Last Saturday a customer called to say she was concerned about an email she had received. I asked her to forward the email to me as I was certain it would be a type of blackmail email scam. Sure enough when I looked at the body of the email I recognised it as a common type of scam.

Here is the body of the email: Read More…

Last week one of my Small & Medium sized Enterprise (SME) customers got hacked. For them, and for me, this is really disappointing and not something anyone wants to have to deal with at any time, let alone in the current difficult situation. I spend a lot of time and effort trying to make all of my customers IT systems as safe and secure as possible but this security breach serves to underline that no IT system can ever be 100% secure.

I’m going to describe what happened so that you may have a better understanding of how these attacks can be carried out. If the knowledge of this attack helps you to improve your own IT security then all the better. Read More…

Today I got a call from a customer who was concerned because he had not received any emails for a couple of days. He had found an email in his junk folder that he thought might be connected to the sudden lack of emails. The email had been marked as spam but it did say that his email account had been blocked so he naturally assumed that the two things could be linked.

He decided to get in touch with me and I’m glad he did as I was sure the two things were not linked. I asked him to forward the spam email to me so I could take a look at it. I was absolutely convinced it would be a scam and as soon as it arrived I knew I was right. Read More…

Not very long ago I decided that it would be really useful to have the RealVNC Instant Support service so I could easily, simply and quickly access a users computer to remotely control it and solve problems without having to visit the machine.

I’ve long used VNC and then the RealVNC server and viewer software to provide support to some of my business customers and it has always worked really well. Adding Instant Support would give me another string to my bow and let me provide better support to more of my customer base.

Today, with all the remote working going on, I got what should have been an easy problem to solve on a computer being used by a home worker. All I would need to do is to access an Apple computer, put a couple of settings in and the problem would be fixed. A perfect job for me and my RealVNC Instant Support service. Or so it seemed. Read More…