It is that time of the year again! Tax season is upon us and with it comes a

barrage of different types of scams and phishing techniques. There are three certainties in this world — death, taxes and data loss.

Between January and April 15, malicious people out there are trying to combine two of those certainties.
No. 1 on the list of these scams is the IRS contacting you for mistakes on your taxes. Like Microsoft, the IRS is too big to care about us little guys and they will never call you. The scammers are calling now through the next few months telling you that you didn’t pay all of your taxes or that they found out you cheated your taxes and you need to pay now — or else. If you ever receive a call from the IRS, hang up immediately because the next words out of that person’s mouth undoubtedly will be that you owe them money.

Phishing is the next item up on the popularity list amongst these malicious scammers. Phishing is a form of scamming that takes place in your email. People will send out fake emails from fake addresses that appear real in an attempt to get you to reply with credentials or open a malicious attachment.

There are a lot this time of year “from the IRS” asking for a copy of your W-2 or for you to contact them. Again just delete these emails as they are just trying to steal personal information and or money from you.

This phishing scam is a popular one during the holidays, as well, with people posing as Fed-Ex or UPS and telling you that your shipment is held up and you need to open some malicious attachment.

If you would like further information on IRS scams, check out a full alert from the actual IRS at https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/tax-scams-consumer-alerts. If you have any questions or are wary of any received emails, give us a call at Eagle technology Solutions, and we will be able to let you know if the email is fake.

With the eyes of the entire world on Pyeongchang, South Korea, nothing

makes for a better target for hackers and malicious attack groups.

The Olympic Committee has reported it has had several machines succumb to a new malware referred to as “Olympic Destroyer.” With the 2014 Sochi Olympics making about $53 million in revenue, the Olympics are a huge target for ransomware attacks. Money though isn’t always the motive, though. In this case, it appears the attackers just want to disrupt the games and show off their skills.

The Olympic Destroyer malware’s current goal is making devices totally unusable, achieving this by deleting files critical to allowing the operating system of the machines to run but, at the same time, using network devices to further its progression to other machines. This sophisticated malware is also stealing credentials from the machines it has infected. Olympic Destroyer contains two modules it uses to steal credentials — one of them steals the credentials from an internet browser and the other from the local machine’s administrator credentials.

You might have noticed on Feb. 9 that the official Winter Olympics’ website was down for the majority of the day — roughly 12 hours — which left attendees unable to print tickets to events. The malware was able to take down the website with the malicious attack, and it also brought down several television feeds. In January, researchers for various companies reported a Russian hacking group had been sending phishing emails with malicious attachments to South Korean organizations as well as groups that work with the Olympics.

Russia’s foreign ministry has denied any allegations and has said “no evidence would be presented to the world.” So far, investigators of the attacks have made no claims as to who has initiated this attack on the Winter Olympic Games.

At a time when the world is supposed to come together for the love of sports, there are still people out there with malicious intentions fixating on poisoning any happiness this world can get.

If you are concerned about Ransomware in your organization, contact ETS about employee training and ways to help educate your staff and have the necessary “safety nets” in place in the unfortunate event you experience a compromise

There is nothing worse than dealing with a computer that refuses to move at

the pace you want it to. This gets even more frustrating when the computer was working at your desired speed for a while but has suddenly stopped doing so. Below are some quick how-to’s to speed up your Windows 10 PC.

By far, the No. 1 thing that will bog down your machine is temporary files being stored in the machine. The easiest way to combat this is to download and install the free program CCleaner, https://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner/download

This program will automatically go through and delete all those files that are taking up space on your computer.

1. Download CCleaner (it’s a small program and won’t take up space on your computer)
2. Find the CCleaner install file in your computer downloads folder (or wherever you have set files to download)
3. Double click the application install file and allow it to run on your computer.
4. Once CCleaner is open you just have to press “Run Cleaner” and then press “OK” on the windows that pop up afterwards.
5. When the program has finished running, It will then tell you how many temporary files were deleted. Then you are free to close the program. (I run this program about every other week on my machines.)

If you still haven’t noticed any improvements, then you can dig a little deeper and shut off some unnecessary Windows services.

1. On your Windows machine, press the windows key (next to your ctrl and alt button) and the r key at the same time. After that combination has been pressed, a run command box will open in your bottom left hand corner. From there you can type in, services.msc and press enter or click “OK.”
2. This will open up your Windows services. The first service to look for is one called Superfetch.
3. Once you find it you can right-click on it and select “Properties.”
4. This will open another window.
5. Find start up type and change it to “Disabled.”
6. At the Service Status, go ahead and stop the service and the press “Apply” and then “OK.” You can also apply the same steps to the services, “Background Intelligent Transfer Service” and “Windows Font Cache Service.”

As always, if you have any issues with these or would just like us to go through and help you out with them, we are always here! Any one of our technicians can help you do this, and you don’t even need to leave home. We can work with you remotely or help you if you encounter an issue with the process described above.

ETS can be reached at 785.628.1330 or you can email us at techs@eaglerescue.net.