Snake Eyes A long-standing association of this word with treachery and betrayal.
Hackers ramp up computer attacks that demand 'ransom' Hackers operating on the Internet's "Dark Web" are spreading a new, more sophisticated generation of the malicious software known as "ransomware," Now I don’t really think this was the game we found ourselves, then again I wasn’t about to call the number to find out…maybe the “Ransom” is only for computers, infected computers, but I was still caught in a loop of someone else’s doing. The swing on the front porch has a cushion that is greatly faded, my wife was on her iPad hunting for a replacement. She happened to land on the firm that had made the swing we had purchased. She handed her iPad to me to verify. Yup, it’s the place, I clicked on the link and from then on Safari was totally incapacitated. Over and over and over the dialogue box would open saying some dialogue that the app was out of date, corrupted etc. and I had to call the listed phone number to initiate a “fix”. I felt sure if I called the number at minimum they would have a known phone number for their records, and possibly they would ask for a ransom to give me a way out of this cyber box I was in. I went to my computer to look up the Porch swing we had purchased, sure enough they must have gone out of business as their Website was no longer up and Superpages did not find a number for them so someone else was trying to cabbage onto their customers….not a bad business plan for the dishonest. First I scheduled an appointment with the Apple Genius Bar, then I decided to check the phone number. Now if you put in a phone number you will be taken to a reverse phone number lookup BUT if you first enter a line similar to what I wrote you will get information on what may have happened to others. I ask…..”problems with phone number xxx” and boy have lots of folks been hit with this. By going through the post I found a solution, so I wanted to pass on just in case any of you have this happen. On the iPad, go to “Settings”, once there scroll to the Safari icon. Inside there scroll down to “Clear History and Website Data”. It’s the Website data that will get you out of this mess.. I’ll never know how the phone number jockey would have directed me, possibly by “installing” his App that would “fix the problem, of course that would have been a very bad choice. It’s good to learn from others experiences, we are learning there are many ways for the bad guys to use their skills at phishing for our information, we have to be very alert.
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