I brought my Macbook Air 13” to this shop after a tea spill. In Apple, they charge plain $750 whatever happens to your computer, even if they only change a single piece, and don’t give you the option of changing all the parts. In Ivanhoe, I saved a lot of money since the only repair that my computer needed was changing the keyboard. The technicians evaluated, gave me a quote, got the cheapest new keyboard they could find, and did a very good job repairing the Mac. I recommend this shop.
One of our friends brought in a computer where a virus had renamed all of his files so that they appeared as a .html file. He had thousands of files so doing this manually was out of the question so he came to us to write a program to do it. Below is the program we used to strip the .html extension recursively from all of his files.
find -name "*.html" -print0 | xargs -0 rename 's/\.html//'
If we knew all of his files had the extension .html appended, then we may have done something like this. But upon closer inspection only some files had been renamed.
find -maxdepth 1 -type f | sed ‘s/.\///g’| grep -E [.] | while read file; do mv $file ${file%%.*}; done
We offer expert computer tech support services in St. Louis for PC Windows, Mac, Laptops and Desktop computers. With our remote and in-store tech services, you can rest assured your computer problem could be a quick fix away. However some computer repairs can be more difficult, and can take more time, however the average computer repair takes less than 48 hours.
Most computer virus issues and computer software problems can be fixed over a remote support session. A remote support session is when one of our expert computer technicians connects to your computer simply by you visiting a website and installing a quick and easy program. After the program is installed it will open a one-time connection with one of our support technicians, and they will be able to share your desktop with you, and assist you to resolve your issues.
Friendly, honest and knowledgeable staff! The fan on my laptop was not functioning properly and they ran an complete diagnostic on it. They had my laptop back up and running by the promised delivery date. There were no additional charges other than their standard diagnostic fee. I will definitely rely on their services in the future.
I am not from St. Louis, was on a trip and had a problem. I found these guys on the internet and dropped in on them, and they solved my problem in less than 20 minutes at a fantastic price.
Over the past couple years there have been a number of computer viruses that appear to be anti-virus software. The programs will appear to be scanning your computer and finding many computer viruses, trojans, and worms. Some of these fake anit-virus programs will even turn off the network connection until a payment is made into a phishing website.
Computer virus mimicing anti-virus software
This past week a computer came into South City Computer with a fake anti-virus program called Avasoft Professional Antivirus. The customer understood this was a fake anti-virus program and immediately brought her computer in to have her data backed up and the computer fully restored to factory defaults to insure the program would longer infect her computer.
South City Computer offers computer repair and support service for Desktop and Laptop computers for the Saint Louis metro area. South City Computer supports both Mac Apple and Windows PC computers. South City Computer offers remote support services for quick scans and fixes to common computer issues. South City Computer specializes in data recovery and operating system recovery services after a virus, software or hardware malfunction. South City Computer can even sometimes recover deleted data files that have been removed from the recycle bin or from a failed hard drive. South City Computer also sells a limited supply of computer peripherals; such as laptop power supplies, PC power supplies, network cards, keyboards, and mice.
Today I received an email saying I had a secure message waiting for me from Fiserv, Inc. ( a global provider of financial services technology), and I needed to download and open the attached zip file to view it. While it is possible Fiserv would want to communicate via a secure system, I have not ever done any business with Fiserv, so my scam flags were already set off.
Here is the body of the email message I received:
Subject: Fiserv Secure Email Notification – 2QTENYPDRS226IB
Message: “Encryption
You have received a secure message
Read your secure message by opening the attachment, Notification_2QTENYPDRS226IB.zip. You will be prompted to open (view) the file or save (download) it to your computer. For best results, save the file first, then open it in a Web browser. To access from a mobile device, forward this message to mobile@res.fiserv.com to receive a mobile login URL.
If you have concerns about the validity of this message, please contact the sender directly. For questions about secure e-mail encryption service, please contact technical support at 888.015.2496.
2000-2013 Fiserv Secure Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.”
Of course I did NOT open the attached zip file called:
Notification_2QTENYPDRS226IB.zip
This zip file most likely contains a virus that will execute when the zip directory is extracted onto the computer.
I did futher investigation into the email headers and found:
Received: from unknown (HELO smtpout.zixmail.net) (63.71.8.106) by zimx.onyxlight.net with SMTP; Tue, 2 Apr 2013 22:14:52 +0500
Now I can be pretty sure that this is a hoax email scam meant to only spread a computer virus onto an unsuspecting users computer.
I did a quick Google search about this particular email virus scam and found an interesting Threat Outbreak Alert from Cisco in Feburary 2013:
“Cisco Security Intelligence Operations has detected significant activity related to spam e-mail messages that claim to contain a secure message for the recipient. The text in the e-mail message attempts to convince the recipient to open the attachment and view the message. However, the .zip attachment contains a malicious .exe file that, when executed, attempts to infect the system with malicious code.
