Comp-U-News from Comp-U-Talk

 

Happy March.  I’m so excited that Spring is almost here.  Tax season is almost here too, so you need to beware of email scams concerning tax related tasks.  The latest scam is via email and looks like it is generated by the CEO and addressed to the appropriate person in finance. It requests a PDF copy of all employee W-2’s.  Obviously, you don’t want to be the person that “accidently” gave away all of the employee addresses and social security numbers so be careful of that one.  And a part of me wants to suggest that maybe we not list all of the department heads and email addresses on our web pages, but that’s just me. 

 

A less specific scam but just as damaging is making the rounds via Word Attachments in an email.  The typical subject will look something like this:

 

Subject: ATTN: Invoice J-11256978
Attachment: invoice_J-11256978.doc

 

When opened you would see something similar to this:

And if you are silly enough to enable editing and enable macros, you will unleash an evil spirit that will encrypt all of your data and eventually you’ll be asked to purchase and send bitcoin to “I don’t where”.  And if you are lucky, they will send you a key to unencrypt your files.  The complete story can be found on https://blog.knowbe4.com.

 

Both of these blog entries are scary and hopefully you will never have to experience the effects of the subject matter.  But if you do, your first step to recovery is to restore from backup.  There are bunches of ways create backups, and if you are still traumatized by feeding a stack of 30 floppy disks into your computer to complete a backup, you can breathe a sigh of relief.  In today’s world backups can be automated and they can be kept on site and/or sent to the “cloud” for safe keeping.  If you’ve been thinking about implementing a backup solution but just haven’t gotten around to it, why not give us a call?  We can evaluate your needs and recommend a solution that is both automated and affordable.  We’d love to help you out and appending to the Mike Tyson quote above:  Failing to plan is planning to fail. (Ouch) 

 

Give us a call: (541) 756-8770

 

And because it made me laugh: My friend is upset because one of her OCD pills is backwards...

 

 

 

 ~Janet