institution and your local authorities. If you paid with a credit card, your financial institution may be able to block the transaction and return the money to you.

Q: How did the scammers know my IP address?

A: There are publicly available tools online that can check a computer's IP address. Getting IP addresses is common behavior for malware - in the case of ransomware, it is used as another scare tactic.

Q: How did ransomware get on my computer?

A: Ransomware, like other malware, can arrive in a variety of ways. However, in most instances, it is downloaded automatically into your computer when you visit a malicious website or a website that's been compromised.

Q: How do I regain access to my computer or files?

A: Do not pay the fine. Ransomware have varying behavior and will have to be removed in different ways. Refer to How to remove a ransomware infection for steps on how to remove ransomware.

For computer system security, contact Sudbury Computer.

Excerpts - microsoft

It is important that Boston area company's computer system security is up-to-date. Your business computer system should be regularly and/or continuously monitored to make sure that you are up to date with the latest security, compliance, and disaster recovery standards.

Microsoft has long benefited from the bug bounty programs of other vendors. But it now has its own new programs to compensate researchers who spend their days hunting down fresh security flaws in Microsoft products. Microsoft is offering cash bounties to boost the "win-win" between Microsoft customers and security researchers.

Microsoft has reversed its longstanding ban on paying hackers for information about freshly discovered security holes and instead is now offering rich bounties for notice of new Windows bugs.

Microsoft has benefited from the bug bounty programs of Google and Mozilla. But it is now offering three new programs to encourage and compensate so-called gray hat and white hat researchers who spend their days hunting down fresh security flaws in Microsoft products.

Hackers can now claim bounties of up to $100,000, depending on the type of bug discovered. For instance, Microsoft will pay $11,000 hard cash for any bugs found in its upcoming Internet Explorer 11 browser software.

"Microsoft entering the game is a big changer because they are a large traditional software vendor," says Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer at application security vendor Veracode.  

Microsoft has come full circle in the hacking community's fractious "full disclosure" debate. Black hat, white hat and gray hat hackers have been relentlessly exposing new Windows bugs since the 1990s.

White hats argue that the intense scrutiny compels software vendors, like Microsoft, to take security more seriously and patch security flaws with more alacrity. Black hats hunt for bugs, too, but with criminal intent. Gray hats sometimes contribute to the cause of good, and at other times behave more like black hats.

Each newly disclosed Windows bug sets off a race to get the new vulnerability patched across the massive breadth of Windows PCs, laptops and servers -- before they can be taken advantage of.

That phenomenon now happens at such a frenzied scale that Microsoft has taken to issuing security patches on the first Tuesday of each month to maintain a semblance of order.

Bug bounty programs have been around for awhile in order to encourage gray hats and white hats to work with vendors to fix problems instead of disclosing new bugs without vendor coordination.

Bounties help "massively.” Cash is best when it comes to demonstrating that software companies who tend to rush products to market actually value the gray hat and white hat researchers who, essentially, perform a critical quality control function.

Now Microsoft is finally acknowledging gray hats and white hats -- with its check book. "The value comes from the business actually understanding the importance of security, and the downstream impacts and ramifications to their business and customers," Ford says.

Mike Reavey, director of Microsoft's Security Response Center, tells CyberTruth that in the past researchers willingly reported a vast majority of bugs directly to Redmond "so there wasn't a need to offer a bounty program."

Do you think you have a bug in your computer system? You may not be able to get cash for it, but contact Sudbury Computer to get rid of it and to help make your system more secure.

Sci-TechToday.com

Workers today can feel at times as if they are playing a video game, battling the barrage of e-mails and instant messages, juggling documents, Web sites and online calendars. To cope, people have become swift with the mouse, toggling among dozens of overlapping windows on a single monitor.

But there is a growing new tactic for countering the data assault: the addition of a second computer screen. Or a third.
 
Multiple computer monitors is the latest workplace upgrade, and it is responsible for the new look at companies and home offices — they are starting to resemble mission control.

