Everyone gets junk mail, stuff from spammers who hope you’ll click on one of the links in the body of the email. As you know, clicking links in mail from someone you don’t know (or even from someone you do know!) can be dangerous. Today we got an email from wikimedia.org for a certain kind of product that shall remain nameless. Wikimedia? Sending out spam? Nope. Let’s see who it was really from.
1. Hovering over the email in our junk folder brought up this supposed ‘source’:
Hovering on the email in the folder shows this.
2. Here is what the email looks like when you right click it in your inbox and choose ‘view message source’.
Gobbeldy gook, right? Nope. There is some vital information here.
3. Lots of numbers and letters but there’s one set of numbers that lead to the source of the email, in spite of what the address is on the email itself. This is who the supposed source of the email is:
This isn’t who sent the email.
4. This is the IP address of the real sender:
This is the real origin of the email.
5. Here is that IP address copied and pasted into the search line at Who.is :
Who.is can track down an IP address or a domain.
6. The search came up with this information for the REAL sender:
At last, the real origin of the email. Taiwan! Who knew? Who.is did.
7. By the way, here is the real IP address of Wikimedia.org:
Search for an IP source or search for the IP address of a domain.
This might seem like an exercise in futility but these few steps will help you track down the source of many things, not just spam email. Knowing how to check an IP address is important, at least we think it is, plus discovering that Wikipedia isn’t sending out spam is reassuring, isn’t it?
Once you know the tricks, you can feel safer and more confident online. These tricks can be used to track down spam but they can also sort out suspicious emails from strangers who pretend to be from another country. Is your email buddy really from England or Canada or are they actually in China or Africa? Now you’ll know exactly where they’re from.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading! Comments and questions are welcome but Likes on our Facebook page get immediate attention. Here’s the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook .
We’ll get right to the point of today’s post. Here’s an example of a bad and very dangerous email:
We expect that you’d recognize this as fraudulent. We hope you would anyway.
A credit card approval in sixty seconds, supposedly from First Premier Bank. A telltale clue is the address up on the top left. Do you think the First Premier Bank would use ‘edanasupermoistnep.com’ as their email address? Apparently, some people do, otherwise criminals wouldn’t bother sending out millions of these junk emails. If only one half of one half of a percent even answers one of these emails, the mission would be successful.
Here’s more:
Look down on the lower left to see where this link actually takes you.
The link in the email does NOT take you to First Premier Bank. Additionally, although the bank’s address in South Dakota seems to be correct, the Texas address isn’t. It’s a well known source for this and other suspicious emails. If you received an email like this one, you’d delete it right? We hope you would. If your credit isn’t that good, however, the attraction of a ‘Bad Credit’ card might be very attractive. Unfortunately, after a bit of digging, we discovered that a First Premier Credit card is the last credit card you’d want. With interest rates up to 79%, you’d almost be better off borrowing from a loanshark.
We did not click on any of the links here, obviously. It was a simple matter to block further emails from this address, at least it was on hotmail/live/outlook. We suggest you do the same.
Here’s an example of a real email from a bank.
This is a real email from one of our banks. Still, there are things to look out for in it.
We’re in Canada and we deal with several banks here. The Royal Bank is one of the largest banks in the world so we feel pretty safe doing some of our online banking with them. This email is simply a notification that our electronic statements are ready to be viewed online. No big deal, right? How do we know that this is a real, and safe, email? Well, it contains a real name, for one. The account numbers (blacked out) match ours and, as we said before, we actually have accounts with this bank.
Still, there are some things in this email that we should warn you about, primarily the contact telephone numbers. While the numbers shown in this email are virtually 100% safe, don’t use them to contact the bank. Why? Because sometimes hackers have access to some of your information but not all of it. Let’s say that someone knew we dealt with the Royal Bank and somehow obtained the last four digits of our account numbers. How could they do that? Maybe from a slip of paper blowing in the wind on garbage day, for one.
If this person needed the rest of our information, it wouldn’t take too much time to draw up an email like this and zip it off to us, complete with phone numbers that would be answered by that person. If you want to contact your bank, how would you find the real number? Easy. The number is on your bank statement, on your credit card and your debit card as well as on your cheques, at least in some cases. Additionally, make sure that you type in the url of the bank’s site, don’t trust the link. We are pretty sure that this email is completely safe but you never know, right? Why not take the extra bit of time to look up both the phone numbers and bank url yourself? If you get in the habit of doing that every time you contact one of your financial institutions, you’ll be well on your way to keeping your identity and your assets safe.
What have we learned? Mainly that you have to be suspicious of just about everything.
1. An email from your bank should have your name either in the body or in the subject line. Emails from Paypal, for instance, always have your name in the subject line. This simple precaution has virtually wiped out phishing emails attempting to steal your Paypal credentials.
