tinsleyNET IT Services Consultant

Scam emails pretending to be from the Government Gateway are being set out again. While some scam emails are still offering larger bodily parts and, ahm, performance enhancing substances, they are easy to spot by both humans and computers. Some scammers have taken things up a notch in the past year or so, creating plausible and relevant scam emails that could catch the unwary. One such email currently being distributed is pretending to be from the Government Gateway, part of the UK's e-Government service for various business and tax electronic form submissions.

Is your internet feeling a bit on the slow side? There are many reasons why your internet may not be trundling along as fast as you are expecting, from poor broadband supply to malware and viruses.

Users of Microsoft Windows 7 & 8 will start to notice a new icon in their system tray with the slanted Windows logo informing them of the opportunity to upgrade to Windows 10. No, it's not a virus or malware, it's a genuine offer from Microsoft. Anyone currently using a genuine Windows 7 (with SP1) or 8.1 PC or on Windows Phone 8.1 will have the opportunity to upgrade, for free, to Windows 10 when it is released in July this year.

Several new exploits have been identified recently that are designed to attach your home or business router from inside, and install code to allow hackers a backdoor to your network and your data. The exploits are designed to get into a network either by infecting devices that go outside of your firewall, such as mobiles, tablets and laptops, or by tricking the user into downloading a malicious file. Once inside the network, the malware gets to work on your firewall, attempting to inject code into the firewall that will allow external code to be added to innocent web pages. So you might be viewing the BBC site for example, and the code adds advertising and other unwanted scripts to the page as it passes through your firewall, meaning the page you see if very different from the one served up by the BBC servers.

Having lived and worked in Shropshire for most of my life, I am fully aware of the issues of rural connectivity. But that's changing as part of the the governments Broadband Delivery UK which aims to have 90% of the UK connected to superfast broadband by next year, and basic broadband access for everyone.