tinsleyNET IT Services Consultant

Malware attack infects PC's globally You have probably heard on the news that millions of computers around the world have been infected with a piece of ransomware, have you checked if your home and business PC's are protected?

Is your home router living a secret double life as a botnet DDoS server? The number of private home routers being duped into living a secret life as part of a botnet or in serving up malicious DNS results to it's users has seen a surge in the latter half of 2016. It's thought that the majority of traffic in the DDoS attack on various gaming servers in Christmas 2015 was generated from home routers that had been compromised.

Safer Internet Day We're supporting the Safer Internet Day again this year, giving tips throughout the day on how to use help make the internet more safe. Follow our posts on popular social media sites, by searching for the #SID2016 and #ShareAHeart hashtags, or find out more about the Safer Internet Day on their website http://www.saferinternet.org.uk/ From the SID Checklists, here's some tips on using Twitter: What Is Twitter? Twitter started life in 2006 primarily based around SMS text messaging as a way to post status updates to friends. It quickly got noticed and boomed into the Twitter that we see today, with most tweeters using mobile apps or the twitter website to access the service. Twitter is limited to 140 characters per tweet, it's a lot like going back to the early day's of mobile phones when sms/text messaging was first used. The debate on the effect this has on the languages is ongoing, but it does mean that each and every tweet is short...

Cybercrime is becoming big business  The total number of individuals in the UK who have been the target of cybercrime leapt in 2015, with nearly 44% of consumers in the UK who have now reported cybercrime. 2015 was responsible for 22% of those, with the average cost to the user at £1300. Of those who reported cybercrime, shockingly nearly half said they had not taken additional precautions while on the internet, such as changing passwords.

Facebook knows too much... Well, if you're a facebook user. Chances are you have filled your facebook with small snippets of personal information, put together it could be used to build a personal profile that might reveal more than you expect. So here's our guide to getting to grips with Facebook

Windows 10 NAS file access is very slow If you have been finding reading and writing files to and from a NAS from Windows 10 is painfully slow, you could try this tip that fixed the problem on a clients computer recently;

Windows Library Folders Despite being much less prominent in Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, the Windows Library files, first introduced in Windows 7, can actually be quite a useful way of collecting together various folders under a common heading. What has been missing all along in Libraries is the ability to add a non-indexed network share.

Broadband for all David Cameron has pledged that all UK homes and businesses will have access to fast broadband by 2020 backed by a Universal Service Obligation, giving the public the right to request an affordable, fast connection, making internet access a guaranteed service like water and electricity.

The telephone provider Talk Talk has become the victim of a criminal cyber-attack. While Talk Talk are still assessing what data was accessed during the attack, there are a number of steps you can take if you are a Talk Talk customer.

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.

Problems with the Samsung SNS service or Single Sign On The SNS (Social Network Service) on Samsung devices is used to bring you updates from various social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, typically via the notifications or integrated into the contacts or calendar apps.

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.

SSD's are slowly but surely replacing their mechanical counterparts, the HDD, in modern computers, they offer more storage per square-inch and can read/write data to and from memory significantly faster than the spindle and articulator arm of a standard HDD, and of course, they are not prone to shock and data head crashes. So all good? well, yes... but.... SSD's are essentially a block of electrical gates used to represent the binary of your data, and those electrical gates can loose their charge if they are not regularly refreshed. this process is speeded up the warmer the drive is, so if you copy your backup onto a SSD then store it away in a cupboard, it could be that in 3 months time when you come to recover a file from the drive, that there's been sufficient loss of charge that the data is irrecoverable.

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.

Twitter users are going to start seeing a new 'check-in' feature in their geo-tagged tweets soon, provided by Foursquare, one of the first geo-check-in providers. The new partnership will mean twitter users can see reviews and tips for places they check in to, and gives businesses a chance to advertise specials and offers to passing potential clients who use the foursquare what's nearby feature.

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.

Do the FREAK It seams like only yesterday we were all being told about the Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL, and how to avoid affected sites until they had been fixed, then there was the Shellshock or Bashdoor vulnerability that meant the servers running your favourite websites were being broken into, you may even have heard of the Poodle attack that could allow an attacker to break into your SSL 3 connection, and now Freak, exploring another SSL vulnerability, albeit one that this time was practically imposed on you

"The Cloud" So what is this cloud thing that everyone is talking about, where did it come from and what do I need to know about it? The Cloud will often be described in different ways by different people. Sometimes their definition might contradict, sometimes they will be talking about different situations or services. The confusion is because 'The Cloud' is not a thing, it's a collection of things that work mostly seamlessly in the background allowing you to share information across different devices without having to worry too much about how you're going to get your information from point A to point B. The cloud was used to represent the internet in computer network diagrams, though originally nothing was kept in the cloud, it was just a means of transferring data from servers to users.

Windows Server 2008 x64 : Getting a x86 Print Driver to work when it won't! Just had 'one of those days' when even the simplest of life's hiccoughs takes an age to resolve, but here is the resolution to just one of the niggles I was faced with, the x64 Print Server on Microsoft Windows Server 2008