Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Your Attention Is Required - NOW!


Virtually ALL my customers use
   -  Microsoft Security Essentials on Windows 7 and
   -  Windows Defender on Windows 8.x and Windows 10.

A really BAD bug has been uncovered that warrants your immediate attention.

Please follow the instructions in this article or alternatively you can do the following:
  1. Open Windows Defender (MS Security Essentials on Windows 7)
  2. Click on the Update tab
  3. No matter what the program says click on the big button Update Definitions
If there is any update for Defender or Security Essentials it will be downloaded and installed.

Stay safe.


Friday, May 5, 2017

"Security" software breaks Windows


It gets fun again - my life I mean; the rest of this blog post is dead serious, please make no mistake.

For years I have recommended NOT TO USE products from Webroot. I remember too many bad experiences with and infections on computers that were presumably "protected by Webroot".

In NBC's words:
An antivirus service used by tens of thousands of businesses and millions of home users shut down an untold number of computers around the world Monday after it mistakenly identified core parts of Microsoft Windows as threats, the company confirmed.
Similar events have occurred in the past; sadly they are much more common than we would like and the public hardly knows about it. Some well known companies in the "computer security" or "anti virus" business have had similar snafus. Here is a quote from a blog post at Bleepingcomputer.com:
... Such mishaps have been reported for years to include major anti-virus/security vendors such as Panda, avast, AVG, BitDefender, Kaspersky, Malwarebytes, McAfee and Symantec. In most cases when these issues occur, the anti-virus vendors and security tool developers take quick action to correct the problem and provide support to those users who have been affected.
To call such blunders a "mishap" is not a euphemism, IMHO it is outright glossing over or covering up a major blunder.

Things like this should not happen and they don't need to happen, they are major avoidable blunders. In every case we can only speculate about the "why" and I don't like to speculate.

What does all the above tell us? IMHO very simple:

Do not trust a single word in high gloss, pretty brochures.
Do not believe the words in computer related advertisements on TV.

What you find in high gloss publications is mostly marketing hype and likely not really trustworthy. And when certain "security" software seemingly out-of-the-blue suddenly is being hyped over the moon in TV advertisements it IMHO is time to run for the hills. It tells me that very likely a marketing campaign has to cover up some so called "mishap".

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So far I have used the acronym IMHO three times in this blog post. Generally there are always at least two ways to look at something, as we say around computers YMMV. If you have a different opinion - or maybe simply think I am a dumba.s then I ask you to please leave a comment, state your case or blow off steam below. 

Thank you in advance.