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Careless Facebook profiling can lead to Identity Theft!

PaulFebruary 19, 2009

I just got in contact with a old friend from High school and another friend of mine suggest the new friend. I was looking at her profile and couldn’t believe what I saw:

As you can see this is not good I was amazed at how many people are giving out there birthdays and who they are married to to friends and family. So we heard about how people are claiming they need help or are in need of desperate money. This is nothing new, as you know people are having hard economy times and people are using the social engineering to scam people out of money.

I feel that I should warn people the important necessity. You shouldn’t be broadcasting your DOB and who your married to to your friends, just in case they get hacked.

Recent activity indicates that identity thieves are hacking into trustworthy profiles before selling on the login details to interested parties. This information is used by spammers to target legitimate users, posting misleading links on their “walls” – personalized message boards.

[Via Computing.Co.UK]

This deservese a little mind and a lot of understanding. By the spammers hacking into facebook accounts they have the chance to scam or spam people with links to possibly have a virus or trojan installer.

[ad#ad2-right]For example This one blog talks about the Virus:

Symantec’s Norton Antivirus software has flagged this as a “high risk” Infostealer.Gampass virus. More info on this particular Trojan vius is here. (Note: Symantec warns the risk level is “low,” since it originated in 2006, but this new Facebook email is a new iteration of the same virus.)

You might be inclined to click on this link because it’s from a friend, but they did not intentionally send it to you — and yes, their Facebook photo is attached, too.

[Via Sync-blog]

Now I went searching through my friends list and also found this little bit of information. As you can see this one is asking for people to use there account to scam people out of money. They could use this to find out even more information of the Other partner and make you believe your talking to the real deal. Saying they need money because they are stuck over seas or something like that. I’ve seen this on other blogs where people have sent money to “friends” but are actually people who are the scammers. Then if you send the money you are out of luck with your money and possibly your friends to. I am sure there are more but this is prime examples of what you shouldn’t do and why.

So what can you do to prevent Identity Theft and/or being scammed?

Roboform Review — A Password Manager that will help protect your passwords from key loggers and other such phishing sites. I strongly recommend it to to all who are security minded. (Never use the same password for all your accounts)

Are you worried about your identity? — This is good information in checking out sites that might be questionable. You can find out what type of site it by using your brains.

Old Phish Become New again — This is blog post about twitter and what may happen if you did give out your password. This is a good example of why you never should give out your password to third party websites.

Twitter Spammers a getting more smarter — This is also good example of what happens when you see become friends with someone who isn’t real. You could be the next to be spammed and/or impersonated.

If you follow some common steps you to could prevent from being the victim or getting your Identitiy stolen. Some things to remember is Never tell anyone your Birthday the whole date like someone did on twitter a few days ago. It’s nice that they are growing older but that gives people that much more information to use to steal your money or your idenitiy. Think before you give out any personal information like Age, Married, who your married to and anything that might be used to be able to access your account or your impersonate you. Remember only you can prevent from being scammed or lossing your identity, you wouldn’t want to have to pay for your mistakes.

Understanding Adsense for the Beginner

PaulFebruary 7, 2009

So you have a website and you’d like the site to pay for itself. That can be arranged it however depends on your website performance. You see you won’t make a lot of money if you don’t have several things going for you. I thought I share with you my experience with making money through Adsense. As you saw, I made enough money to pay for the website for 5 years. It isn’t hard to make money it is however very difficult to keep getting the money. Most people don’t know the tricks to making money with Google’s Adsense.

I’m here to help you out a little with understanding it and getting even more money from your adsense. So here we are 3 months into to putting Adsense seriously on my site and let’s take a look shall we:

As you can see I started off quite slowly as I figured out how to best do it but gained momentum after that. First Month I made $17.19 and the Second Month I made $45.57, the last month I made $64.99 totaling $127.75 leaving me with 16.75$ from the few previous months that I tinkered with Adsense. So where do you start? I found that to be the hardest part, because of the complexity of where I could put the ads. I tried having strips breaking up the text in my blog post that really didn’t get me hardly any clicks. Then I started to incorporate the Adsense into the posts. I learned how to do it through a great blog post and I’ll talk about that later. Here’s what you need to know right now though:

Create good content — This goes without saying that if you don’t have good content people will never find your site. There are a multitude of ways to create content. Some of the most useful for me is How-to, finding a Niche, and Also just blogging about what you passionate about. These will often draw people to your website.

Gjaylaramieet people to link to your post — This will help with search engines because they do some math to figure out if your a real site and how trustworthy your site is on the internet.