For multiscreen multi-taskers, a single monitor can seem as outdated as dial-up Internet. “You go back to one, and you feel slow,” said Jackie Cohen, 42, who uses three 17-inch monitors in her home office in San Francisco, where she edits a blog about Facebook.

The center screen shows what your writing or editing, along with e-mail and instant messages; the left and right monitors display news sites, blogs and Twitter feeds, and you can keep 3 to 10 tabs open on each.

Certainly more people are trying. Tech firms sold 179 million monitors worldwide last year and only 130 million desktop computers — meaning “more screens per desk. Monitors are bigger, too. The average monitor sold worldwide is 21 inches, up from 18 inches five years ago, according to iSuppli.

A major supplier of monitors said 30-40% of the employees of its corporate customers now used more than one monitor, up from 1% four years ago.

There are many reasons for the spike in sales: monitors are much cheaper; they are slimmer, too, so desks can accommodate more of them; and there are more communication tools — instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook — that workers have to keep an eye on.

Companies will pitch it” to job candidates. They know real estate is important. It shows they are serious about their engineers. And the engineers do care about the screens

The main rationale for a multimonitor setup is that it increases productivity. But that notion is not simple to prove or measure, partly because it depends on the kind of work people do and whether they really need to be constantly looking at multiple data streams. Another theory holds that people have just grown so addicted to juggling that having more monitors simply creates a compulsion to check them.

One study, by the University of Utah, found that productivity among people working on editing tasks was higher with two monitors than with one.

The author of the study said he uses three monitors himself, but also said that it was hard to generalize about whether more monitors are better.

At the very least, more monitors cut down on toggling time among windows on a single screen, which can save about 10 seconds for every five minutes of work. If you have more than one monitor, “You don’t have to toggle back and forth. You can take in everything with the sweep of an eye.”

David E. Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan whose research has found that multitasking can take a serious toll on productivity, said he buys the logic about toggling.

For assistance in setting up extra monitors, contact Sudbury Computer.

NY Times

Your email has been hacked. An E-mail worm is an infection that uses your system to send out mass mailings.  It will generally grab your address book and send an email to everyone you know. They expect that your colleagues will open mail if it comes from you.

The new generation of E-mail worms are getting trickier and using address spoofing to help hide the worm.  When a system gets infected, the worm sends out an infected E-mail to everyone in the address book.  The difference is that it uses a random address in the address book as the from address.  This makes it look like the infected mail came from someone totally different that may have a clean system.  This person generally gets blamed by everyone for sending out the infected E-mail when they actually had nothing to do with it thus making it more difficult to track down the actual infected system.

If you are accused of-, or think you may have an infected computer system, take these steps.

1. Run a virus scanner and a malware scanner to make sure that your system is actually clean.
2. Look at the headers of the E-mail to see where it actually originated from as this can help convince people that you are not the one who is infected.  Here is a good site to help you interpret E-mail headers.  http://www.mxtoolbox.com/emailheaders.aspx
3. Send a link to this article to your accuser so they can better understand how Worms and Spoofing work.

For more information or assistance, contact Sudbury Computer.

You will want to have reliable email security in place to protect your business network. If you are hosting email in house, you have a few options.  Use software on your mail server, use a device on your network to scan your mail before it hits your mail server or use a cloud based solution.

Using software on your mail server can be effective but it puts a lot of extra stress on your mail server as well as your network.  It also is not the best idea to allow infected mail to hit your mail server before dealing with it, although there are several decent products on the market that handle this fairly well.  This can be a fairly inexpensive solution up front with reasonable ongoing support/maintenance costs.

Using a hardware filtering appliance is a nicer solution although the upfront costs may be prohibitive.  You will also have ongoing support/maintenance costs with this solution.  The hardware appliance will scan all of the mail after it arrives on your network and will only hand it off to the mail server once it is certified virus/SPAM free.  One downside is that mail is still coming into your network stressing your routers, switches, etc.

