The worst virus I have ever seen is the fake anti-virus software that downloads itself through browser plugin vulnerabilities called "Win 7 Antispyware 2012" among many other names.  When it gets onto your computer it pretends to be a virus scanning utility that has found several viruses on your computer.  It shuts down all of your programs and blocks them from running.  It itself is the virus.

It convinces you that you need to pay a fee to remove the viruses on your computer and prompts you for your credit card.  This is where many of the unaware give up their credit card information to the hackers.  This particular customer had done this and I advised him to immediately call his credit card company and have the numbers changed on his account as well as protest the charge.

The virus had dug itself in deep and since the computer was only used to surf the net there was no data or programs on it worth saving.  The easiest solution was to just reinstall the operating system.  After the fresh install several programs were installed to prevent future attacks.

A New York county recently made several last-minute changes to their property tax bills.  This would mean the careful and quick updating of several hundred thousand records so that the bills would read correctly when taxpayers went to view them on the county's website.  We worked as part of a team which created and ran the necessary database queries to keep everything running smoothly.

This task was similar to a project we worked on earlier in the year where a change to the law for STAR exemptions caused sweeping changes to have to be made to both the data and the format of the tax bills themselves.

A New York township recently had several thousand old property record cards scanned to reduce paper clutter in their office.  In New York State each property has what is called a tax map number.  The tax map numbers were not written on the cards in the proper format and the company which scanned the cards tried to do the best they can to name the files appropriately.  We stepped in to write a program which determined the correct tax map number by cross-referencing the filename with the town's property database.  After the files were matched up, they were then renamed, copied to the main image store, and the town's database was updated with a pointer to the image.

The Lowville Food Pantry's name is self-descriptive.  It provides food for people who need it in the Lowville area.  The pantry did not have a website and wanted something simple to advertise their services and current donation needs.  They asked and we delivered.  The website features a list of needed items, food drive calendar, links to major donors, a simple contact form and map for driving directions.