Use Microblogging — It is well known people use Twitter, Friendfeed, and others a like to tell people what they post about. It can be great place to help promote your blog and get people to come more and more to your site.

Try not to annoy the users with Ads — This is the most important if you want people to come back to your site you should make sure you don’t send people away from your site. People will not want to come back if you annoy them to much. So it is essential that you keep them happy.

Find a good blog theme — A good theme helps bring people to your site by making it easier to read and find what they are looking for. You might also consider making a sneeze page to keep people coming back to your site. This will help your readers and make it more of your own. You might also want to buy a theme for your blog sooner or later.

With These tips and tricks you too could be on your way to having a great blog. I would be willing to bet that soon I will be triple that amount if I keep up with what I am doing. I hope you tell people about this blog and let people know how good this blog is for you. Remember only you can prevent virus infections.

People coming from Sites that don’t exist

PaulJanuary 28, 2009

So I woke up today checking out my sites, and looking outside. So As I was checking my Stats for my blog. I cam across a referring site that brought Supposedly Two people to my site. I looked at the URL for the site:

http://trojan.fiftystatesclassifiedads.com/index.php

[ad#ad2-right]So after seeing the “trojan” Prefix and I am wondering if this was an attempt by Malware to infect my domain. So I go check this domain out. I got to it and I get a 404. I then do a Cache Check with OPENDNS. I also Then decided to see if it was even Registered domain by the doing a Whois. So I am opening this up to people who might know. I did do some research and here’s wha I’ve found out so far.

According to How2hack, they talk about how people want privacy and that it might be someone who does not want to be found. I tend to agree with them, Privacy for Privacy sake is good but if you want to be private you would you even be checking out websites knowing people will want to find out who really is coming to your site. The How2Hack site also talks about how this might happen and I see where they are coming from.

This was the only site I could find that even looked like it was relevant to what I was searching for. I don’t see how someone can come to my site saying they were referred by another site and that site does not exist? Anyone want to try to answer this question and give insight as to why this would happen?

Twitter Spam bots are hot to trot: http://gentai.com/revenge1

PaulDecember 29, 2008

Ok so I was curious why I all of the sudden got people joining my list. each one I look at just to see who these people are have only one twitter message saying this from two different accounts:

and this one also

and once you click that link it takes you to this website and see what they want you to do:

These people are trying to get you to click on there links and [ad#ad2-left-1]get you give them email accounts. This has been socially engineered to look like it is real. I gave them a 10 min email account to see what they sent me. It was a link to there porn site. Wanting me to give them my credit card or checking account information and to join there site. I don’t think so, not this old dog. Anyways if you get this spam from a user you might just want to block these people. Some of these people have followers. Hmm I don’t know about these people. I guess they want you to send an email to other people to spam them also. How nice of them to social engineer this scheme so you can make your friends and family mad at you and probably not even talk to you. So that is why it is good not to auto-follow people when they subscribe to your twitter account. Some people have that set. Some people just don’t learn. I am sure some people will like this site for other reasons but please don’t spam people with this little site. Please don’t put people on that list.

Getting better speeds from your Cellular broadband!

PaulDecember 24, 20083 Replies

If your like me and you want to get better than expected speeds from web pages loading. It sometimes frustrates people that the speed of web page loading is slow to some people others like me always expect it to be slow. This is the downside of having a mobile internet, because of the locations of the cell towers and if there is any interference to or from the tower. This is always going to be a problem with this technology, if something is going on the network it will undoubtedly slow you down. So what can you do to speed up the web page loading and other web site functions. Here are some great list of available ways to get a little more speed from your modem:

Google Gears — This is one of those little extensions that will Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance. Although this is something you can use on all your website but if you like to go to certain websites alot for games or online interactions, who use JavaScrip will speed up your internet experience.

FasterFox — This is for Firefox only. What it does is : Prefetch Links, Page Load Timer, and Block Popups. This starts caching some of the pages to better help with web browsing. Although this is good by itself. I find that it is better to use this with some of the other programs.

RabbIT— is a web proxy that speeds up web surfing over slow links by doing: Compress text pages to gzip streams. This reduces size by up to 75%, Compress images to 10% jpeg. This reduces size by up to 95%, Remove advertising, Remove background images, and Cache filtered pages and images. This is pretty good for web access and seems to work well with Broad Band modem.

[ad#tmi-left-1]These are a few that I found to better help people who have cellular broadband to get a boost of speed from there service. Although this might not work on all networks due to the restrictions of some of the network policies this will at least help out with some. I’ll be trying this out on my Cricket modem later this month to see if it is good for that service.