According to the web site www.itworldcanada.com PC Live Care now has online support designed to convince victims that the product is legitimate. The agent answers message by instant message. Symantec Corp. warns support staff try to persuade users to buy products for up to US$100.

For the full story click here: http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/rogue-antivirus-program-comes-with-tech-support/140004

Unfortunately it appears to be able to get through most antivirus software! Malwarebyts (www.malwarebytes.org) will remove it – the only problem being that PC Live Care blocks the malwarebytes web site!

The best way to deal with viruses is to avoid them in the first place – remember, keep your antivirus up to date, don’t download applications unless you trust the site, and don’t follow links in unexpected/odd emails!

If you have been hit by PC Live Care – give us a call straight away.

www.nakedwines.co.nz

www.moncellierwines.co.nz

Are you out and about over the summer? Will you be relying on internet café’s and borrowed computers to keep up with your emails and your business during the break?

If so don’t forget that you can take your business with you thanks to Portable Apps. Download the apps from portableapps.com and take your office with you on a memory stick!

Portable apps includes an office application, a web browser, an email client, antivirus software and even Skype – all of them run from a memory stick (USB flash drive) so you can use a borrowed computer or internet café and everything you do will only be on the flash drive – nothing is saved locally!

Why not pop into the office, pick up a flash stick and at the same time get one of the guys to load portable apps for you!

Have a happy and safe Christmas!

How agile is your business, and how can you keep your risk premium as low as possible when making decisions?

• How will you build a picture of what is important to your business?
• Who will be your best allies?
• What issues could side swipe your business?
• What trends can you see today that will shape your business decisions?

Make your business knowledge and industry insight work together to build a picture.

The 3i Insight Tool allows your staff to;

Find information
Tag like items
File the short version and
Search for keywords.

Your business can then use your stored knowledge to;

Inform direction
Decide a tactic and
Act on it.

Fully accessible wherever you are, the 3i Insight Tool is a web-hosted platform that is fully customisable for your business brand and functionality. Have staff closest to your industry channels or geographic sectors pool their collective information to support business decision-making and direction.

Take a look at www.3i-drg.co.nz.

iPhone owners in Australia discovered their devices had been targeted by self-replicating attacks that display an image of 1980s heart throb Rick Astley that’s not easily removed.

The attacks, which researchers say are the world’s first iPhone worm in the wild, target jailbroken iPhones that have SSH software installed and keep Apple’s default root password of “alpine.” In addition to showing a well-coiffed picture of Astley, the new wallpaper displays the message “ikee is never going to give you up,” a play on Astley’s saccharine addled 1987 hit “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

Possibly far worse than some of the PC viruses that only distroy your data!

As you are most likely aware, holding a cell phone while driving will be illegal from November 1st and so we have a range of hands-free solutions in stock now.  Let us know what you are after – or even just drop Julie an email to see what is avaliable.

If you are interested in having us add Kaseya to your system just give Paul a call – 09 4867014.

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/sprung-by-facebook-geek-justice-for-pornsurfing-laptop-thief-20090812-ehpa.html

An 18-year-old, accused of stealing a laptop in Melbourne and surfing porn on it, thought he was home free after evading police for two months, but he came undone when he logged on to Facebook.

The laptop was reportedly stolen from a staff member of ladder manufacturer Branach in the vicinity of Narre Warren, in Melbourne’s south-east, on June 8.

Fortunately for Branach, the company is a client of Sydney-based managed IT support firm Navigatum, which can connect to and control any of Branach’s laptops and diagnose technical problems from anywhere.

Using remote access software called Kaseya, Navigatum senior network technician David Stevenson set up an alert so that, whenever the stolen laptop was used to log in to the internet, the software would send him an email.

"I can tell when he’s online and from there I can jump on to my laptop and start watching what he’s doing," Stevenson said in a phone interview.

"We were watching him for a little while but, because he was logging on at really random times like really late at night, we set up some scripts to capture [screenshots of] what he was doing on the screen every 30 seconds, and that was then uploaded to our server."

In fact Antivirus 2010 is part of a botnet – a collection of infected PC’s which work together to spread the virus – and, rather than removing any viruses from your PC it is a virus!  When Antivirus XP was at its height last year we had a number of clients who paid over the money – and found lots of extra charges on their credit card!

What can you do about this?

First off make sure you have up to date Antivirus software – a real antivirus like ESET Smart Security – and make sure its all working correctly.  Second, make sure all the Windows security patches are applied.  And finally, when downloading from the internet, make sure you trust the source of the file before running it!

Worried?  Call the offcie and book a health check!