Email tricks & Camera clicks
By; George Horton
Some day soon it could be a criminal act not to have security software on your computer. You doubt this? Consider the latest viruses circulating the web. The recent MyDoom Worm has become the fastest spreading virus ever. This worm uses a form of Social Engineering to fool people into thinking the message was returned because it could not be delivered and trusting people’s curiosity to get them to open the attachment. It is working. Please be very suspicious about file attachments as there is little room for blind faith on the web.
You must have an anti-virus tool and an Internet firewall. If you cannot afford to buy them, then by all means use the free ones. I use AVG anti-virus and Zonealarm firewall. Both have tutorials, and are available free for home use on the web.
I am wont to mention any names, but will say that the email servers that are providing anti-virus software that bounces virus infected emails, should stop immediately, as they are becoming participants in spreading the virus. By bouncing viruses at people who are not infected, they become part of the denial of service attacks. If you do receive one of these infected attachments do not open it. Delete it immediately, update your anti-virus program and run a complete systems scan.
Watch out for these words in the subject line; error, status, server report, mail transaction failed, mail delivery system, hello, hi, and especially any words in broken English, likely to be coming from foreign countries.
Although most of us are used to short and sweet email messages when using attachments, these days the more information provided the better. If you do not know what the attachment is do not open it, even if it is from someone you know. In other words, unless you have prior knowledge that it is coming, don’t trust it.
This is going to be tough on business, but is easily overcome by calling or emailing in advance to let them know an attachment is coming, or by having a catch phrase you both recognize, or better yet, simply paste the message text into the body of the email.
The authors of the MyDoom worm let loose another worm called DoomJuice. It infects Windows based machines that are already infected by the MyDoom worm. It does not come in your email, but instead uses a backdoor to your machine that was installed by the MyDoom worm. DoomJuice scans random Internet addresses to find machines that are infected and loads itself without you noticing. The new worm still launches the denial of service attacks, but also has the original source code, making it impossible to pinpoint its origin. Because thousands of computers will have the original source code, the authors of these viruses will likely not be caught and the attacks will probably continue forever. ('Denial of service' means trying to overload the Websites server by repeatedly reloading the front page of the website).
If you are ready to buy a digital camera, here are a couple of things you should know. The ‘megapixel’ count is not the most important factor in digital photography. That is the ability of the camera to capture the most dots per inch. The more detail, the better, especially for printing. However, if you are mostly printing 5 x 7’s you can stay with the 3.2 megapixels variety. The most important feature is the camera lens. The ability of the camera to capture light, the type of zoom, and the color quality will be determined by the lens. Also, an optical zoom gives a true lens based quality to your pictures, as apposed to a digital zoom that trims the image digitally. Some cameras have up to a 10x optical zoom. You may want to pick up a rechargeable battery as well.
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George Horton
george@kcnb.ca