Widomaker
Home Office / Small Business Hurricane Prep
With what is (or was by now?) hurricane Idalia crossing past my house today, I decided to write a quick summary of what I usually do in cases like this to prepare. This is for a home office or a small business, assuming you have the resources for a typical home.
Source: SANS Internet Storm Center
Check if you are a victim of the Qakbot Malware!
The Justice Department today announced a multinational operation involving actions in the United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Romania, and Latvia to disrupt the botnet and malware known as Qakbot and take down its infrastructure. [1]
On August 29th, 2023, the FBI provided Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) with 6.43M email addresses to help notify impacted victims of their exposure to the Qakbot malware. Anyone may check to see if their email address is included in the list of victims of the Qakbot malware via the HIBP notification service.
We recommend that everyone subscribes to the free notification service provided by Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) which can notify you if your email address is found in certain data breaches, including being in the Qakbot data.
Qakbot relied on compromised accounts to spread its malicious emails. If a receiver interacted with one of these emails, it is highly likely that their device became infected. As a result, they would have become part of the Qakbot botnet. [2]
If you find that your email address is in the Qakbot data, meaning your computer was probably infected with the malware, you should take several actions, including resetting your email password, and resetting any other passwords that were used on the infected computer (banking, shopping, etc.). Also, it’s possible your computer is infected with other additional malware, it should be scanned by a reputable antivirus/anti-malware product such as Malwarebytes or Windows Defender. Since Qakbot targets, among other things, banking/financial details, you should carefully review bank statements for unauthorized transactions and report any you find to your financial institution.
Office Closed on Wednesday, Aug 9, 2023
Our office will be closing early, at 11:00 AM, on Wednesday, August 9, 2023.
Thunderbird 115 Update Coming Soon
Do you use the Thunderbird email software? During the next several weeks, you should begin to see your installation of Thunderbird 102 automatically update to Thunderbird 115. Thunderbird users may wish to read more about what’s new in the updated Thunderbird so they are not surprised by the update. Details may be found on Thunderbird’s Blog, with the most recent post linked below…
Source: Getting Started With The Main Window Of Thunderbird 115
[Resolved] DSL Outage in parts of Williamsburg, VA, on July 11, 2023
7/11/2023 2:00 PM ET – There is a telephone company outage affecting some DSL customers in the Williamsburg, VA, area. Customers reported trouble starting shortly after 12:15 PM. The telephone company has not provided an ETR. We are waiting for further updates.
7/11/2023 4:00 PM ET – Affected customers have been able to reconnect since 3:34 PM ET. We are still waiting for an update from the telephone company. If you were affected by this outage and have not reconnected, please power off, and back on, your DSL modem. Contact our office if you are unable to reconnect.
7/12/2023 10:00 AM ET – The telephone company outage has cleared.
Office Closed on Monday, July 3, and Tuesday, July 4, 2023
Our office will be closed for the Independence Day holiday on Monday July 3, and Tuesday, July 4, 2023.
Email Server Maintenance on Monday, June 26, 2023
We have received notification from our email server provider of upcoming maintenance. This may affect customers with widomaker.com (or tni.net) email addresses, as well as customers, with their own custom domain names, using our Enhanced Email hosting services. This maintenance will NOT affect customers with email hosted on our Plesk hosting servers.
On Monday, June 26, 2023, from 12:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. EDT, we will be performing service migration work and […] improvements. We are expecting 5 to 15 minutes of downtime during the migration as we need to restart our services. Requests made during this downtime window will fail, and you’ll want to reattempt them once services are restored. We do not expect any other service impacts or downtime.
Office Closed on Monday, June 19, 2023
Our office will be closed on Monday, June 19, 2023.
How to Protect Against Virtual Kidnapping Scams – YouTube
Why you might want an email client in the era of webmail • The Register
We suspect that some people might ask be asking themselves: “who uses a local email client in 2023. Doesn’t everybody use webmail these days?”
Source: Why you might want an email client in the era of webmail • The Register