Category Archives: Security

Download Your Facebook Albums with O Drive

October 20, 2014 Computers Made Simple Leave a comment

O Drive is a new offering from www.odrive.com . Through a comment on one of our posts, this one, we found odrive to be an easy way to download your own Facebook photos. Easy is good, free is good and odrive is both. We have reservations about it, however, and we’ll highlight those later on.

NOTE:

1. Odrive does NOT download your friend’s photo albums in Facebook, just your own. If you want to save someone else’s albums on Facebook, you’ll have to use one of our other suggestions.

2. Odrive will download all of your photo albums including the ‘My Photos’ and ‘Photos of You’ albums as well as those albums that you’ve named yourself. Keep in mind that the Photos of You album is comprised of photos that are posted by other people, ones that you are tagged in, right?

Odrive is an app that you download to your computer, it’s not a cloud storage site like Dropbox, at least as far as we can see. Think of it as a linking service, one that syncs the items to which you allow it access. Your Facebook albums are still on Facebook’s servers but now, using odrive, they can also be on your computer. Let’s say you want to delete some photos from Facebook but you also want to save copies of those photos on your computer after you delete them. Instead of saving them one by one, it’s easy to download them all at once with odrive. Here’s how:

Once odrive is installed, choose Facebook from the dropdown list of apps it can access, enter your username and password, click yes to allow odrive to access certain parts of your information and you’re done. Click on the various folders that appear on your computer and odrive will sync your pics with the Facebook servers. Depending on how many photos you have online, this could take a while.

In your Facebook folder that appears in odrive, find the album that you want to delete. Double click the folder to open it, wait for all of the photos to sync (you’ll know a photo is synced because it will have a blue check mark on it.) Once all the photos have check marks, go back to the list of albums, right click the one you want to delete and choose ‘Copy’. Then, ‘Paste’ that album onto your desktop, for instance, or into a folder that is separate from odrive’s folders. Once you do that, the photos are in three places; on the Facebook servers, in your odrive folder AND on your desktop.

Go back to Facebook and delete the album. Once you do that, the photos in that album are, theoretically, only on your desktop. Keep in mind that Facebook keeps copies of everything you post on your profile. Remember that and choose your actions accordingly. Pretty much everything you do on Facebook will be there for a very long time, even if you delete it.

TIP: We repeat: since odrive syncs everything on its own, you will want to copy and paste the album folders to another location on your computer. If you delete a photo from the Facebook site, it will disappear from your odrive folder the next time the syncing process occurs. Keep this in mind.

Odrive can, if you let it, sync more than your Facebook photo albums. Right now they list Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Gmail, etc. Here’s a screencap of the apps odrive can sync now:

Photo of odrive syncable apps. — **Right now there seem to be 10 storage apps that can be synced with odrive. Which ones you choose to use are up to you.**

Remember that these cloud storage folders will show up on your computer should you allow odrive to access them. Consider the gigabytes of information that will be sucked from the cloud and shot into your odrive folders. Dropbox alone is up to two gigabytes of data, Gmail can be almost unlimited, OneDrive and Google Drive too. Does it really make sense to have everything in two places? While odrive only syncs folders that you click on, the possibility still exists for massive data duplication in the cloud and on your computer.

On a similar note, how secure is the data on your own computer? If you lose your laptop and you’ve synced even one of these cloud apps, everything that was up in the void is now on your computer, accessible to anyone who has access to your computer. You’ve probably read our previous posts on cloud storage security and how we feel about its security. Microsoft, for one, is well-known for snooping into your data that is stored in its OneDrive as well as doing the same thing in your email. If you give odrive access to these and other online storage folders, not only do you have to worry about how private this stuff is online but also about the consequences of someone else gaining access to your computer. Of the two, as long as your important data is encrypted in the cloud using your own encryption system, we think you’re safer leaving things in the cloud rather than having that data in two separate locations.

We found odrive to be fast, easy to use and useful for one thing, downloading your own Facebook albums. To that extent we recommend it. We would suggest changing your password once your albums are downloaded and stored in a separate folder on your computer. Doing this, odrive becomes a single-use tool. Just make sure you’ve synced all of the photo folders before you change your password. You’re on your own as far as using it to sync your cloud folders. We don’t recommend that but if you can see a reason where this syncing would be helpful, go ahead.

