The Weekly Geek

Windows Intune is a “cloud” and PC based product that includes Windows 7 Enterprise for your computers and cloud based management of those computers. The idea is fairly simple and honestly a good one. You get Windows 7 for any PC you have (even though most if not all PC’s already come with an operating system installed) and you have the ability to “manage” those computers from any location via the cloud (the internet for those of us not into “the word of the year”) all this and security software too, this works out to a decent deal overall.

If you “purchase” Intune for $11 per month per computer (when I refer to a computer I mean a desktop PC, laptop or netbook system) you can upgrade that system to Windows 7 Enterprise Edition if you have XP, Vista or another version of 7 already installed. A promoted benefit is the ability to upgrade to Windows 7 using existing hardware. This of course is a VERY bad idea, Windows 7 is designed to run on hardware that is 18 months or less old, Core 2 Duo type processors, 4 GB of RAM. These technologies were not readily available in XP and many Vista computers. Of course, if you are purchasing new computers from someone that will provide them with no operating system (OS) then you don’t have that worry and should save a few bucks on the systems too. [Read more →]

Over the years Microsoft and others have offered cloud based services, software, data and security that is located on a server somewhere “out there”. In theory you don’t have to worry about updates, security patches and backing up. Such offers include Google Doc’s and Gmail as well as what we are going over here, Microsoft Office 365. In actuality, information gets lost. Not to pass the blame but Google lost over 500,000 peoples data (phone / voice, email, contacts and documents) in May of this year, it happens.

I have been using Google Docs, voice and Gmail for a number of years now and have recently been using Microsoft’s Office 365. Both have benefits and both have downfalls, in this article I wish to cover what I consider the pitfalls of Office 365. [Read more →]

In Windows 7 and Vista, if you use Internet Explorer 8 or 9, it is not uncommon to visit a web page, especially one that has “secure” info such as a bank or shopping site, and get a pop up in the middle of your screen stating “This page contains both secure and non secure items. Do you want to display the non secure items” if you click “No” then part of the page / web site will not display correctly. [Read more →]

Recently one of our customers had a break in and all the laptops stolen, about 10 days later, the crooks returned and did the same thing. Within two weeks the local news had a story about the number of break-ins in this little town. [Read more →]

Here we go again, the Fake AV criminals have come up with a new attack, the SonicWALL research team has received reports of a mass SQL injection infecting millions of websites. It is likely that the back-end databases of these websites were compromised leading to this SQL injection.

Malicious script codes were inserted and being served in webpages which when triggered redirects to malicious links that serves FakeAV malware. [Read more →]