Alert: PDF Documents Infected

A large number of PDF documents are now infected opening them could give the attacker full control of your computer. The fix requires that an update be loaded for Acrobat Reader. We will be performing these updates for you during the next update cycle. Meanwhile, the infection is easily avoided because the infected document will show up on your network attached to spam.

Subject lines include:

Your credit report
Your credit points
Your balance report
Personal Financial Statement
Personal Credit Points
Personal Balance Report
Your Credit File
Balance Report

As always, the solution to this problem is to be very cautious when opening attachments to any email even if you know the person that sent it. A good habit to develop is to contact the person that sent you the attachment and ask what it is before you open it. Always be careful.

In case you are interested here is the report on the exploit from Adobe.
http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb07-18.html

Amy Babinchak
Harbor Computer Services

Removing Distractions

Information overload is becoming a serious problem and can create on-going distraction and interruption for your employees thus sapping valuable productivity from their day.

Intel has identified this one issue has sapping more energy from their employees than any other single thing and they have decided to do something about it. Other companies are too. Maybe some of their ideas will work for you?

No Email Fridays. That's right, no email on Friday. (watch some of your employees start to twitch as withdrawal symptoms kick-in)

Talk to your Team Morning. Intel has a lot of engineers working away in cubicles. Rather than talking to one another they found that they email to the guy in the next cube. As an experiment, they decided that groups working on the same project are not allowed to email one another in the morning. They have to get up and talk to each other. Now this seems counter intuitive. Email or Instant Message is supposed to make you more efficient. But if team communications are suffering because no one EVER talks, then you've got to make time for talking.

Less Than 5. The less than 5 movement says that if you can't say what you need in less than 5 sentences, you should talk to the person instead of emailing it.

Get creative. If you see that email, IM, web surfing are taking up time and your employees no longer communicate in person, then do something about it. Do it as an experiment. Make it up. Have a no email Friday once a month if every Friday is too much. I'll bet your employees have ideas on how to help trim down interruptive information overload.

Website Error Reports Safe to Ignore

If you have received a website problem report, you can safely ignore it. We use two web hosting solutions and one of them is going through an upgrade. The websites are working fine but the reporting engine is spitting out reports it shouldn't be. It's being working on now and those reports can be ignored.

thanks,

Amy Babinchak
Harbor Computer Services

Product Review: Comcast VOPI

Just as we were one of the first to go with Comcast Internet service and experience the pain of doing so, we are now one of the first to sign up for Comcast VOIP and experience the pain of doing so.

I have two optomistic things to say

1. Call Quality is Good
2. The service will probably get better. (At least it did with Internet service after a while)

I have these pains

1. After the helpful service man setup our router it came un-setup after about 3 hours.
2. The helpdesk said it would be 24-72 hours before someone would call us back about not having Internet or Phones! "So I should sit here out of business for 1-3 days?" This caused the person on the phone creating my trouble ticket to change her speak from 24-72 hours to "soon". But did not change the result.
3. We still don't have voicemail.

All I can say at this point is thank goodness the only people that call our office number are vendors trying to get us to sell you stuff.

This is why we install patches as they are released. This is why we start learning about new software a year in advance of its release. This is why we install and uninstall over and over again on our machines. This is why we attend training courses.

We strive to experience the pain so you don't have to. This means that our phones go up and down; our computer system goes up and down; and we experience lousy service.

The goal is always to try to prevent our customers from having to go through the same pain that we do. So for now, we can't recommend Comcast VOIP service. Maybe they'll eventually get their act together and not keep a business network without internet and phones for 3 days and without voicemail for over a week.

Amy Babinchak