Thanks for reading! Comments and questions are welcome. If you’ve used odrive, please share your experiences with our readers. Use the comment form below or ‘Like’ our Facebook page and comment there. Here is the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook.

Phishing Scams, Rip Offs, Scam, Spam

Ten Ways to Spot a Scam

March 24, 2014 Computers Made Simple Leave a comment

Photo of Stop Scams photo — **If you’re smart, you won’t get cheated by the many criminals out there.**

We’ve noticed so many new kinds of scams lately that we thought we’d update you with some tips on how to spot one. Off we go:

1. If it sounds too good to be true, it most definitely is. Just as you know you didn’t already win the Publisher’s Clearing House millions, you didn’t win the Yahoo/Microsoft email contest either. Oh, and about that money held in escrow in England after that guy died? Nope, not going to happen.

2. Most banks, if not every bank or financial institution will never email you about a sketchy transaction or suspicious activity. They’ll either call you on the phone or simply suspend your access until you both can sort it out.

3. Anyone you do business with already knows your name and account information. If someone calls you and asks you to verify anything with them, tell them no, then call the bank/company/whoever yourself, just to check. They will know immediately from their records whether they have contacted you recently.

4. Do not answer polls on the phone, specially ones about home security, no matter how legitimate the person may sound. While you are answering the questions, you’re also giving the caller all kinds of information about your home, your current state of security as well as the hours when you’re there.

5. Never give money to anyone who is going door to door in your neighborhood. Even if they say they are from the Children’s Wish Fund or the Heart and Stroke Foundation, don’t give them any money. Why? Most of the time these people are scammers. Even if they aren’t, they are making money from the money that you hand out. In most cases, they are paid reps not volunteers. Give directly to the charity, and choose the charity carefully. This ensures that the money goes directly where you want it to, not into some scammers pocket.

6. Never donate a dime to the folks who hang around just outside the grocery store collecting for children’s charities or pet adoption outfits. We’ve checked dozens of these and not one has ever been associated with a registered charity. The money you give goes directly into someone’s pocket, not to a charity.

7. If you get a message on your answering machine and you don’t know who called, don’t call them back if you don’t recognize the area code. The 1-800 series of numbers are usually OK but there are numbers out that that will cost you hundreds of dollars a minute in charges. You’ll get a big surprise on your next home phone or cell phone bill. Look at it this way. If it’s important, they’ll call you back, right?

8. Don’t add unknown apps to your mobile phone. Some of the horoscope or trivia apps will send you text messages every day or several a day, all the while charging you money for them. Getting out of these charges is next to impossible. This goes for some Facebook apps too. In the signup process the charges will be hidden in the fine print and, if you’re like everyone else in the world, you never read the fine print. Getting a daily horoscope just isn’t worth $2.50 per text message, is it?

9. Check emails for spelling mistakes. That goes for websites, too. If you happen to get directed to a website that looks legitimate, check for misspelled words, bad English, etc. Scam or spam email is known for grammar errors and words that are misspelled. ‘Informations’, with an s, is a popular mistake that you will see over and over again.

10. Update your technology regularly. Windows updates itself whenever a new exploit is detected. This goes for your mobile devices as well. For us, a new version of WordPress is installed as soon as we find out about it. These updates help you avoid identity theft. By the way, if you get a notice of an update that comes from an unexpected source, let’s say while you’re on a website, stop what you’re doing, close the site and restart your browser. Chrome, for instance, updates itself every time you start it. Internet Explorer doesn’t but that in itself is a great reason to switch to Chrome, isn’t it?

Stay safe out there. If you have a security concern, talk to us about it. If you have found a new scam, let us know so we can spread the word. Do it in the comments below or Like our Facebook page and tell us there. Here is the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook

Email, Hotmail, Keep Safe Online, Phishing Scams, Phishing Scams, Security

Stay Safe Online – Part two Email Dangers

March 6, 2014 Computers Made Simple Leave a comment

We’ll get right to the point of today’s post. Here’s an example of a bad and very dangerous email:

Photo of Example of Fraudulent Email 1 — **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:

Photo of Example of Fraudulent Email 2 — **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.