2. Don’t click on links or phone the numbers in these emails, even if you are sure that the email is safe. Enter the bank’s URL yourself. Look for the bank’s telephone number in a bank statement, in the phone book or on your credit/debit card.
3. If you don’t deal with the bank that supposedly sent you the email, delete it. Most banks don’t use email to contact their customers except for simple statement notifications similar to the one we showed you above.
4. Above all, if a bank or credit card company has found ‘unusual activity’ surrounding any of your accounts, don’t you think they’d call you on the telephone? Think about it. Stay safe.
Thanks for reading! We’ll continue this series over the next few posts. We will share more thoughts and links on our Facebook page. Here is the link to it:Computers Made Simple on Facebook.
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One of our readers got into a real jam recently while travelling. From her description, it’s a situation that any one of us could encounter when we’re out of the country. Here’s what happened to her. See if it’s possible for you to be in the same situation.
1. Our reader uses Hotmail/Outlook, the free email service from Microsoft. Millions of people use the same service, including the people at Computers Made Simple. We should point out that she has used the same hotmail account for over ten years.
2. As she didn’t travel with a laptop or connected mobile device, she made use of various computers to access Hotmail. Because of this, the security people at Outlook/Hotmail locked up her account. Until she could prove who she was, she could not sign-in.
3. If you’ve ever used one of the free web-based email services, you’ll know that you are often required to be able to receive a code via an SMS/text message sent to your mobile phone. Guess what? Our reader had used her landline as her contact number but had it disconnected while she was away. Ooops! No way to receive the code.
Does any of this look familiar? Could you see yourself in this situation? Even if you do travel with a cell phone, you probably wouldn’t have the use of the same number. Many people purchase a SIM card in the country they are in but this will not let them use their old cell number.
Microsoft/Outlook expected our reader to know something about her last ten emails, the subject line or the sender, in order to prove she was the account owner. Is that something that you would be able to provide? After jumping through seemingly endless hoops, our patient reader did get back into her account. We weren’t much help at all, to be honest, but her experience made us question what we would do if we were in the same situation.
Locked out? What’s the solution?
Whether you use Hotmail or Gmail or Yahoo Mail, what trials and tribulations would you face if you were to head off on an extended trip through various countries? We can imagine that more than a few travellers have met with the same situation as the one in which our reader found herself. Yikes! The problem we face here at Computers Made Simple is that we don’t have an answer. Well, not a free one anyway. More on that later.
We’ve posted the question on Slashdot plus we’re doing some research into solutions. Once we find out how to avoid the problem, we’ll post the answer. Meanwhile, here are our suggestions:
1. Use a current and active cell phone number when setting up the security settings for your email account.
2. Leave that phone with a trusted relative/friend who will be able to receive any security code that you need to verify your identity.
3. Have your email forwarded to another account. This is only a partial solution but it could alleviate some of the tension when you can’t get into your main account.
That’s three but there are probably more that we can’t come up with right now. If you have some suggestions, let us know. Have you found yourself in the same situation? What happened? Did you manage to get back into your account? Let us know in a comment below or on our Facebook page. Here is the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook
Finally, there is a fool-proof solution to all of this but it isn’t free. In our next post we’ll explain how to become your own postmaster. It’s not that expensive but it takes a bit of technical know-how to set up.
Thanks for reading!
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We had an opportunity recently to stage an event where everyone was invited by email. While there are a few online sites that will create a nice looking invitation for you, and yes they are free, these places require access to your contact list. We we troubled by this right away. Once a site has access to your contacts, that leaves the door wide open for identity theft, no matter how secure the site tells you they are. We decided on an alternative.
We use Outlook for some of our email accounts. Outlook is actually two things so let’s sort it all out. Remember Hotmail? Well Outlook is the new Hotmail. Instead of hotmail.com, which still works by the way, MSN wants you to use outlook.com to access your online email. That’s one Outlook. The other Outlook is the email app/software that is part of Windows. If you use your ISP’s email, which we don’t recommend, Outlook is what you need to access it. There are other email clients but most people use Outlook. It’s a standalone app, not linked to a browser. Got it so far?
TIP: Another reason for using Outlook for the invitations is this: They won’t end up in a junk mail folder. Your contacts know you and get your emails in their inbox. If you use an online event invitation service, more than likely the email won’t even be read by the recipient, even if it says that it’s from you. Their email provider may sense that something is amiss and place the email in their junk folder.
Today we are talking about the website email, outlook.com. If you use outlook, hotmail, or ‘live’ for sending and receiving emails to your contacts, you can also create decent looking invitations using it alone, no need to use a website where you have to sell your soul to invite people to a party. Here’s how you do it:
1. Once you’re in your email account, click New to create an email. You can either add contacts now or after you’ve got the invitation designed.
2. Up at the top, left of center, look for the word Options. Click on it and make sure that Rich Text is checked:
Rich text makes it all happen.
3. Once rich text is set up, look to the right and use the icons to choose your font size, typeface, type colour, etc. Here are the icons you can use:
Bold, Italics, etc. They’re all here.