E-mail messages that are related to this threat (RuleID5286) may contain the following files:
Notification_K8XDS9NY.zip
EncryptedMessage.exe
The EncryptedMessage.exe file in the Notification_K8XDS9NY.zip attachment has a file size of 132,096 bytes. The MD5 checksum, which is a unique identifier of the executable, is the following string: 0xB20694AA43ED58B3550777DCF3ADB102
The following text is a sample of the e-mail message that is associated with this threat outbreak:
Subject: Fiserv Secure Email Notification – 232113549
Message Body:
Encryption
You have received a secure message
Read your secure message by opening the attachment, Notification_232113549.zip. You will be prompted to open (view) the file or save (download) it to your computer. For best results, save the file first, then open it in a Web browser. To access from a mobile device, forward this message to mobile@res.fiserv.com to receive a mobile login URL.
If you have concerns about the validity of this message, please contact the sender directly. For questions about secure e-mail encryption service, please contact technical support at 888.492.1202.
2000-2013 Fiserv Secure Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cisco Security Intelligence Operations analysts examine real-world e-mail traffic data that is collected from over 100,000 contributing organizations worldwide. This data helps provide a range of information about and analysis of global e-mail security threats and trends. Cisco will continue to monitor this threat and automatically adapt systems to protect customers. This report will be updated if there are significant changes or if the risk to end users increases.
Cisco security appliances protect customers during the critical period between the first exploit of a virus outbreak and the release of vendor antivirus signatures. E-mail that is managed by Cisco and end users who are protected by Cisco Web Security Appliances will not be impacted by these attacks. Cisco security appliances are automatically updated to prevent both spam e-mail and hostile web URLs from being passed to the end user.”
BEWARE of emails that seem suspicious that try to get you to download and execute a file. It is highly unlikely any business would communicate with you in this fashion. If you have received an email like the one in this article and you downloaded the email attachment, bring your computer into South City Computer today for a virus scan and virus removal, as your computer is probably infected with a computer virus, and could be performing malicious or illegal activity without your knowledge.
Last week the news stories broke all over the St. Louis metro area about people’s credit card number being stolen and fraudulent charges being made. The common thread of all of these fraudulent charges was these cards were also used at Schnucks Markets in St. Louis, Missouri. According to a press release on Schnucks.com from March 30, 2013, Schnucks CEO Scott Schnucks says “After extensive review, we confirmed that Schnucks was the victim of a cyberattack”.
Why would Schnucks supermarket store your credit card information in a centralized database system that could fall victim to cybercrimes and hacking? Most stores take in credit card information encoded on the magnetic stripe at the point of sale and store this information temporarily until all transactions are batched out. They do this to keep banking fees at a minimum for charging credit cards, unfortunately this means that your credit card information is being stored for a period of time, which in turn means it can be hacked and stolen, which is exactly what happened to Schnucks.
If you have fallen victim to this cyberattack, you will need to cancel your credit card and get a new one, as the cybercriminal will still be able to use your credit card number to make fraudulent purchases until the card has been canceled.
This is the official Press Release from Schnucks:
“ST. LOUIS – Schnucks announced today that it has “found and contained” the issue behind the reports of unauthorized access to payment card information at Schnucks, and it has taken comprehensive measures designed to block any further access. The computer forensic firm that Schnucks engaged found evidence of computer code that would capture the magnetic stripe data on the back of payment cards. Now that the issue has been identified and contained, the investigation will turn to determining for how long the issue existed and which stores were affected. Customers can continue to use credit and debit cards at Schnucks.
“After an extensive review, we confirmed that Schnucks was the victim of a cyberattack,” said Chairman and CEO Scott Schnuck. “We have identified the issue and taken comprehensive measures to contain the incident. We are cooperating with law enforcement, the Missouri Attorney General’s Office, and the credit card companies to determine the scope and magnitude of this crime and apprehend those individuals making fraudulent purchases. We have been told by the computer forensics expert that the security enhancements we have implemented in the last 48 hours are designed to block this attack from continuing. Our customers can continue using credit and debit cards at our stores. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused our customers, and we thank each of them for their patience while we worked hard to investigate their concerns.”
Schnucks advises that if customers suspect their cards may have been compromised, they should immediately contact their credit or debit card company, typically a bank or credit union.
Founded in St. Louis in 1939, Schnuck Markets, Inc. operates 100 stores (including five Logli and six Hilander stores) and 96 in-store pharmacies in Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Iowa. Follow Schnucks on Facebook at www.facebook.com/Schnucks.”
The official press release webpage.
Over 2 Million Cards stolen from Schnucks – StLouisPublicRadio.org