Summertime Blues

For most of us this phrase would mean that they are down in the dumps. To others it might mean that a concert. The key here is that we should not assume anything when it comes to our computers and their protection.

Case in point… a client calls me up saying that one of his office PCs is acting ‘weird’. So anyone that has sat in front of a computer can tell you that ‘weird’ is not good. So I get on over to the client’s office and discover that this computer has has been infected with a few viruses. I discover immediately that the PC does not have their anti virus software up to date. When I ask him about this he says that a message came up a month or so ago and said that it wanted him to buy something to continue his protection. I told him that that was normal. That the program itself would continue to do scans, but that you had to pay for the up to date ‘signatures’ that tell the program how to detect all the new viruses.

Well to make a long story short, we activated his anti virus account, downloaded the ‘signatures’ and then did a full scan. The scan found 17 new viruses. One of which was noted to send information to someone else’s email account!

 We will never know if that virus did in fact send any information out to another email account [this is one of the ways identity theft occurs]. But we have agreed that I would return the next business day to ensure that all his computers had up to date accounts and that they were doing full scans every night.

So the moral of the story… never assume your computers are safe! You just might end up with the Summertime Blues…