It’s a question that I’m asked regularly and it’s not an easy one to answer. In order to give an unbiased opinion as to which one I would recommend, we need to firstly determine what you mean by “best”. You see, for some people best means ‘cheapest’, for others best means ‘easiest to use’ but for most, I suspect, best means ‘the most efficient at protecting against viruses’. Read this entire article »
If you have a business here on the Costa’s then you should already know about the power of Facebook, especially if you market to the ex-pat market here as most brits here on the Costa Blanca are very familiar with Facebook, they use it for everything from finding local businesses, rating the service that they have received to catching up with friends and family here and back “home” in the UK.
I would go as far as to say that retired people here in Spain are much more “teched up” and familiar with how technology and Facebook work than their peers back home; of course this ability, I think, comes from the need to use technology to keep in touch that wouldn’t be necessary back in the UK. Whatever the reason, if you’re a business owner then you should know that your core customers use social media. Read this entire article »
We are seeing an increase in this type of computer compromise, so this month I thought that we should spend some time looking at ways in which you can protect yourself from this new and worrying form of virus.
Ok, so first let’s define what we are talking about – ransomware is a type of virus that will encrypt your files (documents, emails, pictures etc.) and then ransom you usually 100’s of euros to get them back. There is no reliable way to get your data back directly once it has been encrypted without paying the ransom. Paying up has two downsides, firstly you’re losing money and secondly in some cases you are handing over your credit card details to criminals. Read this entire article »
Well it’s warming up! It is always tricky to write about the weather 2-3 weeks before you read my article so I hope that its not pouring down when you read this. It’s mid April at time of writing and and the days seem to be getting warmer and warmer, ramping up to what hopefully will be a lovely summer.
Summer is traditionally a quiet time of year for BlueMoon Solutions; as many of our customers either go back to the less stifling weather of the UK or just sit in the sea or pool cooling off. Quite understandably, it seems a bad time of year to be sitting inside using technology when you can be outside enjoying the long warm sunny days with family and friends – let’s face it, that’s why many of us moved to the Costa Blanca in the first place. Read this entire article »
Wow, what a year! It doesn’t seem two minutes ago that we were complaining about how hot it was – now we have the log burners on and are sitting shivering under the blankets at night! This month, given its a New Year I thought it might be nice to review what we covered last year in our monthly articles. Read this entire article »
I was recently asked to give a talk to the association of retired police officers (ARPO) about Internet security i.e. Anti Virus and all that sort of stuff – they must have been stuck for someone interesting to talk to them so in a fit of panic asked me to!
Anyway, in doing research for the talk I came across a very interesting fact – AVG is no longer the best free antivirus out there – and I thought you should know about it.
I regularly review statistics on anti-virus products in an attempt to keep up with current trends and to offer my customers the best advice that I can. Every time that I have checked over at least the past 8 years, either AVG or Avast have been the best free antivirus products with Kasperskey usually topping the list of products that you have to pay for. Well this month to my suprise there is a new guy that has knocked AVG and Avast from the top free positions – its name is Panda antivirus. Read this entire article »
A reader in the UK forwarded me an article from the BBC this week – it relates to the Crypto Locker virus that we have dicsussed a few times before.
It seems that some security experts have managed, by luck really, to gain access to the encryption key used to encrypt unfortunate victims data, enabling them to use this information to help other victims decrypt their own data!
If you are unfortunate enough to have been affected by the Crypto virus and still have your encrypted data, you can visit the portal at www.decryptcryptolocker.com and use the information there to gain access to your data again. The portal asks for your email address and one of the encrypted files. It then uses the information found by the security team to generate a recovery program (an antidote) that will repair all of your infected files – great stuff! Read this entire article »
Back in December last year we looked at a new virus called Crypto Locker. This virus is classed as ‘ransomware’ and not only locks you out of your computer, demanding money to let you access again, but also encrypts all of your important data so even asking/paying a computer tech to clear the virus won’t give you your data back! This virus, along with another called GOZeuS have been in the news recently. Read this entire article »
Ok, so unless you have been living under a rock for the last few weeks, you will have heard about this bug (also referred to as SSL or secure certificates). A bug is a mistake in the programming code that has been around for over 2 years. This is the first thing that you should be aware of. The problem has already been around for over 2 years, so although it’s now receiving a lot of publicity, the chances are that if it was going to affect you then it would have already done so. Read this entire article »
On the 8th April this year Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP (and Office 2003) – that is, if you read the popular press and believe everything that the “guy down the pub that knows computers” says then your whole computing world will end. Famine will sweep across your hard drive, a plague of locusts may well emerge from your CD ROM drive and every single hacker in the whole world will go to town on your bank account details. Or will they? Read this entire article »