Category: Wikipedia

TINYURL being used by scammers and hackers — How to prevent it!!

Paul

With Phishing attempts going on with the TINYURL redirect website, I thought I would show you how you could prevent from going to a site you don’t want. Tinyurl.com has a great little feature, although it is a feature based on your cookies. It however will help prevent you from going to a site that you don’t know anything that about. It’s called the Preview Feature, and is available to any user who wants to use it.

previewtiny

As you can see if you enable it and you go to a click on a tinyurl, you will see this:

http://tinyurl.com/6t7ukk

previewtiny1

[ad#ad2-right]As you can see, if you click any TINYURL links you will automatically be told where that link is redirecting you to. This however only works with there being a cookie left behind in your system to let tell Tinyurl that is has to show the link first. So if you clean your cookies out from time to time, you will need to enable it every time after you clean the browser cookies. This will help prevent you from being phished because you will be able to tell if it is the right site in the first place. If not then you don’t have to visit that site. This should be enabled on all Short URL Sites, I hope they make it a mandatory for any site that redirects. This would help stop phishing and scammers because they can’t hide behind unknown url. Only time will tell though, these sites are always going to have problems but this would solve so many problems.

Spammers defies Bill Gates ‘magic Solution’

Paul

Sopho’s published statistics and I thought I would talk about it here.   Bill Gates promised to have a Magic Solution 5 Years ago.   Sophos Also provide a Chart of the Dirty Dozen:

dirty-dozen-q408

Sopho’s also is claiming that “US retains its crown as spam king“.    I don’t think so because of the the Other 32.4%.   The US can’t be the main culprit to spam.    So What was this ‘Magic Solution’ that they promised 5 years ago?

Microsoft has two techniques in mind for solving the spam issue, both based on the premise of changing the economics of email to place a greater burden on the sender.

[Via CBR]

Microsoft did have some good ideas but they wouldn’t work for right now because the first part of the ‘magic Solution’ was to add  mathmatical question to each and every email we sent out.   I know that this wasn’t going to work because hackers have already created a systems to get around the captcha verification.

[ad#ad2-right]Spammers of course are the ones  who is sending out the spam but they have people who write virus software, which I consider a hacker.  You see they want to infect systems so they can easily send out even more email.  When a system becomes a Botnet they usually are used to send out email.  If your curious as to what a Botnet is Check out the Wikipedia entry for further details.  So they need these systems to be able to send out spam, and other types of email phishing.   Most of the time a spammers  spam just for money because they make money by spamming people.   I hate spam because it clogs up our email accounts with unwanted emails.

So Did Microsoft come up with a fix?  According to Sopho’s they seem to be dropping percentages from 2004 to now in the US.   I have to wonder if Microsoft proclomation made them worry and go outside of the US.   I don’t think it will stop in fact, I suspect with the economy like it is we will undoubtedly start seeing even more spam and even more computer infections.

In order to prevent yourself from viruses and computer infections, you will need to install Anti-virus software and a Good firewall, not just the Default Windows Firewall.  This will greatly increase your chances of not getting a virus and possibly help prevent some of the spam.   You should also tell your associates or customers the benefits of preventive updates.  You should also remind people about not clicking links in emails and also not everything you read is true.

Are you worried about your identity?

Paul

So after the fiasco of the other day, I decided I will talk about security and why you should worry about new websites that you have never heard of.   People are not worrying about there identity and keeping there identity safe.   You see whenever someone signs up to a service without thinking about their password being stored or even used maliciously.   You see when most people don’t use more than one or two passwords for all there accounts and then you use the same password with a new website.  Are you asking for your identity to be stolen?  In one of my previous blog posts I talked about not having any privacy on the internet.

So How can you protect your privacy?

When ever I come across a site that I don’t know about and I want to protect my account from being compromised I find out what I can from several places:

  1. [ad#ad2-right]Google — Yes this is quite common to use to find out about what people are saying asking the keywords like is it a scam or what people are saying about the site?  This can be very useful to make sure I don’t get scammed by a company for instants the Nationwide marketing scam.  Although this is really important when you get things that sound questionable.  This can be very useful with regards to keep your wallet safe.

  2. Whois Network — If there is a site you’ve not heard about and have a question about it you can always do a whois lookup.   This is a great resource for finding out how long the site has been up and who owns it?  The problem with this is most people who have a website aren’t worried about security and privacy.   So you make sure this site isn’t a phish site or to make sure the site isn’t being used improperly.

