What's New Cyber Tech Cafe - We announced in April that we have partnered with Domain.com for all of our website and email hosting and that we would begin migrating all of our current website and email hosting customers to Domain.com in the coming months.  We are excited to announce that this has been going well and feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.  As you're reading this, most of you have already been migrated and some are still on the schedule.  If your migration is not complete and you are not working with us already, please contact us right away.  If you missed the original announcement, it is still available on our website here.  If you have any questions about the transition or would like to discuss other options, please don't hesitate to give us a call at…

What's New Cyber Tech Cafe - We announced in April that we have partnered with Domain.com for all of our website and email hosting and that we would begin migrating all of our current website and email hosting customers to Domain.com in the coming months.  We are excited to announce that this has been going well and feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.  As you're reading this, some of you have already been migrated and some are already on the schedule.  We will be contacting each of our hosting customers directly to schedule the migration and expect to have everyone migrated by July of this year.  If you missed the original announcement, it is still available on our website here.  If you have any questions about the transition or would like to discus other options, please don't hesitate…

  Updates Microsoft - There are a total of 10 updates from Microsoft this month with 2 of them listed as critical and the remaining 8 listed as important.  The first critical vulnerability affects all version of MS Windows and Internet Explorer and allows an attacker to install viruses, malware, etc. or completely take over the computer simply by getting the victim to view an infected web page. The second critical  vulnerability affects MS Windows XP, MS Windows Vista and MS Windows 7 (this reportedly does not affect Windows 8 or Windows RT) and also allows an attacker to install viruses, malware, etc. or completely take over the computer simply by getting the victim to view an infected web page.  Microsoft releases regular updates the second Tuesday of each month, often referred…

There are a LOT of reasons and ways here but the most popular reason (right now) is money.  The folks writing the viruses are making a TON of money doing it.  How do they make money writing viruses?  Consider the little story below.  We have a couple of players in our story.  We have Alice, who is the typical computer user.  We have Mallory, who is the bad guy who actually writes the virus.  Then, we have Trudy who has gotten a great deal on 100,000 Viagra pills that she wants to sell anonymously via email.   Alice has a computer that she uses for day-to-day computer activities.  She doesn't do her banking online and doesn't store anything 'sensitive', so she doesn't obsess (or really even think about) about security…

How did I get a virus, I don't visit porn sites?!?!?! Ok, so I just saw this on the wire and wanted to take an opportunity to a) warn folks about the hack on the DOL website and b) use it as an example of how easy it is for someone to get a virus from otherwise legitimate websites.  I'll try to be brief, but, well, you know how I tend to get on this stuff. First, the news.  According to this article, one of the U.S. Department of Labor's websites has been 'hacked' and is now redirecting users to malicious code.  Translation, if you visit the site, you stand a very good chance of getting a virus. Now, on to the good stuff.  According to the article, visitors to…

What's New Cyber Tech Cafe - We announced last month that we would had partnered with Domain.com for all of our website and email hosting and that we would begin migrating all of our current website and email hosting customers to Domain.com in the coming months.  I'm excited to announce that this has been going well and feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.  As you're reading this, some of you have already been migrated and some are already on the schedule.  We will be contacting each of our hosting customers directly to schedule the migration and expect to have everyone migrated by July of this year.  If you missed the original announcement, it is still available on our website here.  If you have any questions about the transition or would like to…

The so called 'FBI Virus' has come back with a vengence and appears to be using well known and highly publicized vulnerabilities in Adobe products and Java to propagate.  If you have a computer and are not 100% certain that you are up-to-date, use the links at the bottom of this email to make certain.   What it is? - The premise is simple.  Attackers scare victims into giving up money valuable information by convincing them that the FBI or DHS is somehow 'after them'.  Typically, the intended victim gets a virus that causes a 'splashscreen' to pop up on their computer with an official looking seal (traditionally FBI but, according to US CERT, they're using DHS now) and a warning that, if the intended victim doesn't pay up, they…

The short story We are making some internal changes at Cyber Tech Cafe that may result in some email 'weirdness' on Saturday and Sunday.  These issues will be resolved by 6:00am Monday morning but, if you send emails to us Saturday and Sunday, some messages may be delayed or bounced.  If you send us an email over the weekend and do not a) get an autoresponse from the helpdesk (some folks have requested that these be disabled so, if that's you, you won't get an autoresponse) and b) you don't hear back from us first thing Monday morning, your email was likely fodder for our new fangled SPAM filter (or, it was just unlucky enough to come in while Nathan was tweaking something).   For those craving details :) New…

So, you want to learn how to 'hack' email.  Well, you've sortof come to the right place.  The purpose of this article is to explain a little bit about how email works and what actually happens when you click that send button.  The process noted here can actually be used to diagnose email problems and / or confirm that a server (in this case, mail.foo.com) will actually accept email for the domain foo.com.   For this example, we will assume that our email address is bob@foo.com and we're trying to send an email to tom@bar.com.  We won't get into any detail about what email software we're using but will instead focus on what's going on behind the scenes.  We need to get to a command prompt (or DOS prompt or…

It's hard to believe, but it's update time again already.  This is the monthly update and news letter with the details of what's going on and I'm going to try something a little different this month.  After talking with a lot of the folks that get this monthly newsletter though, I'm going to try making a few changes to make it more user friendly and readable and I'd love to get your feedback on how we can make it easier to read and / or more usable for you.   What's New Cyber Tech Cafe - As many of you already know, we are in the proces of suspending our hosting operation.  Website and email hosting was one of the first services that we offered when we started the company…