My DigitalZone

Phishing is a general term associated with a fraudulent attempt to gain access to a person’s important personal information, such as credit card account numbers, user names, and password, and in some cases, the social security number. The number and variety of phishing attempt are increasing rapidly. Bad guys use emails to deliver an innocent-looking email with malicious contents. Sometimes, they use text messages asking for a person to call a certain phone number to obtain personal information.

The email/text message pretend to be from financial institutions (banks, credit unions, or credit card companies), PayPal

Obviously, emails and text messages appear to be from legitimate sources so the recipient think that they need to take some actions (click on a link in an email or call a certain phone number) to remedy the situation described in the email. Those situations include that:

• your account is being suspended;
• your account is being deactivated;
• unusual transaction on your account; or
• missing information on your account.

The above are examples of phishing attempts pretending to be a financial institution. There are some new varieties that pretend to be a package delivery companies, such as UPS, FedEx, or USPS.

Here’s an example email for the UPS case.

Sorry, we were not able to deliver postal package you sent on October the 19th in time because the recipient address is not correct.
Please print out the invoice copy attached and collect the package at our office.
If you do not receive package in ten days you will have to pay 6$ per day.

Your UPS

Apparently, we need to be able to distinguish the legitimate email from the bogus ones. Here are some basic rules to spot the bad ones.

• generic greetings
  Example: Dear XXXX Bank customer: (instead of Dear your_real_name
• legitimate-looking link in the body of the email
  The link may look legitimate but if you hover the mouse over it, the real link address is pointing to a different address.
• legitimate-looking attachment with “.zip” or “.doc” extension.
  Don’t be fooled. The only thing that the bad guys want is for you to click the link.Just one click on the fraudulent email will install and deploy some executable file that contain a trojan horse (a malicious program that opens a back door to your PC and steal your personal information by sending your keystrokes of your important user name and password.

So, the key is not to click a link in an email and do not click the attachment unless you are sure it is from a legitimate source. The Chase (credit card) site has an extensive example of fraudulent email here.

Like most of you, I use the internet online access to manage a lot of things, so I do receive many legitimate emails from them. I’ve make it a rule not to click any links in an email. When I receive an email about one of my account, I open up a new internet session and access it separately, not from the email.

Hope this helps you a bit.

I must admit…. I like electronic gadgets. I usually buy new and hot stuff relatively early, especially when it comes to music- or video-related goods. I am not as crazy as those who spend hours and hours in front of a store to get hold of a new product. But I usually buy a new product before its second generation comes out.

For some reason, Bluetooth headsets did not interest me. Well, that is… until recently. I’ve been doing Christmas shopping and noticed that the prices of Bluetooth headsets have come down a lot. I am feeling tempted. So, I started to do some research.

The two main advantages of Bluetooth headsets are:

1. Wireless — frees up hands
   Obviously, not having to use a hand to hold the phone is very, very convenient, especially while driving. Even when you are doing a grocery shopping and calling home to ask your family members about what they want from the store, your hands are free to push the shopping cart or to examine some products. I can see some benefits in this regard.
2. Affordable
   As I noted above, Bluetooth headsets are affordable now. You can find some cheap one for less than $20.00. However, people I spoke with and a lot of online reviewers said the sound quality for cheap units are not as good. You get what you pay for. One person told me that $50.00 is his threshold. Anything above should be decent, according to an IT person who uses Bluetooth at work.

Well, then the question is:”Do I Need IT?”
Probably not. At my work, I sit in front of a computer almost all day with a headphone on to shut out noises and listen to the music. I don’t move around. I don’t get too many work-related phone calls anyway.

My commute time is very short. It’s only a 10 min. drive one way. I do, however, drive 40 min. one way every week for some extra curricular activity. I use a corded headphone I bought along with my new cell phone, LG enV3, so I have a device that let me do hands-free driving while on the road.

My next question to me has an obvious answer. Do I Want IT? Yes, I do. Very much.