Photo of Example of Real Bank Email — **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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Email, Keep Safe Online, Phishing Scams, Security, Strong Passwords

Stay Safe Online – Part 1

March 5, 2014 Computers Made Simple Leave a comment

Just this morning we read that 100% of attacks on computers are criminal in nature. What does that mean? Simply that hackers aren’t out just to have fun, they are actively trying to steal your personal information. It’s not only personal computers that are under attack. Read this story about how a major Canadian bank was scammed out of $87,000.00: Bank of Montreal Gets Scammed Once you read the story, you’ll see how all of this started. The customer’s email account, which had been hacked, was used to initiate the process.

We’ve written posts about how you can protect your email account(s). Here’s a link that shows some of them: Email Password Protection Make sure you read as much as you can about using a strong password as well as how to enable two-step authentication. For that matter, make sure you use multi-level authentication for virtually everything you do online. Most email providers as well as banks, social networks and financial institutions already require this. Make sure you take advantage of it.

Enough preamble, let’s get to a new type of scam that you might fall prey to. This involves Google Maps. Bear with us while we explain how it works:

1. If you run a business, you can put your location and business information right there on the Google map of your city, complete with your street address, your logo and your phone number. This is where the danger is, that phone number.

2. Hackers have found a way to install fake telephone numbers in Google Maps. Let’s say you’re looking for a bank branch in another city. It’s easy to check a bank’s name, just type it in and you’ll immediately see little flags all over the map. This works for anything, restaurants, hardware stores, police stations, etc. Here’s an example of the information you might see:

Photo of Bank Address from Google Map — **There’s the bank’s number. Wait, is it a real number or a scammer’s number?**

3. Before you call the Citibank number, it might be a good idea to check the number somewhere else, let’s say on Citibank’s real website. Use the map for the location but NOT for anything else. This doesn’t apply only to banks. Here’s a link to the story explains the exploit and how several people thought they were calling the FBI but were really calling a hacker, this time an honest one:

FBI and Secret Service Calls Intercepted by Google Maps Exploit

These are a few things to watch out for when you’re online. In our next post, we’ll get into a bit more depth on these scams and how you can protect yourself from them. Stay tuned. In the meantime, ask questions or comment below or on our Facebook page. Here is the link to it:Computers Made Simple on Facebook.

Thanks for reading!

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Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Facebook, Security, Security Settings

Facebook Security Settings – Part 2

February 4, 2014 Computers Made Simple Leave a comment

In our last post we showed you how to use the Code Generator feature in the Facebook mobile app. Here is the link: Facebook Security Settings – A series Using the code generator, you can prove your identity to Facebook when you try to login from a new browser or location. Today we’ll run down the complete list of Facebook Security Settings. They are quite straightforward but very important. Let’s get going:

1. From any page on Facebook, look up on the top right for a tiny icon, a downward arrow just to the right of the globe icon. Click it and choose Settings. Like this:

Photo of Facebook Security Settings 1 — **We want Settings.**

2. On the left side, click on Security:

Photo of Facebook Security Settings 2 — **Click on Security to bring out this menu.**

3. Make sure your settings are the same as in the photo above. You want as much protection as possible. On the right side there is the word Edit. That allows you to change the settings in each section of the menu.

4. The theory behind all of this is to ensure that you are the person using your own Facebook account. If Facebook doesn’t recognize something that it should, it will prevent anyone from logging in to the account. This is a good thing, don’t you think? All of your personal information is useful to crooks, even if you have no financial details inside your Facebook profile.

TIP: If you don’t think that your security is important, here’s a story. On one of our accounts, we noticed that there were active sessions in another city, somewhere that we haven’t been in years. We closed them, of course, but that made us wonder how this could have happened. There were two active sessions which we immediately closed. Even if you don’t take our advice and change your settings, for whatever reason you have, it’s a good idea to check your ‘Active Sessions’ just to make sure someone isn’t logging in to your account from another location.

5. You can also enlist a friend or relative as a trusted contact, provided that they have locked down their account just as you have. This contact will be able to vouch for you should your account be hacked. With their help, you’d be able to recover it more quickly.

Read each section of this menu carefully. There are little help menus inside each part so you can’t get confused over any of this. If you do, ask us. OK? Do it now, don’t wait.

Thanks for reading!

Here’s the link to our Facebook page: Computers Made Simple on Facebook Keep up to date on our posts and occasional tips and tricks.

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