Alex's PC Solutions

About 6am this morning we started seeing client sites dropping offline, It looked like a large Cox cable regional issue. What we are seeing now is a nationwide internet issue. Our peer group is reporting problems all over the country. Locally it seems to be affecting Cox business clients and also causing sporadic issues with residential service. Hopefully it will be up soon but it isn't even a Cox issue it's a company called Centurylink that they connect to.

Doctors and Nurses in middle GA who are trying to get set up for tele-health please read: This week has been chaotic for healthcare providers. We want to help however we can. We are providing free HD webcams, setup and training for tele-health visits. We can get your tele-health services, website, laptops, phones and desktops set up and provide training for yourselves and your staff. No catch, no charge, if you have MD license plates you don't even have to give us your ...name. We are extending our office hours till 8 pm on weekdays and will be in all day Saturday and Sunday. Please call our offices at (478) 200-8800 or message us here if you have questions. We can set up site visits for larger practices if needed. We have several practices both large and small that are operational already and we are confident that we can get you going very quickly at this point. Please like and share with any medical professionals in middle Georgia that might be able to benefit from this. See more

Computer security 101: Getting hacked is pretty much nothing like the movies. Especially for small business. It's is not some elite computer genius hammering at a keyboard. It is more like a little kid in a parking lot walking around to see if any car doors are unlocked so they can steal pocket change. That is to say that it is usually a slow tedious process where a simple computer program just tries random connections until it finds one that is unlocked. (or easily unlo...ck-able) But unlike kids stealing your change, getting hacked can be completely devastating and frequently will end up in huge monetary losses or the closure of the business entirely. There are a handful of ways that this happens commonly and easy steps you can take to prevent this. I'm going to talk about one of those today. One of the very biggest causes of hacked systems is "work from home" remote access that is not set up securely. I bring this up because everyone is switching to work from home right now and doing it very quickly. We get calls all the time from other peoples clients that have been hacked and almost every time this is how it happened. Make sure you (or your IT person) is not cutting corners and exposing your business. Safe ways to "work from home" are generally using a VPN connection or using a remote access site that is set up specifically for this purpose. Local Companies that I know for a fact do things the right way are ours ( Alex PC ) Prestige, Spinen and Infinity networks. The very very bad way to do this is with something called an open RDP connection. I am not going to name names but we see this a lot from a few of the smaller I.T. groups in town. Thet set it up like this because it is easy and free to set up and doesn't require a lot of knowledge to do open RDP. We have come behind a lot of these companies and seen these setups, in many cases we see someone has been actively trying to hack in. If you are set up like this then you will get hacked at some point, almost certainly. Please ask your IT provider if you are using open RDP. You don't have to know what it is to ask the question.

We shut down our entire software company for a week to work on a covid-19 project that was suggested by a friend.( Patrick Andrew Boyce ) This is what we ended up with https://www.curbq.io/home It's a free contactless curbside checkin and queueing app for small businesses that can't afford to hire programmers to build their own. If it is popular then we will keep adding features. I'm really proud of my team, they worked nonstop all through memorial day weekend to get this put together and I think it turned out very slick. Hopefully it will help a few people. We are still putting the final touches on it but if you can use it or you know someone who can use it then please like and share.

Computer security 101: Getting hacked is pretty much nothing like the movies. Especially for small business. It's is not some elite computer genius hammering at a keyboard. It is more like a little kid in a parking lot walking around to see if any car doors are unlocked so they can steal pocket change. That is to say that it is usually a slow tedious process where a simple computer program just tries random connections until it finds one that is unlocked. (or easily unlo...ck-able) But unlike kids stealing your change, getting hacked can be completely devastating and frequently will end up in huge monetary losses or the closure of the business entirely. There are a handful of ways that this happens commonly and easy steps you can take to prevent this. I'm going to talk about one of those today. One of the very biggest causes of hacked systems is "work from home" remote access that is not set up securely. I bring this up because everyone is switching to work from home right now and doing it very quickly. We get calls all the time from other peoples clients that have been hacked and almost every time this is how it happened. Make sure you (or your IT person) is not cutting corners and exposing your business. Safe ways to "work from home" are generally using a VPN connection or using a remote access site that is set up specifically for this purpose. Local Companies that I know for a fact do things the right way are ours ( Alex PC ) Prestige, Spinen and Infinity networks. The very very bad way to do this is with something called an open RDP connection. I am not going to name names but we see this a lot from a few of the smaller I.T. groups in town. Thet set it up like this because it is easy and free to set up and doesn't require a lot of knowledge to do open RDP. We have come behind a lot of these companies and seen these setups, in many cases we see someone has been actively trying to hack in. If you are set up like this then you will get hacked at some point, almost certainly. Please ask your IT provider if you are using open RDP. You don't have to know what it is to ask the question.

Hi middle Georgia, we desperately need more webcams and tablets for getting doctors set up with telemedicine. These are sold out literally everywhere right now ...and also online. We bought up a ton of them last week but have gone through every single one and there's still a need. My group has been providing them and setting them up for free but we are willing to purchase them if you can't donate. Even older webcams are probably okay. Please take a moment look around see if you have any of these. If you are able to help please call our office at 478-200-8800 or drop by at 850 Hillcrest Industrial blvd. Even if you don't have anything please share this post and maybe somebody who does will see it. See more

https://www.hcanews.com//yes-healthcares-data-breach-probl

You should probably change your passwords, It's about time. Our shop has been getting regular calls about a new very convincing, very embarrassing email scam that is going around and we wanted to let you folks know what it is and how it works. Typically it works something like this:... You receive an E-mail that says: Your password is XXXXXXX I have hacked you! The thing is, it really is your password or a password that you use. The email goes on to say something along the lines of " I have hacked your computer, I have recorded you going to adult sites and turned on your webcam and recorded you doing adult things, If you don't want me to share this video with your friends and family you'll send be some bitcoin. So we have had a lot of people that are alarmed by this and probably even more that are too embarrassed to actually call us about it. The way the scam works is this: There have been numerous high level security breaches in the past few years with millions upon millions of peoples data being stolen. This data frequently includes email addresses and passwords used to log into online accounts. A lot of this data is now just floating around on the internet for anyone to look at, So thieves have gotten lists of these things and they are just mass emailing people the threats. Your computer hasn't been hacked, someone else's server has. You can protect yourself by never using the same password for different websites and accounts, This can be hard but there are some great free utilities you can use for this like https://keepass.info/ or https://www.lastpass.com/ You should also if you haven't recently go out there and change or update all of your passwords while you are at it. There is a good chance that if you use the same email address and password for multiple sites that bad guys out there already know what it is.

How to pick a good strong password: An unexpected four-word phrase (CHBS-style) Add special chars and caps but not at the beginning or end Check your password's strength with a tester on a public uni site... Lie on security questions. See more

Just fyi, if you live in west Macon near bass road, we are tracking a Cox outage this morning from zebulon to I-75, not sure if it is affecting residential or not.

I guess we were nominated for this? I am glad I noticed this before the deadline of tomorrow! I guess go vote for us? or other people if you want? Infinity networks does a great job too! http://macontelegraph.secondstreetapp.com/BOTB2018/gallery

We see this sort of thing during audits all the time, make sure your IT staff is not exposing you by having open remote connections.