31 days of Paranoia – day 31

First off a bit of Halloween humor seen on a twitter post… someone was saying they were dressing up as “Outlook”.  Their costume was to wrap themselves up in a translucent shower curtain with a sign that said “Not Responding!”.

I think we all can relate to that.

So as I’m here at the front door (dressed up like Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg I might add) waiting for the trick-or-treaters let’s end our 31 days of paranoia with one more post of resources:

Places to go to get help – especially for Windows issues.

First off – and above all – this site.  Specifically the Forums on this site.  There is nothing that helps better than someone else saying “gee I don’t see that here”… or “yes, I’ve had that EXACT same issue and here’s how I fixed it!”.  When you have no other machine to compare to, you tend to get a bit paranoid thinking that attackers are making your machine freak out when it might just be… well… patching or anti virus scanning or something third party making it freak out.

Next I’d recommend something that makes me shiver… and not just because it’s Halloween and I’m listening to the Amazon Halloween playlist (It’s playing Michael Jackson’s thriller right now).  Twitter.  Yup Twitter.  I am lately finding that you can get one on one help when you direct it to a corporate or official twitter account.  There is a list (it might be a bit outdated) of official twitter aliases, and their official support alias for Microsoft is https://twitter.com/microsofthelps

You can direct message them and get communication back.  The reason it makes me shiver is I find that twitter is too narrow of a channel and the knowledge or solution doesn’t often get exposed like it does in a forum venue.

If you are an IT pro kind of person, I’m finding that Microsoft employees respond pretty good on the Techcommunity venue.

Also make sure you have at least SOMETHING that can get to google.  The best way to fix a Windows machine is a working computer or device and a search engine.  There are so many times I’ve fixed something scrolling around a page on my iPhone.

Now just so you don’t think I’m going to end the 31 days of paranoia in a happy spot here are some parting trends to worry about:

Crypto mining attacks are trending.  The bad guys get on your machine and use the excess CPU to coin bitcoin.  So they don’t want to steal your credit card data, they want to use your computer to make their own money.

Smaller more targeted phishing is on the rise.

Attackers that set up Office 365 relay rules and then hide the fact that they’ve taken over your email box.

And with that we close this month of paranoia.  Going forward I’ll still throw in a paranoid post or two…. just not as often as one a day.