On of my clients was hacked the other day – well, when I say ‘Hacked’ I mean that they had someone go onto their PC without authorisation.

In fact they were not hacked as such, but their old IT guys had left a HUGE security hole in their system for ‘convenience’ – NEVER a good idea! What a stupid thing to do!!
This was then exploited (as you might expect), and some stuff was ordered via their online accounts (Amazon etc…).

Once the person was into the network they garnered more information from the connected PCs and tried to order stuff with the accounts that were on other PCs.

Fortunately the clients mum called her to ask about an email that popped up (at 04:00 in the morning!) and the client caught the person dialled in to the PC and dumped the connection – she then managed to check the history of the intruder and contact the people that things were ordered from.

It’s looking like she was spectacularly lucky!! The people who were contacted have stopped the orders and things are looking like going back to normal – with the exception of come cancelled cards that is!
This could so easily have been much much worse.

In this case it’s looking lots like some clown connected to the machine and simply used the existing details on the PC to order stuff – its a good thing too – a more savvy intruder would have left all sorts of Trojans and back-doors so he/she could simply walk back in later and do the same again, with the new cards and accounts etc…

Suffice to say the fraud squad are doing their thing…

I’ve done a complete scan and clean up and am as sure as I can be that there is nothing left in the wake – I think the interruption stopped any long term damage happening.

I guess the moral is that you never know just how secure you are – you can only do the best you can, and hope it never happens…

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I had the pleasure of flexing my technical muscles today – with the development of an issue with the Apple iPad2.

Now this is an impressive piece of kit to say the least – the feel alone is of a polished product, and in general it’s a nice experience to use…

…BUT

As is usual with most of the tech from Apple I have had to fix, once there is an issue it’s a right  to fix.

In this case the client had synchronised the email accounts and settings from his Mac to his iPad – a process that should have duplicated the details. In this case the iPad didn’t like the stuff it had duplicated and refused to ‘do’ email.

I came to this after the client had had a 1½ hour support call to Apple!
This was not something I knew before I got there!!
Fear was mounting, as was the pressure after this little gem was dropped into the conversation…

Long story short – I fixed it!
Not only that, there was an issue with the connectivity with the 3G mobile network which I also solved!!

Boy was I impressed with myself..!

 

 

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I have spent most of the last couple of days sorting out some particularly nasty spyware infections.

Quite literally there have been clients queueing to get their machines cleaned of this little bit of nastiness.

It manifests itself as a spyware scanner called ‘System doctor’ and seems to perform a scan of your PC, resulting in many ‘infected’ files – it also changes your desktop wallpaper to a screen saying something about files not being deleted from your PC.

DO NOT BE FOOLED – this is a simple spyware infection and can be removed using freely available tools!

In our case, the clients involved ALL had contracts covering these types of eventualities and the removal procedures cost them nothing more than their machines being inaccessible for an hour or so.

We offer a simple clean-up service for £75 one off fee, a small price to pay for safeguarding your PC/Laptop

This spyware seems to be infecting peoples machines from legitimate websites so make sure you don’t agree to anything trying to run on your PC unless you know what it is.

Here’s the shameless marketing bit:

If you get infected – CALL US!!! 0845 634 0599

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