I am sure by now you have received the little notification to upgrade to Windows 10, either on the bottom right corner of your taskbar or a big pop up on your screen to download it now. The question you might ask yourself is “Do I need to upgrade?”  The answer to that will differ per person and how comfortable they will be with using the new operating system.

Here are a couple of questions that you should ask yourself before going to Windows 10:
Does my hardware of my computer meet the requirements to run windows 10?
Will my older programs work for it?
Will all my files work for the new operating system?
 

There has been many already who made the transition over to the Windows 10 and had some issues they came across when doing so. Some older programs didn’t work, files open up with different programs than its original, certain drivers of the system were not compatible and needed to upgrade. Some are minor issues, but most can be avoided if a little research is done before changing over.

Windows 10 is not a bad operating system. You just need to be prepared before any changes happen. Making a back-up of your files before doing the update would be the best thing you can do if you decide to move forward. The free update to windows 10 will end on July 29th. If you need any assistance or just have questions about the process feel free to contact us and we will gladly answer your questions.

On Sunday May 19^th 2013 I received a call about 10:00am that our office was flooded. It was determined that a water supply line in another unit broke free and was running the entire weekend.  All of our computers and servers and phone system were unaffected by this disaster because all of the equipment was off the floor.

Upon arriving at our office we discovered that the carpet was soaked and there were puddles of water emerging as we walked on the carpet.  The landlord called a plumber who immediately fixed the problem then drained out the water from our unit with their equipment.  Then a water restoration specialist was called in to do remediation.  The carpet and padding was torn out and holes drilled in the walls to prevent mold from forming.

After this was completed they brought in 8 commercial blowers and 1 dehumidifier to dry out our offices.  With all this equipment running it made it impossible to run our business from the office.  Also as a result of all this equipment running day and night we had electrical circuits blowing in the middle of the night several times which caused our systems to go on standby power and notify us of a power outage and put our system on batteries.

This process went on for 2 weeks but, luckily, with our business being in “the cloud” we were able to continue our business operation from outside the office.  Our technicians received their jobs through the internet and processed payments in the field.  They communicated through phone texts and emails for office follow up.

Unfortunately other businesses in our office complex were not so lucky.  One business had 3 computers on the floor and an UPS (Uninterruptible Power Source) on the floor.  Two of the computers had water in them and were able to dry them out and get them running again.  Two of the UPS power backups had to be replaced entirely.  The Network Server was up on a table so they were able to continue their operation after a few days.

Are you prepared in the event of a disaster such as this?

Weddings, no doubt, are always special. It is celebrated in more ways than one, depending on the culture, country, religious affiliation and tradition a couple belongs or wish to adhere to. However it is practiced, one thing is certain: the preparations and plannings behind it have been grueling, stressful and time consuming.

Thanks to technology and human ingenuity, wedding preparation is more manageable and a lot quicker to pull off than before. For one thing, there are services available online that cater to the soon-to-be-wedded who opt for the modern way of sending out wedding invitations in the form of e-cards.

Our researchers in the AV Labs captured a malicious spam appearing to be a wedding invitation purportedly from White Wedding Agency, a business entity in Prague:

Malicious wedding invitation spam                                                               click to enlarge

From: {random email address}
Subject/s:

Wedding Invite
Wedding Invitation

Message body:
You are Cordially Invited to Celebrate

the Our Wedding

On Tuesday March the 29 at Four O’clock

Followed by a Reception

Get Full Invitation Text

Clicking the link at the bottom of the message downloads a ZIP-compressed file. The file looks like this once decompressed:

Postal-Receipt.exe                                                                                               click to enlarge

Notice that the file uses an icon that mimics the look of a Microsoft Word document file, an attempt to mask its true file type (which is an executable). As we have seen before, this method is most effective especially if the user did not set the option to view file extensions by default.

We also found out that the malicious file is hosted on legitimate but compromised websites. It has the following URL format:

{compromised domain}/components/.{random alphanumeric characters}.php?receipt=ss00_323

Below are the determinations of the malware as per our ThreatAnalyzer results:

Malware Determinations for “Postal-Receipt.exe”                              click to enlarge

If users execute the file, it drops and opens the text file, Postal-Receipt.txt, as a way to distract users from noticing activities being done by the malware in the background. Below is a screenshot of the said file:

Profile-Receipt.txt             click to enlarge

Apple has long touted security of its Mac operating system, contrasting it with what it portrays as security-hole-ridden Windows. Now Apple is finally admitting that Macs can get viruses, too…well, it doesn’t go quite that far, but almost admits it.

Apple has changed the marketing on its Web site touting the Mac’s virus invulnerability. Before the change, Apple boasted in part:

It doesn’t get PC viruses.
A Mac isn’t susceptible to the thousands of viruses plaguing Windows-based computers. That’s thanks to built-in defenses in Mac OS X that keep you safe, without any work on your part.

The text now reads:

It’s built to be safe.

Built-in defenses in OS X keep you safe from unknowingly downloading malicious software on your Mac.

That marketing change may not strike you as substantial, but coming from Apple, it’s a big deal. Apple has long denied any security problems with the Mac, detailed evidence to the contrary. The Flashback trojan attack shows that the Mac is vulnerable, even though Apple doesn’t like to admit it. And Eugene Kaspersky of the Kaspersky security company says that Apple is ten years behind Microsoft when it comes to security. Apple doesn’t take malware attacks seriously, he says, which will “mean disaster for Apple.”

Does the change in marketing mean that Apple is starting to take security more seriously? It’s too soon to tell. But clearly the company recognizes that it’s got to own up to at least some security vulnerabilities, and that’s a first step.