Rossander’s Security Reader

I don’t often have good things to say about Microsoft but they just announced a new change to their help site that might actually work.

When something’s wrong with your computer, sooner or later, you’ll try to google the problem. If it’s a technical problem, there’s a reasonable chance that Microsoft has a write-up of both the problem and the steps you need to take to fix it. If you’ve ever tried to follow one of those writeups though, you know that the detailed steps are very technical and the explanations often assume that the reader has a high degree of prior expertise.

Someone at Microsoft realized that the repair steps are pretty mechanical and wrote a script to execute it for you. They call it the just ‘Fix It’ button. (The icon shows a little guy in blue overalls holding a wrench.) The fixes work for simple problems like restoring a missing Internet Explorer icon to the desktop or enabling numlock during logon. For more examples, check out the Microsoft FixIt page.

The downside of all this, of course, is that you’re giving someone else permission to run applications on your computer. As a general principle, that’s a bad idea. It’s especially bad given the number of microsoft-spoof sites out there – hacker sites designed to look and feel just like the real thing. There are no known cases of spoofs of the FixIt button yet but it’s only a matter of time.

Before you click a ‘FixIt’ button, take a couple steps.

• Be very sure that you are on a legitimate site. If necessary, close your browser and type in support.microsoft.com yourself.
• Be sure that the problem you are about to ‘fix’ is really the problem you have. Take the time to troubleshoot thoroughly and to read the description carefully before you start.
• Keep your antivirus and antispyware software turned on and completely up-to-date. If someone tells you that as part of the fix you need to turn off your antivirus… Well, there actually are a few rare conflicts where you do have to disable some of your security functions in order to perform some maintenance steps on the computer but 99.99999% of the time, it will be a scam.
• And finally, back up all your important data before you ‘FixIt’. Microsoft created the problem in the first place. Are you sure you trust them to fix it? I might but not without a backup.