What I’ve decided to do, since I cannot decide to buy it now or not, is to buy one as a Christmas present and see how my recipient likes it or not. In other word, I’ll use her as my guinea pig.

Based on my budget (between $50 to $70) and my research, models I am considering buying are the following.

• Plantronics Discovery 925 Bluetooth Headset
  
  • From CompUSA ($49.99)
  • From TigerDirct ($49.99)
  • From Amazon.com ($49.99)
• Jabra BT 530
  
  • From ComUSA ($54.99)
  • From TigerDirect ($54.99)
  • From Amazon ($37.95)

Home wireless (or wired) internet connection can go kaput for no reason at any time. Thankfully, it doesn’t happen too often but once in a while you need to deal with it. Before calling a tech support line, make sure to do the following as the actions listed below are the ones that the technicians will ask you to perform anyway. In most cases, doing these things will fix your problem. If not, you need to call tech support.

1. Check if you TV is working (for a cable modem user) or if your home phone is working (for a DSL modem user.)
   If your TV or your land phone is not working, something is wrong with your line, so you need to call tech support.

2. Examine the modem lights and the router lights.
   Do they look normal? The power indicator light should be solid and the activity lights should be blinking. Then proceed to the second step.
3. Unplug the power code to the modem to initialize the modem.
   Wait for at least a few minutes and plug the power back on. The modem lights will go through the initialization process. At the end of the initialization process, the modem lights should return to the normal state. Check your computer for the internet connection. If it’s still not working, proceed to the next step.
4. Unplug all the cables in and out of the modem and the wireless router. Then plug them back in securely.
   Check your internet connection on your computer again. If it’s still not working, it’s time to call tech support.

Have you struggled to sync music between your cell (LG enV3) and your computer? I have. It was frustrating as music sync software (both Windows Media Player and Yahoo Music Engine) didn’t work. But I’ve found a much easier solution.

Use a memory card reader on your laptop — No need for special software
Yes. It’s just that. If you laptop has a memory card reader, use a memory card adapter that comes with the memory card for you phone, and stick the memory card into the card reader. Your laptop should recognize your card just like any other external drive.

Side Notes

• Battery Life When Used as a Music Player
  I was skeptical about the battery life if I use the phone as a music player. I used it for about 6 hours straight last weekend and it still had 2 bars. I need to do more experiment to be sure, but I can tell you it’s been good so far.
• Sound Quality
  The sound quality is quite good. Even though it doesn’t have some advanced features of a mp3 player, such as equalizer, it has high quality stereo sound.

Related Post
LG enV3 Picture Problem

Ah. The annoyance started about 30 min. ago. AVAST!, Malwarebyte’s excellent software for detecting/removing malware, started to detect tons of tons of trojans, especially Win32:Delf-MZG, like crazy. I took it seriously and started a full scan. Then, it recommended to do a memory scan after a reboot. I did it. I chose to remove all the suspicious ones. I think it detected over 30. Most of the files were audio/video-related. Some dlls for SUPER (video conversion software) and GoldWave (audio editor).

I took a note …. Win30: Delf-MZG…. did a google search after the reboot. It sounds like it’s the update from AVAST! has some problem. Some people started to discussed it about an hour ago over at Yahoo Answers, and one poster suggested to go to the AVAST user forum. Overall, it sounds like a lot of them are just false positives but I’ll keep an eye on it. I’m heading to the AVAST/Malware bytes’ site right now.

It’s really annoying. It’s happening for many people today, Dec. 2nd, 2009 at around 10 p.m., U.S. Central time.

Update
Guess it was too late. It looks like all of the alerts were false positive. See this. I tried to use GoldWave and Super but they didn’t work because I chose to delete suspicious files. The deleted files are not in the recycle bin, so I need to reinstall those programs. So far, my laptop itself is working fine.

So, ignore the AVAST warnings and take NO action. Do not choose to delete files!