Superior Technology Services

03/16/2014

Beware of cold calls.

Someone that I know was almost recently a victim of this. Beware of anyone that calls you unexpectedly saying that they are with any particular institution, and want either sensitive information or money. In this particular situation, the person calling ultimately wanted money.

The scam is that they call and say that they are from Microsoft, and it has come to their attention that your computer is infected with a virus and/or is sending out spam mail. The first thing glaringly wrong with this is that Microsoft wouldn't call you for something like this. It is possible that your Internet Service Provider (ISP) may call you for something like this, but Microsoft wouldn't.

Anyway, they have you pull up some stuff on your computer, and although the stuff that you pull up is normal stuff, they spin it in such a way that they want you to believe it is a virus, and you can pay them a subscription fee to clean this and any future problems for a fee. This is ALL a hoax

Be careful when you receive calls of any kind asking for sensitive information and/or money.

There are numerous examples of this scam out there, but I chose one to link to this. In the particular example of the scam linked below, the "technician" that accessed the computer was actually accessing a virtual computer, and not a real computer, but the people on the other end didn't know that. When the call recipient input fake information into Paypal to pay them, they got vicious and vindictive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a_edowfgl8

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeromesegura 1) Female tries to social engineer me by showing what she first calls errors and then spyware, viruses...

01/31/2014

This post is about social media. PLEASE take responsibility, and don't just blindly post/share/retweet things that you see in e-mail, on Facebook, or on Twitter. There is so much out of date, or just down right false information out there, and it is terrible. How can you be more responsible with your posts???

Well, for posts that are urban legend type posts (the magic of Coke, waking up in a tub full of ice, etc.), one of the best resources out there is www.snopes.com. Put in a few keywords for the urban legend that you are researching, and you will get results. The better (and more unique) keywords that you use, the better the results will be.

For things like missing kids, etc. Do a search on google news (www.google.com/news). This will search a bunch of media outlets, and will often verify if the child is still missing, or if it is even real to begin with. Of course if someone has been missing for a very short time, it may be hard to verify, but at least try to research it.

It is easy to just forward an e-mail to all of your friends, share a Facebook status, or retweet something on Twitter, but if we all take a little bit of responsibility to validate the information that we disseminate, it will allow us to keep the invalid stuff out of the way for the VALID and IMPORTANT information.

Please share this page with your friends for more computing hints and tips! :)

01/24/2014

I haven't forgot about you guys, just have had some "writers block" and have been trying to think of a good topic. If you have anything you would like to see an article about, please let me know!!

Also, please share this page with your friends!

10/20/2013

When you buy a retail computer (Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.), typically you will find that there is a way to restore your machine to the way it was the day you got it. This is a very useful tool. There is one aspect of this tool that people usually do not think about. Consider the following scenario.

You have 1 hard drive on your system which contains all of your data (Windows, documents, pictures, etc.). That same hard drive also contains the data to restore your machine to "factory settings". The problem is that if your hard drive physically breaks (crashes), you lose the ability to restore your computer to the factory settings. The only way to restore your computer in that scenario is to purchase a set of "restoration CDs" from the manufacturer which typically cost anywhere in the $20.00-$40.00 range.

There is something that you can do to prevent that charge in the unlikely event that your hard drive crashes.

All of the recovery programs that I have experience with, offer the ability to burn a set of recovery CDs right from the program. This will allow you to burn a set of CDs that contain the "factory settings" image, so that if your hard drive has to be replaced, you can recover your NEW hard drive to factory settings.

* WORD OF WARNING - Only use recovery CDs for the PC that they were created for. Most of them have safeguards in place so that they cannot be used on different PCs, but it is better to be safe than sorry.

09/20/2013

Thanks to everyone following this page. Please share this page with others. Every so often we will be posting computer tips and tricks. The first tip is about backup.

So often people don't backup their important documents and pictures. If you are one of those that do backup your important documents - That is great, BUT do you have an offsite backup? If your house should suffer from a catastrophic event (flood, fire, etc.) your locally stored backup could also be destroyed. Fire safes typically have a fire rating, and will only survive so long in a fire.

There are a couple of ways to do an off-site backup. You could create an additional backup, and store it at the house of a family member, or a safe deposit box. This type of backup would be done less frequently than your normal backup, but not so infrequent that you have too much unprotected data.

Another way is with a cloud backup service, where your data is backed up over the Internet. Depending on how much data that you have (and your internet connection), this could take a while to initially backup, but the subsequent backups would be quicker. These services are relatively inexpensive these days, and are reliable.