Matt Shinall
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Thursday, Dec 03, 2009
The holiday shopping season is well under way and more shoppers are turning to online retailers than ever before. A survey from the National Retail Federation shows that more than 42 percent of holiday shoppers will purchase from the Internet this holiday season.

Warnings about purchase protection and identity theft become common sight during the holiday shopping season, but Nathan Underwood, owner of Cyber Tech Cafe, cautions Internet users about their vulnerability all year long. It is not just online shoppers at risk, Underwood said. He warns that every Internet user should be concerned with online safety.

Underwood served in the Army as a technical controller before beginning his career in information technology. After a brief stint as an IT consultant in Atlanta, he came to Cartersville and opened Cyber Tech Cafe in early 2002 in order to focus on residential and small business services.

According to Underwood, computers are vulnerable to a plethora of attacks from malicious sources by simply having a connection to the Internet. Digital attackers may not even be interested in account information -- many hackers want to hijack defenseless computers for their own gain.

Many people are interested this time a year to buy a new computer. With the slow PC sales due to vista, Windows 7 coming out and the already slow market this holiday season is setting itself up to be a good time to buy a computer. Black Friday is traditionally the Friday after Thanksgiving, and is usually the time when all the best deals of the season are available. We have gotten numerous questions about good deals, so I am going to use this post

http://cybertechcafe.net/?q=node/143

to list the great deals I find on computers and accessories as I find them. So if you are looking for a computer keep checking back and see if anything suits you.

Recently there has been a large spike in the number of computers we have in the shop with virus infections. Many of these new infections are smarter, more aggressive, better programmed and far harder to remove than their predecessors. A frequent question at pickup is "Where did I get this?"

Finding the source of an infection can be difficult, and most viruses and malware now open your computer up to other items, so it must be determined which was the first infection. We usually see viruses come through in a few different ways. The classic are email, where you get a message to open a link or run a file. It may look like a video, but it isn't. The other classic way is from file sharing. Limewire, Kazaa, etc all offer free files but at what cost. While there are more than legitimate uses for distributed file sharing (eg downloading a new release of Ubuntu from a torrent) most of the files on there are not legal for you to download and use without paying for licensing. Because of the number of people who blindly download illegal software, music and videos there are a large number of spyware and virus distributors that use file sharing as a means to deliver their malware.