Over the long holiday weekend Facebook began having serious issues. News feeds stopped updating and displayed entries that were days old. Popular apps like Farkle started loading slowly or returning errors. Uploaded pics didn’t always display and the site as a whole started running slowly and returning random “endpoint” errors. Facebook was silent on the matter but their users weren’t. Amid the complaints a dire warning began popping up on statuses. . .

For all the time we’ve been using cell phones, we’ve never had to worry about someone else trying to control them, unless they steal them, that is. It’s just not something one would think about, especially not when using the iPhone. Apple has a history of security with its desktops, so why not the iPhone? Turns out they’ve been a bit lazy with the security updates.

This week’s column is all about the scourge of scareware. Most of us have seen it at one time or another as we surf the web. A pop up will suddenly appear with dire warnings that your system is infected or critical errors were found in your registry. Clicking on it brings up a site for a program that claims it can fix everything-for a fee. The price ranges from $29.95 to $50. Once you pay and download the program, sure enough it does a scan, finds the problems and fixes them all. What a relief, right? Not really. You never had any infections or errors at all. The only thing that got cleaned out was your wallet. A scammer just succeeded in scaring some cash from you.

That’s right. The whole concept of scareware is actually pretty simple. Just trick someone into thinking they have critical issues with their computer and need your program to fix it. It’s big business for cybercriminals.