TIP: Set up everything and just start typing. If you look for your cursor, it won’t be there and if you click inside the email, you will lose all of your settings. Remember that.
4. Once you have the words, highlighting and colors ready, you can add photos to your invitation. Here’s how:
‘Picture inline’ will add a photo right inside your email invitation.
5. Here’s what our lame but very quick attempt looks like:
For something that is free and private and safe from identity theft, it’s not too bad, is it?
6. Once you get it all set up, make sure you save it as a draft so you don’t lose it. Then add your recipients, including yourself, and send it out. Outlook/hotmail usually has restrictions on the number of emails you can send at once so you may have to do this all in more than one step .
TIP: Why send it to yourself? Any important email should also include a copy sent to you, either in the email address slot or as a Cc/Bcc (carbon copy or blind carbon copy). That way you know if the email was sent properly. (Bcc means that no one but you can see that you sent the email to yourself or to anyone you Bcc it to.)
You’re done! We’re quite sure that someone with design talents can come up with something better than our effort.
Thanks for reading! Questions, comments and suggestions are all welcome. Comment below or Like us on our Facebook page and comment there. Here is the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook
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Although we don’t get nearly as many as we used to, some very dangerous emails still make their way into our inbox. Which ones are those? Emails with attachments, that’s what we’re writing about today. We’ll give you a few tips on how to stay safe and protect yourself from these malicious emails.
1. What’s an ‘attachment’?
Most of the time, an email is just words that someone has typed, no different than a text message. Some emails looks much like a webpage, specifically those from companies that you’ve chosen to deal with or receive ads from. Nothing much to worry about there, right? Complications arise when someone attaches a file to an email. Let’s say you’re sending a resume to a company that’s hiring. You could copy and paste your CV into the body of the email or you could attach the whole file to the email. The format for this file may vary, from PDF to .doc to .docx, etc., but the full file is sent with the email. At the other end, the person who opens that email has to download the file and open it on their computer. (Some online email providers allow documents to be opened with their email program but not all do this.) Hopefully, you’ll see where this is going. What if that attachment isn’t a simple Word document?
2. How do I know if an email has an attachment with it?
If you use Outlook/Hotmail, it will look like this:
The icon of a paper clip means these emails have attachments.
3. What are the dangers of email attachments?
Some types of files, zips for instance, contain executable files within them. An executable file is one that actually does something, as opposed to a photo that you simply look at. Some other types of files, pdfs for example, can have an executable file hidden inside them. You are not able to send unzipped executable files any more, most email providers, if not all, have chosen to eliminate ‘exe’ files as attachments. This doesn’t mean that you’re safe, just that you have to be more careful.
If you somehow get an .exe file and click on it, you could be allowing a virus to take control of your computer or installing a key-logging program which will remember everything you type then send that data to an identity theft gang; any number of bad things, in other words. That’s why attachments can be dangerous.
4. How do I know if an attachment is safe?
Here are some simple rules to follow when faced with an email that has an attachment:
A. Do you know the sender?
B. If you know the sender, is the attachment described in the email? “I’m attaching a copy of my latest resume. Could you check it over for me?”, something like that.
C. If you know the sender, does the subject line of the email look like something they would say? “Hey! Look at this hot pic I just took!” is an example of something you shouldn’t open, let alone download the attachment.
D. Are you expecting an email with an attachment from someone you know or a company you deal with. Is the company you contacted sending you the manual for something you bought? Is a government agency sending you a new tax form? Did you request something from this person or company?
You’ll have to answer these questions yourself but A. is a definite NO, right? C is very popular now, specially on social media sites but often in emails. Basically, you have to use your head. If you delete an email that has an attachment, don’t worry about it. The rule here is to protect your computer and your identity first. If the attachment was legitimate, that person or company can always send it again.
TIP : Outlook/hotmail has a cool feature that locks attachments and pictures in emails from persons or companies that are not on your contact list or who you haven’t certified as being safe. Here’s what this looks like:
This is why we suggest that you use an online email client.
Don’t know the sender? They’re not on your contact list? Outlook protects you from the hidden dangers in these emails. You have two choices besides deleting these. If you know the person or company, click ‘Wait, it’s safe!’. If you’re uncertain, click ‘I’m not sure. Let me check’. If you choose this one, Outlook shows you a bit more of the email but still keeps some things locked down. In the photo above, there are two attachments and we know for sure that these are malware/viruses or other nasty things. Besides, we’ve never heard of the sender. We’d have to go way out of our way to get infected by this email but, unfortunately, people do this every day. Now you know the dangers.
Thanks for reading! Let us know if you have questions or suggestions about this or anything else ‘techish’. Like us on Facebook so you can keep up with our posts and tech tips: Computers Made Simple on Facebook
a little bit of hi-tech, a little bit of common sense and a lot of fun
