"But I don't even have an iCloud account!" my aunt said over the phone, as the realization of her fear began to set in. "Is this just a scam?!" At this point, vishing scammers had already installed remote software on her PC and were attempting to have her purchase Google Play Store prepaid cards and send them the codes so the "problem" with her "account" would be "fixed."  In response, the plug was pulled, the hard drive destroyed and passwords were changed. A diploma from the school of close calls was earned that day. If only my aunt knew – if only she had been "patched!"

CoNetrix was voted Best Computer Repair/IT in KCBD's Best of the West 2019 in Lubbock, Texas. Multiple companies around the Lubbock area contended for KCBD's Best of the West designation. Viewers of KCBD News Channel 11 cast their votes through kcbd.com by selecting their favorite company in each Best of the West category.

Some of our apps are for fun things like accessing social media websites, and others are for utilitarian things like paying bills, managing insurance, or overseeing banking accounts. With apps like these having access to our most intimate details, we should closely monitor the apps we use and what these apps can access on our mobile devices.

I recently built a new VM with Windows Server 2016 and installed Exchange Server 2016. As part of hardening the server, I implemented our normal security header and cipher suite hardening steps. The Exchange Control Panel (ECP) appeared to function properly after these changes were implemented, but about a week later I found an issue where one of the less commonly used pages would not open. The page would not load the style sheets and you could not navigate to the page when using the FQDN from the local server. The page mostly worked when accessing it via https://localhost/ecp or from the FQDN outside the network.

For our audits, we run VMware Health Analyzer (VMHA) on any vCenters to collect information on ESXi build numbers, snapshots, dormant VMs, etc. Recently, a customer we were scanning had two vCenters, and while VMHA worked fine on one of them, we were getting errors on the other. Standard troubleshooting didn't work, and the customer didn't know why we weren't able to collect the information this year. After running nmap on the vCenter, we determined the customer had redefined the port used for this vCenter instance and simply defining the port in our scan credentials solved the issue.

Several years ago my wife and I enrolled in country western dance lessons offered in our community. I have a reputation for being challenged in the areas of rhythm and coordination, but it sounded like fun. Over several weeks we learned multiple dances ranging from the supposedly simple two-step to more complex dances. I learned that I could manage on a dance floor as long as I stuck to the basic dances like the two-step and that I never would have rhythm or coordination.