  3. Sitetiki —  a good site to do some research.   It’s a wiki like Wikipedia but for websites and if they are good or bad.  It also has a spammer list for people to watch and make sure not to go to.  These sites are usually redirect spam sites uses for email.

What about Personal privacy?

With this I also want to talk about security online to prevent people from gaining access to your accounts online by guessing the password.  Some sites also like to phish for your account information and use the information gained to take control over your account so here are some useful links to help protect your account information:

  • [ad#cricket-right-ez]Roboform — This is good for generating a really good random password and remembering it.  This will keep people from guessing the password and also make it easy to come up with another good password.  This will also fill out the required site forms that usually use to sign into website.

  • A good VPN Service —  If your like me and you have to use free wifi from time to time and want to make sure you have privacy on the net.  This is good for security on any open wifi network and you don’t want to have anyone watch you while your browse online.  In case someone is interested what VPN’s are used for here is the link to let people understand it better.

  • Perfect Paper Passwords — This is coming from Security now Episode 115 and he talks about this to better help people make the best possible passwords.  Listen to it and it will help you understand more about security.

These are just a few ways to prevent people from gaining access to an account.   After doing some research on this and thinking about this in bigger detail.   I would like to make a public apologies about the fiasco yesterday and what happened.  In all truthfulness everything didn’t seem right with the doings of the going on with website.   I also was worried about the twitter spam it was sending out as you started the service.   I didn’t know until later that it was a real person trying to make a product twitter users could really use.   I have learned from my experience and I will work harder next time and not be so quick to act next time.   If I was the company that bought that site, I’d also offer a job to both of them for being intuitiveness on coming up with a really good product.

You tracking Santa, here’s how!

Paul

So as Christmas is almost upon us we are faced with the problem of tracking Santa.
Norad decided to start tracking Santa Clause, Here’s the Wikipedia information from the site:
[ad#ad2-right]

In 1955, a Colorado Springs-based Sears store ran an advertisement encouraging children to call Santa Claus on a special telephone hotline. Due to a printing error, the phone number that was printed was the hotline for the Director of Operations at the Continental Air Defense (CONAD). Colonel Harry Shoup took the first Santa call on Christmas Eve of 1955 from a six-year old boy who began reciting his Christmas list. Shoup didn’t find the call funny, but after asking the mother of the second caller what was happening, then realizing the mistake that occurred, he instructed his staff to give Santa’s position to any child who called in.
[Via Wikipedia]

So how can you track Santa, here are a few ways to keep up to date on where he is around the world:

These are just a few good website to watch him travel around the world.   Are you tracking Santa?  Because I am!!

Disaster preparation 101 — Data backup

Paul

In this one I will talk about Disaster, it happens to all of us from time to time. A fire, a earthquake, a stolen laptop or any number of ways. So what happens to your data, is it stored on the laptop? Is it important very sensitive data? Could you get fired if you lost that data?

[ad#ad2-right]These are all questions you must ask yourself when you have laptop. How do you backup your data or even do you have a backup? Having seen this with my own clients, I must wonder if there are people out there who just don’t care. I had a client the other day who gotten a virus and this was a really mean virus. Deleted some very important files when you tried to clean the virus out. She called me in a panic because she couldn’t load up windows? I asked if she had any backups, she said “what’s a backup” . So I sat there discussing this with the client for over 20 minutes. Finally she started to understand, she said she had the OEM Backup DVD but nothing else. She also said she needed help with getting data off the computer. I told her that I would be able to come the next day and I was lucky the virus didn’t do anything else to her data. We were able to retrieve the data from her system. That is where I start my rant , Why would anyone not have backup of there most important data?

So How do you backup your data? This is controversial and somewhat depends on how much people want to spend to keep there data safe and not loose pictures or music. There are several ways to do it, each way has it’s pitfalls or short comings and requires a little more effort:

Kinds of Backup

Hard Medium – DVD, CD, External Hard drive

Although,  The hard medium is usually used that doesn’t mean you can have a backup other than hard.   Here are some ways to back up on the internet.

Internet Medium:

  • Jungle Disk — Provides online storage through the Amazon s3 service.   Only pay for what you use.   It works well with most Operating system.  I’ve used it on Vista so it is really nice.

  • Carbonite Online backup –Another good Online storage.

  • Some Other Online backup — Here a list from Amazon to better help you find the type of software that you might need.

These are just a few options, if you want to look for other you can.  The important thing to do is BACKUP because if you need some data that gets wiped or destroyed.  You will be kicking yourself for not backing up.