Dear CEO scam is causing trouble

Dear CEO scam is causing trouble

If you own a website, chances are high you’ve received the Dear CEO scam email:

A scan of a Dear CEO scam letter trying to trick the user into replying

This scam has been hanging around for over years.

It reads:

Dear CEO,

(It’s very urgent, please transfer this email to your CEO. If this email affects you, we are very sorry, please ignore this email. Thanks)

We are a Network Service Company which is the domain name registration center in China.
We received an application from Hua Hai Ltd on May 14, 2019. They want to register ” _______________ ” as their Internet Keyword and ” _______________ .cn “” _______________.com.cn ” ” _______________ .net.cn “” _______________ .org.cn ” ” _______________ .asia “domain names, they are in China and Asia domain names. But after checking it, we find ” _______________ ” conflicts with your company. In order to deal with this matter better, so we send you email and confirm whether this company is your distributor or business partner in China or not?

Best Regards

**************************************

Mike Zhang | Service Manager

Cn YG Domain (Head Office)

This one came via a customer last week. It’s a bog standard scam designed to trick the reader into responding out of fear.  The  Dear CEO scam appears to be warning the web owner, they may have issues with their domain name. The sender buries the reader in a bunch of useless information making it difficult to parse what the message is actually saying. In fact, it’s just one more piece of junk hitting your inbox. I posted a podcast covering a few details about it here so, give it a listen.

But, the short answer to your question “should I be worried” is “NO. Delete it and move on with your day.  Email scams are a dime-a-dozen, but they are getting far more sophisticated, so use a lot of caution when dealing with any unsolicited email.  If in doubt, don’t respond and ask for a second opinion. You can always copy and paste the message into Google to see if it pops up as a reported scam.

 

WUAUSERV won’t stop – 3 fixes

WUAUSERV won’t stop article was updated Sept, 2020.

I’ve been plagued with the irritating WUAUSERV won’t stop issue.  Windows 10 store wouldn’t download / install new apps or updates. Deleting the updates, rebooting didn’t do a bit of good.

First fix for WUAUSERV won’t stop

In the past all it took was to fire up CMD in Admin and type in the following commands:

  • net stop wuauserv
  • cd %systemroot%
  • ren SoftwareDistribution SoftwareDistribution.old
  • net start wuauserv

And Bob’s your Uncle. Fire up the store and everything should work. However, a glitch cropped up that prevented Windows Update Service from shutting down. I worked through about 4 possible fixes, each increasingly invasive and complex, none of which worked.  They all tripped over WUAUSERV failing to stop.

Possible fix to WUAUSERV won’t stop – check your antivirus

This morning I was struck by a blindingly obvious solution. The culprit was my antivirus program, not windows. I use AVAST, so I disabled it and ran the CMD commands. In under 5 min, Windows 10 store was downloading all previous updates and installed new apps with no issues. I restarted AVAST, went back to the store and it still worked.

So, there you have it, problem solved.  However, I have to stress disabling your antivirus for any amount of time is a risk. I’d advice you to disable your internet connection first, then disable your antivirus and run the CMD commands. Restart your Internet and then start the store.

A third fix courtesy of a reader

Reader RON D wrote in with the following alternate fix:

Another way to do it is as follows —
  • From a command prompt, run “sc queryex wuauserv”
  • Look for the part where it says “PID: {number}” .. that is the process ID of wuauserv.
  • Then use pskill, or task manager, to terminate the process. 🙂
Apologies to Ron D for not having this in the comments section, but I was mid stream in switching to a new comment field so he was lost in the switch over.  Thanks for sending in this fix.

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