John Simek

Firm/Organization: Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
Blogs: Your IT Consultant

Latest Articles

Nobody wants to experience a disaster, but everyone should be prepared to deal with one. These days, we have to be prepared to deal with natural and cyber disasters. Tom Merritt at Tech Republic offers five considerations for your disaster recovery plan. Decide what data you can lose: In the process, you’ll begin to prioritize what you realize you can and cannot lose—this way you can focus on the most important systems and devices. Is…
Dark Reading reported that over 5,100 devices suffer from a firmware vulnerability that allows unauthenticated users to view and access data on the units. “The flaw, which is present in certain models of the NAS products, allows unauthenticated users to view and access data stored on the devices, and is trivially easy to exploit via the Application Programming Interface, researchers from Vertical Structure and WhiteHat Security said this week.” The impacted devices include several models…
Actually, the update is intended for the wireless dongle. Devices sold prior to 2016 are vulnerable to the MouseJack attack. The Verge reported that many Logitech devices are still vulnerable to the attack even though a patch has been available for some time. The MouseJack vulnerability allows an attacker to connect to the wireless receiver and send any keyboard input desired. The easiest way to see if your devices are vulnerable is to download the …
When Malwarebytes was first released, you could pay for a lifetime premium license for free without real-time protection. Bleeping Computer has reported that all of that has changed. With the release of version 3.8, Malwarebytes is now enforcing the lifetime license to work only on one machine. Apparently, you could previously buy one license and install it on multiple devices. No more. Users are now receiving an alert that states, “The usage level has exceeded…
Yesterday, I mentioned the problem with Zoom allowing an attacker to turn on your webcam without your knowledge. The original reports indicated that the issue was limited to devices running MacOS users. However, How-To Geek reported that a tweet from the security researcher that discovered the original flaw confirmed that Windows users are also impacted. Zoom has backpedaled and issued a fix to remove the local server that was causing the problem in the first…
Beware, if you are a Mac user and installed the Zoom video conferencing software. Several sources have reported a flaw in Zoom that allows an attacker to turn on the webcam without the user’s knowledge. Cybersecurity researcher Jonathan Leitschuh disclosed details of an unpatched critical security vulnerability (CVE-2019-13450) in the Zoom client app for Apple Mac computers, which if combined with a separate flaw, could allow attackers to execute arbitrary code on the targeted systems…
One of the pains of life is having to reinstall and reconfigure apps when you get a new mobile device. Some make it easy and some make it hard. If you use Google Authenticator for 2FA, you need to associate the new device to your account. Google intentionally makes it a little difficult to move Authenticator. After all, the point of 2FA is to increase security so it should take a little work to make…
Your internet service provider (ISP) charges you for internet access up to some particular speed. As an example, you may be paying for a 30 Mbps connection. The upload and download speeds may be different as well. Some providers are even offering “Gigabit” internet connections. In reality, the gigabit internet doesn’t quite get there and typically is 940/88 Mbps, but that doesn’t sound as sexy as gigabit internet. The important part is that you verify…
Some things just never go away. Corel has quietly been in the tech background for many years and it looks like it will be around for a while longer. TechCrunch reported that private equity giant KKR has closed a deal to buy the company from Vector Capital, which has owned some or all of Corel since 2003. Corel is the company behind a number of longstanding software brands including WordPerfect, Corel Draw, WinZip, PaintShop Pro.…
As time goes by, your laptop battery won’t last as long as when it was new. There are several reasons why your power drain increases, but how do you know when you should actually replace the battery? ZDNet has a great post that identifies some key battery statistics you should be aware of. First, you need to install a utility to expose information about your battery. There is a free software application called BatteryInfoView by …