Sure it’s Australia, but if somebody drops a flash drive in your mailbox or inbox, DON’T plug it in unless you know where it came from.  I can’t help with ransomware.

Australian police warn of ransomware USB drives showing up in mailboxes

HP inkjet printers refuse to accept third-party ink cartridges after stealth firmware update.

HP’s latest trick to boost printer revenue was to distribute a firmware update with a six-month kill switch. The result? A great many printers suddenly stopped supporting third-party ink cartridges without warning last week.

Maybe you’ve heard about Cryptolocker or other types of “ransomware”. Ransomware is a type of malicious software (malware) that infects a computer and restricts access to it until a ransom is paid to unlock it.

Please, do NOT follow unsolicited web links in email. Take regular backups of your data and keep an offline backup. Cryptolocker can infect your internal hard drive, your backup drive, and any drives connected to your network. The only truly safe behavior is to UNPLUG your backup drive so it’s not even connected. Your choice is to either connect your drive when you want to run a backup, or have two drives and switch them regularly. That way, you may only lose your data since the last switch.

Read all about ransomware from the US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team). https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA14-295A

Let’s be careful out there!

Now there’s a headline for you, and perhaps one you shouldn’t ignore this time. Change your passwords! Create a smart password strategy, and don’t use the same password everywhere. Change your email passwords first. If your provider supports two factor authentication, definitely do that. Next change your passwords at banks and credit cards and brokerages, anyplace that handles your money.

Take a look at the article from Money magazine, then get to work changing your passwords.
http://time.com/money/3086151/russian-password-hackers-heres-what-to-do-now/

Let’s be careful out there!

When you click “Erase everything” on the phone, all your data is safely erased, right? Well, no. Neil J. Rubenking takes us through the details of getting your old Android phone well and truly wiped before you pass it on.

http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/security-software/325313-by-selling-your-smartphone-you-re-selling-yourself

Ransomware, a particularly annoying breed of computer virus, is spreading like the plague. This malware locks you out of your computer files until you pay up — and it is proving incredibly difficult to exterminate.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/09/technology/security/ransomware

Help! My Microsoft Outlook is working offline! It happens sometimes, here’s a short video to see how to fix it.

If we show you how to back up your PC for free, will you finally do it? Beyond simple hard drive failure, your PC could fall prey to user error or all sorts of nefarious malware. The only way to ensure that none of your personal files or programs are lost in a catastrophe is to back up everything regularly.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2095481/if-we-show-you-how-to-back-up-your-pc-for-free-will-you-finally-do-it.html

According to the common wisdom on passwords, you should pick different passwords for different accounts. But if your way of remembering your passwords is to make them slight variations of one another, you could be making hackers’ lives easier than you might think.
Read more…

PDF, Flash, and Java: the Most Dangerous File Types

After ten years of study, researchers concluded that security holes in Adobe and Java are responsible for 66 percent of all vulnerabilities actively exploited in Windows. Vendors patch these flaws as quickly as they can, but their hard work doesn’t help if you don’t stay up to date.