Secure your e-mail

We all use anti-virus and anti-spyware programs to help fight online threats but what about those we willfully let in with our e-mail clients. Here are a few tips you can use to make incoming and outgoing e-mail a little safer.

1. Don't allow your e-mail client to completely render HTML e-mails.
It is much safer to have your e-mail client render your incoming e-mails with limited HTML or better yet as plain text. Allowing full HTML rendering of your e-mail leaves you open as a valid recipient of spam or the risk of getting successfully phished by some malicious security cracker or identity thief.

2. Avoid free e-mail services.
Your POP3 account from your ISP is more secure than free e-mail services such as YahooMail, GMail and other free e-mail providers. ISP's usually require encryption to send and recieve e-mail and they do not sell or share your information.

3. Don't Access your e-mail account from an unsecured network.
We all want to check e-mail or banking while we're away on vacation. Often internet cafe's and free wireless access points are unsecure leaving your data open to the public.

4. Safe guard your address book users.
Address books are handy to send e-mail to all your friends and family with a simple click, however many trojans are designed to use your stored address book to send malicious code to all your users.

5. Use BBC when sending e-mail to multiple recipients.
Using BBC when sending e-mail to everyone in your address book ensures that each
user sees only his or her own e-mail address. Other recipients e-mail addresses are
hidden.

Netbooks. Are they worth it?

Dell, HP, Acer are all selling the new Netbooks. I'll review them from 2 points of view.

As a computer user I find the netbooks small, extemely low end, and usually running a low end obsolete operating system. The screen size is difficult to read, the keyboard smaller still. With no cd or dvd rom, limited usb ports or the power to properly power external hardware at 299.00 its no bargin.

As a computer repair technician they are horrible to work on.

Conclusion:
Buy a Netbook, external powered DVD burner, external powered external hard drive or

Buy a low end laptop. Most laptops today start at 399.00 and include a current operating system, DVD burner, ample usb ports and a screen you can see.

I would love to see some feedback on this subject.

Is your Website Infected?

This week a new round of javascript injections are infecting legitimate websites. The active exploit site uses a name similar to the Google Analytics domain (google-analytics.com), which provides website stat services to webmasters.

If a user loads the site with the injection code they get passed onto a site that tries to exploit Internet Explorer or Firefox vulnerabilities to infect the users computer with malware. If the false site can't find a browser vulnerability, it tries to trick the user into downloading a Trojan.

All Webmasters should check their site regularly for any code they know shouldn't be there.
Most injection exploits can be found in the head section or just before the ending Body tag in your web pages.

They are almost always javascript and can contain an iframe.
If your using any scripts that accept user input in forms, guestbooks ect, be sure to secure them. Escaping characters is essential.

There are always going to be new exploits. Anti-virus companies, software developers and Microsoft, Apple and the rest all try to patch these exploits but it's really up to the user to be sure they are secure.