Archive for March, 2010

Please be aware of the facebook email going around at the moment. It will come from support@facebook.com and will have a .zip file  attached claming to be a new password change when in fact it is malware to infect your computer. Please delete this email as soon as   you recieve it.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

| Lo-Call 1890 219 219 (Ireland) | Freefone 0808-CALHELP (UK) |

| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00

We had two cases today of customers with a phishing email purported to be from Eircom. The exact text of the email is shown below. However the summary is that it claims that Eircom customers will have their account deleted in three days if they don’t reply with their account details including password. I expect there will be many compromised accounts as a result.

Needless to say, this email is a hoax. If you receive this email, do not respond to it. To quote Eircom “eircom will NEVER send an unsolicited e-mail asking for your password or any of your account details. If you receive an e-mail asking for any of your account details, please DO NOT ENTER ANY DETAILS and delete it immediately”. continue

Happy St Patrick’s Day everyone. It’s a damp, grey start to the morning here in Ireland but at least you can brighten up your Mozilla Firefox browser with a St Patrick’s day theme (click here).

There are two designs in the theme, I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to discover what they are. You switch between them with the big friendly “switch” button just about the main web  page. There are also buttons that allow you to send ecards and views St Patrick’s day videos.

So if you’re not going to a parade today or joining in the festivities, why not shamrock your screen or leprechaun your laptop.

Happy St Patrick’s Day from the Home Helptech Team

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

| Lo-Call 1890 219 219 (Ireland) | Freefone 0808-CALHELP (UK) |

| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00

Someone in the house hogging the Sky Box? Away from home and missed an episode of “House”?  – I might have the answer for you.

I finally got round to trying out the new Sky Player plug-in for Windows 7 Media Center over the weekend. I must admit that I came away quite impressed with the slickness of the finished product.  Sky and Microsoft combined to roll out the Media Center Plugin in the UK before Christmas.  For unknown reasons, those of us in Ireland had to wait until the start of February before it was officially available. continue

There has been a report this week claiming that there are now over quarter of a million malicious posts on Facebook. The latest report from Infosecurity.com (click here) details how fan pages of celebrities such as Justin Timberlake are being used to trick the unsuspecting into downloading virus and malware infected files onto their system.  Links are also spreading into individuals pages.

The links can potentially be to any piece of malware but the following guidelines are a good way of minimising the risks: continue

Everyone in Europe who is currently using Internet Explorer as their main internet browsing program is powering on their computer to find a screen like this appearing on their screen. Without going into the details, this is the culmination of a dispute between the EU and Microsoft over its dominant position in internet browsing software. The outcome is that all of us here in Europe are being forced to choose a browser for our PC, even though most of us don’t really care that much as long as we can see our web pages. continue

We’ve had a number of customers recently mention that they have been cold called by someone in India claiming that their computer has a virus, system crash or other such problem. They subsequently offer to resolve the problem remotely.  I have no evidence of how good or bad their service might be but their initial claims are certainly have a hint of scam about them. They have no way of telling what problems you have with your PC without your knowledge, unless they’re already working for the “bad” guys of course. People should be suspicious of these kinds of calls.

Their website is https://www.onlinepcdoctors.com/ which looks quite professional. Don’t be fooled. They also appear to have national phone number for many countries. There are details of them operating in Ireland (click here), in the UK and in Australia (click here).

There’s also YouTube video of a simlar scam, also based in India  below:

We had a case last week where Norton 360 (version 3) repeatedly got into a hang while removing tracking cookies that it claimed to have found. On closer inspection of the Temporary Internet Files folder, the number of Cookies that Norton was claiming to have found was larger than the number of cookies that actually existed. So my conclusion was that Norton was hanging while trying to remove the non-existent cookies.

In any case, nothing seemed to fix this without a full removal of Norton 360. Even uninstalling Norton 360 appeared insufficient and in the end, we called upon the Norton Removal Tool (found here) to fully remove Norton 360. After full removal and re-installation, the application worked perfectly again.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

| Lo-Call 1890 219 219 (Ireland) | Freefone 0808-CALHELP (UK) |

| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00 |