Cloud based solutions check all of your mail on their servers, forwarding to your mail server after mail has been certified clean.  They will block infected email and SPAM before it hits your network keeping the load off of your routers, switches and mail server.  The online solution will prevent you from using extra bandwidth and unnecessary storage.  You will pay a monthly fee per user.  This is the preferred method of Sudbury Computer because with the massive amounts of SPAM coming in these days, this traffic can  be overwhelming to a network.

With any of these email security solutions you will have a method of scanning through blocked mail to see if anything was identified that wasn't SPAM (false positives) and will have the ability to release it.  You will also have the ability to create white lists for people that you always want mail to be allowed from.

For more information on email security options, contact Sudbury Computer.

Too many businesses still have unsecure networks. Fortunately or unfortunately it is easy for a small or medium sized business to have a wireless network. Unfortunately, those same companies may have unsecure wireless networks. In fact, the default settings on your companies Wireless Router usually come with no security. As a result, your wireless network can leave your business open to hackers who can ruin your computer, compromise your system, and steal information.

Did  you know that there are sites like http://wigle.net/ that are dedicated to mapping wireless networks and finding out whether or not they are secure? You can type in a zip code and see a map of all wireless networks in the area.

Hackers use these sites to practice their skills and try to access computers on a wireless network to see what they can steal.  They also use this technique to attack business systems and put viruses and SPAM sending applications on company computers.

It is essential that your company take the necessary steps to secure your wireless network. Why is your wireless network more vulnerable? With a traditionally wired network, a hacker needs physical access to that network. With a wireless network your system works with a radio signal, and it is easy for hackers to access this signal from outside.

When data is being transferred via this radio signal, it can be easily accessed or corrupted. With a hard wired network, the data travels and stays within the wires. A wireless network is an easy and economical way to set up a business network, however, they are not secure. The threat of hackers, viruses and spyware will only grow over time, set up a secure wireless network to keep your computer, data and company safe.

For a secure wireless network, contact Sudbury Computer.

There are certain risks your company must deal with if you host your email network in your physical office on an exchange server. If your office building is physically damaged from fire, leaking pipes or other natural disaster, or if your onsite server is accessed by unauthorized personal your business could suffer serious ramifications. Additionally, your company must upgrade the software and hardware at  your own expense.

If you are worried about the safety and security of your commercial email account, you may want to consider hosting business email on a cloud platform.  When you use cloud-based hosted email many of the problems associated with an onsite server disappear. All of your company’s servers, licenses, and system updates are maintained by the hosting company.  As a result, your system will be far more secure.   

Your company E-mail will be synched across all devices (desktop, laptop, IPad, IPhone, Droid Phone, Blackberry).  This means sent items and subfolders will carry across all devices, and once an email is read or deleted on one device, it will be read or deleted on the others. This makes time and email management much easier, while making your employees more productive.   This synchronization also goes for all calendars and contacts.

Cloud computing allows you to host email and other digital services in another, central location that is accessed via the internet. This eliminates the need for onsite servers.  In fact, many companies now use cloud technology. It is usually cheaper, your company merely pays a monthly hosting fee, it is more scalable; and it is easier to upgrade to the latest technology.

With hosted email in the cloud you will have access to business class webmail synced across all devices.  Also, you will no longer have to worry about E-mail back-ups with a cloud-based system.  Sudbury Computer will perform this task automatically. Contact Sudbury Computer to discuss how hosted cloud mail can benefit your business.

Every business, at some time or another, will suffer from some form of computer hard drive failure.  The biggest threat to your business during a hard drive failure is data loss. There are many causes of data loss, including hard drive failure or malware, but each scenario is unique. If there is no data backup in place it is likely that not all data will be recoverable.

If you have previously backed-up your system or data, you can restore your data from that previously created backup. But, never assume your system backups are running.  System backups need to be monitored constantly. Data loss can put a company in a position where it is unable to conduct business because important data cannot be accessed.  
 
Do not overlook the importance of backups to your business. If system backups are being done regularly, either daily or hourly, your business is safe and protected. Data can be restored from the backup, with minimal loss or downtime. However, establishing a system back up plan for your data is not the end of your responsibilities as a business owner. Be sure you have an offsite copy of those backups – either carried offsite or streamed to online storage.

