Not only was the email addressed to me, but to a number of local business people I know, but do not correspond with via that email address, if I do at all. Most are people I have met networking and have their cards, so I know who they are. Point 1: I could see all their email addresses.

It didn’t take much scanning to figure out point 2: I can guess with about 99% certainty who has been sending out emails with this list of addresses. I get them from him, too, and in this email account.

Point 3: Because of his method of blasting his email contact list “in the clear” using the “to:” and “cc:” fields, he now makes all his contacts vulnerable to be collected and used, increasing the quantity of SPAM traffic on the net, not to mention annoying (at the least) and infecting (at the worst) all those computers of your friends and family and business contacts.

Putting all those puzzle pieces together, he’s how you can save your friends, family and business contacts from more of such a fate:

1) If you feel inclined to send something out, put their addresses in the “Bcc:” field. Then any recipient will only see their names, and no one else, and therefore, if this email finds it’s way into someone’s email account where they farm email addresses to send out SPAM to, you’ve put up a simple firewall on that activity.

2) When you get that forwarded 20 bizillion times joke, or offer for Bill Gates to donate $1 to your favorite charity, do this: Right after you click on the “Forward” function of your email, hilight and delete all the other lists of emails that are visible in the body of the message. Besides saving someone from being SPAMed as a result of you inadvertently helping SPAMers collect their address, think how much better a reading experience those who receive it will have when they don’t have to scroll down 37 screens to read the relevant material?

Summary: Put email address for blast work in the “Bcc:” field and remove any visible lists of email addresses in items sent to you, if you forward them along!

Understanding the Digital Landscape

What is it?
How do you find it?
How do you use it effectively?

Computers save us time in everything from information storage and retrieval, calculation, graphic design, and report preparation. E-commerce allows our websites to keep our businesses running 24/7.

A failure at any point, from our office records to our online presence, can quickly snowball into a technological disaster, especially for a small business that doesn’t have an IT (information technology) staff in-house.

Seminar leader Curt Middlebrook, The Computer Whisperer, provides insights into the equipment, computer programs, and office and internet support services out there, and the people who provide them. You’ll learn how to maximize your online efficiency, and how to track the success of your online marketing.
This is a Lunch & Learn program, part of the Pinellas Park/Gateway Chamber of Commerce Success in Business Series. Your registration includes detailed information for evaluating every aspect of your company’s digital landscape, as well as a light lunch.

When : Tuesday, November 16; 11:30 am to 1:30 pm
Where : Park Station, 5851 Park Blvd., Pinellas Park, Room 202

Cost : $19.95 Pinellas Park/Gateway Chamber Members
$24.95 Non-members

Call Chamber Manager Larry Steinlauf at 544-4777 to register.
You must be registered to attend.

< a href="http://consumerist.com/2010/07/security-patching-for-xp-service-pack-2-ends-today.html">“Security Patching for XP Service Pack 2 Ends Today”.

It costs money to have teams of people, like fire fighters, employed for the “in case of emergency” situations. Yes, while they aren’t responding to the latest hacker attacks, they can be doing productive things with their product line, but consider Microsoft has two other fully functional PC operating systems they have to support as well: Vista and Windows 7.

Short translation: If your computer(s) is (are) running Windows XP, and you haven’t updated beyond Service Pack 2, then you are potentially at risk if the hackers figure out a new way to end around the security features of XP/SP2.

The good news? Make sure you’ve installed Service Pack 3. Microsoft will still have resources that keep that “vintage” of XP updated and patched for security holes.

In the long run, it’s notice to consider drafting your plan to upgrade your operating system software, and possibly your systems. I have been using Windows 7 on various machines for about a year now, the first installation on a very old computer, and I did it just to see if it worked…it did. Not that some of the others I’ve upgraded haven’t had a few issues with finding drivers, but it’s time. Besides, it runs fast like XP, yet is pretty like Vista!

If you need help laying out a plan and a budget for your business, contact me!

The “bad guys” on the Internet have long had a habit of finding the biggest security holes with the greatest potential impact. That’s one reason why the Apple computer line has remained effectively virus free (I caught at least one in the early Mac days (Scores), so don’t tell me there never has been any Mac viruses).

Over the years, operating systems have been “hardened”, so the bad guys have become creative and looked towards other avenues, to the point that Mike Cox in an article “Social media attacks dominate first half of 2010 malware trends” on eChannelLive tells us what is now going as as the biggest impact by the bad guys:

“Cyber criminals are putting increasing emphasis on using social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter as effective ‘spread mechanisms’ for malicious software,” said Arvid Gomez, Norman vice president, OEM and Technology. “In the past, they put nearly all of their efforts into compromising PC operating systems. As social media use becomes part of the fabric of our daily life, Internet users need to make certain they are taking the necessary steps to protect their privacy and security.”

He then goes on the discuss the koobface malware that has come through FaceBook since 2007. I encountered this at a client’s site about 4 months ago.

Another method to not only frustrate you, but also get some money, or your credit card number for use in, in the least case fraud, and the worst case, identity theft, are the “scareware” or “rasomware” programs that take over your system and basically demand that you buy their removal tools, which…are pretty much garbage anyhow. Mike has this comment:

Norman security experts also note that fake antivirus programs continued to plague many home PC and business users. Rogue antimalware programs have been around for a long time. In recent years however, they have become increasingly widespread, and represent a major problem. These programs can be difficult to eradicate, as they often consist of many different malicious elements.

I spent a better part of Wednesday ripping one of these attacks out of a laptop of a client’s office machine. I’ll say this: About 6 months ago, I could find these and get around them and eliminate them in about an hour. That was thanks to having seen several in a short time frame. They all had different file names, and loaded themselves from different places on the drive, but they all used the same methods. The one I ran into Wednesday had grown far smarter. I found it pretty quickly, but it had done many things to mask itself, and had placed some more hooks in the registry than I was used to deleting. Additional, I found a browser web director trojan in there, too. It may have arrived as a package deal, but it took 6 hours to find it, delete the offending things, much of the time was spent running scans, which found more things with each delete/reboot/scan cycle. It’s gone now and they are back to work, without having to just wipe the drive and begin all over, but it was a long day, when some elements have become smart enough to even force a load, regardless of some settings you applied to keep them from coming in a boot up.

I know many people don’t want to learn about the specifics of keeping your computers free of malware and other bad things, but your choice, as I see it, is to commit to some training by your local computer support person/people/staff/support company, or you can call us up and pay by the hour to undo what was maybe a 5 second decision on what to do about the question: “XXX is requesting to run. Do you want to block or allow it?” from your firewall protection. Because of the bad guys, you must get some education in how to keep from your system from becoming unavailable for a few hours (at best) to days (worst case).

Good rule of thumb: You can unblock accidentally prohibited functions. You will lose time and money if you let something in out of “I don’t have time to deal with this, I just want to get back to work!” frustration.

Read Mike’s article and practice intelligent computing!