Computer Safety & News

This link shares how to check on & clean up old history for the Alexa intelligent speaker system.  Sometimes background noise is interpreted by the Echo system as a possible command.   https://lifehacker.com/how-to-listen-to-and-delete-everything-your-alexa-has-r-1826372696 https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/28/17402154/how-to-see-amazon-echo-alexa-conversation-recording-history-listen Last week a story circulated the web about Alexa recording the personal conversation of a woman and then sending it to a […]

A dangerous new malware attack called VPN Filter is circulating and it attacks routers and other networking devices as described below https://www.ic3.gov/media/2018/180525.aspx https://www.symantec.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/vpnfilter-iot-malware Summary — The FBI recommends any owner of small office and home office routers power cycle (reboot) the devices. Foreign cyber actors have compromised hundreds of thousands of home and office routers and […]

One of the many rare “features” in Excel is the use of the “IQY” file extension.  This is a text based function used to do a simple web lookup (but this can be made dangerous, by interacting with a malicious website — which is now in use by a new variant of the Necurs botnet).  […]