Sudbury Computer highly recommends that your business devise a system backup plan. You should also review this back up plan regularly.  Unfortunately, sooner or later all systems will face some type of failure which will require data to be restored from your system backup.  Depending on the type of business you own and how your data changes from day to day you need to determine how often to perform computer backups - weekly, daily, or several times per day.

Protect your business; ensure that you have safe and secure system backups that are not being stored on-site. Additionally, be sure those backups are being performed properly so your business will have them when you need them.

If your business has made backups of all the data stored on your computer hard drives, restoring that data in the event of a loss will go much more quickly. For more information, or to create a system backup plan, contact Sudbury Computer.

Introducing the new Sudbury Computer website, welcome to our blog page. Here you will find out about the latest information on IT services for small and medium sized businesses in all industries.  From system monitoring and IT managed services, to IT support and disaster recovery, Sudbury Computer is your outsourced IT service provider.

Sudbury Computer offers the Sudbury, Wayland, Marlborough, and Framingham areas with a solution to IT services and disaster recovery needs. If you have a small to medium sized company, it is much more cost effective to hire an outside IT company rather than a full-time staff.  Sudbury Computer can help you keep your business running. In the unfortunate event that a data disaster occurs, we can get you up and running again, with minimal interruption to business.
 
This blog is a where you can find information on the latest technology, trends, hardware and software. We offer the information and know-how to keep your business running and we are happy to assist you and share with you our extensive IT knowledge.

Please subscribe to our blog, we will be updating it weekly so you can stay up to date on the latest new products and information.

MAC vs. PC - MACs are pricier up front but seem to have less maintenance costs associated with them so you may break even in the long run. Many people buy MACs to they don't have to deal with the Virus issues that plague Windows users. MACs are not more secure than Windows but Windows has the bulk of the market share so the Mal-ware writers target it more. You can buy your MAC right from the Apple store or from Apple.com. I am going to focus on the PC purchase as there are not as many choices on the MAC side and the Apple store techs can help you through that purchase.

Vendor – On the PC side, I prefer to buy directly from Dell. They are aggressive in their pricing and their tech support is less horrible than the others. I prefer buying direct from Dell either by phone or website as opposed to buying from one of the local stores as you have more options to customize your system and will have your warranty directly through dell.

Laptop vs. Desktop - Desktops will have faster processors, larger hard drives, can house more memory, and are more expandable than laptops and generally have a longer lifespan.
The only real reason to go with a laptop is portability.

Operating System – Windows 8 is the latest and greatest from Microsoft. It is a great operating system although you will have a learning curve as the interface is quite different. 64-bit Windows will give you better performance.

Processor - Unless you are gaming or doing heavy video editing, there is no real need to spend money on updating to a faster processor. Any Core 2 Duo or Dual Core processor will suffice.

Memory(RAM) – Windows loves memory. For Windows 7 or 8, I would go with a minimum of 4 GB RAM. Your system will perform better with 6 or 8GB.

Hard Drive - it's usually short money to upgrade to a larger hard drive. Video eats up hard drive space quickly. Photos and Music can if they are high quality. 500GB is usually pretty cheap and sufficient for most. 1 Terabyte is usually reasonably priced. Check what you are currently using and plan for plenty of growth. Solid State Drives are coming down in price. These are faster than standard hard drives if it keeps the system in your price range.

Video – built in video will be sufficient for everyday use. There isn’t a real need to upgrade unless you are doing something special such as video editing, CAD Design or heavy action gaming.

Warranty – I would go with a 3 year onsite warranty. After diagnosing a hardware issue over the phone, they will send a tech to your Home/Office to repair your system. A processor or motherboard failure will pay for the warranty.

Laptop Battery – Go with a 9 cell battery. You will get more hours out of a charge.

Laptop Screen Size - This is personal preference. Larger screens make for a heavier laptop so be careful if you travel frequently. Go to a local store and check out the different sizes to see what you are comfortable with. 15" seems to be acceptable to most in terms of screen size and weight.