Phishing: Message Options

Many people are investing lots of time and energy in pretending to be who they're not through e-mail: looking for Internet users who will give them sign-on details, account numbers, PINs and so on that they can use to strip bank accounts or run up unpayable credit card debts. 

No single method will protect - in the end, you have to be suspicious of any request for personal details or even opinions.  How many of us have answered a phone call that was apparently a survey and ended up being asked for details that could open us up to further unwanted phone calls or given details about our address, postcode or buying habits? 

If you use a Windows computer, you may also have Microsoft Office.  This is a fantastic tool for organising your e-mail, but the latest version has made it harder to look closely at incoming messages before you actually open them.  The trick is to look at the Message Options and see if the addresses in the mail headers actually look anything like the apparent sender. 

In Outlook 2003 and later versions, it used to be possible to right-click on a message in the Inbox and look at the headers directly.  The latest version, Outlook 2013 (also part of Office 365) doesn't allow this unless you first do a little customisation.  Here's how to do it.

I haven't yet found a way to restore the right-click function but you can still use it if you customise the Quick Access Toolbar of Outlook 2013.  That's the very top of the window, where the Outlook application icon, the Send/Receive All button and the Undo button can be found.  It looks like this:

Right-click on the ribbon (that's the feature with the tab names and icons just below the Quick Access Toolbar).  You'll be offered the option to customise the Quick Access Toolbar.  Set the top drop-down box to Commands Not in the Ribbon.  It looks like this:

Select Message Options and then click Add, and move it up one place using the buttons on the far right.  When you click OK, the Quick Access Toolbar should look like this:

When you receive a message that looks suspicious - as examples, a bill you weren't expecting, a receipt for a charity donation, a request to confirm your details, a notification of a failed payment, in your Inbox, select but don't open the message.  Then click on the fourth icon from the left at the top of the window (Message Options).   If when you scroll down, you see evidence of spoofing of addresses, just delete the message - don't open it, and certainly not its attachments.  Here's an example of a spoof e-mail with some of the tell-tale signs:

This was supposed to be from NatWest Bank.  Why would it send an e-mail from a belgacom.be address, relayed through skynet.be?  And then why would its From address be nto.com.  Who?

Use this tip and your own intelligence to cut down your risk of being hacked by evil people. 

Windows 7 / Office 365

Faced with the removal of support for Windows XP in 2014, it was finally time to bite the bullet of installing a new laptop using one of Microsoft's 64-bit based operating systems. 

Nothing I've read so far convinced me that an immediate move to Windows 8 would be anything but a major disruption, so I opted for a Windows 7 Pro system with a free copy of Windows 8 to be used later, if needed.

I chose a Toshiba with Intel Core i3/2348M processor, 4 GBytes of RAM, and 500 GBytes SATA disk.  At the level of a system for home or SME office use, this is a good compromise between power and price.  It's not going to be used to play games, but can certainly run all of the necessary office software, BBC iPlayer, browsers and so on. 

Installation was really very straightforward.  A few options - language, etc., account set-up, and we were good to go.  It detected the available wifi networks and all I had to do was select one, enter the password and let Windows know that this was a home network.  The next step was to create Windows Recovery DVDs - 4 in all.  The online manual - accessed with the pre-installed Acrobat Reader - gave the necessary instructions, and I ran the utility with the Verify option set.  This was a good idea - the third disc failed verification and had to be re-done. 

After that, all was very easy.  I downloaded the Chrome browser, as Microsoft's Internet Explorer starts up with all sorts of garish and unwanted stuff, and Bing as a search engine, and then starts leading you off in directions of selecting options.  Not interested.  I thought we were supposed to be offered a choice of browsers when starting a new PC - the EU spent years and untold millions of euros disputing with Microsoft to give us this - but I saw no sign of it. 

Printer set-up was very easy - much better than on the MacBook Pro.  Windows scanned the network and found the two printers (one is a multifunction device).  All of the necessary drivers were available, and the whole task was complete in a few minutes. 

One of the drawbacks of moving from Windows XP is that your much-loved Office 2003 software also becomes redundant.  Fortunately, starting up the one month free trial of Office 365 was easy too.  This gives you the full Home Premium product including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, OneNote and crucially - Outlook.   It all hooks up to SkyDrive and a licence allows the software to be used with up to 5 devices.   Not sure that I want all documents on SkyDrive - unlike the option that you can set up for a Google account, Microsoft accounts don't have two factor authentication yet.  But let's see how it goes, and whether it's really useful or not.

Another worry was the white background in Page Layout in Word.  Call me agoraphobic, but it looks as though there's something missing, or the page hasn't rendered fully.  A comforting grey would be much less disturbing and not keep making me think that it's not working properly. The same in PowerPoint - don't like it. Fortunately, there's an option to overcome this problem. Just select File / Account / Office Theme and Dark Gray is your friend.

But, like the move to rented rather than bought software licences, I guess this is something we'll have to just accept, like it or not. 

Summary: highly impressed with the ease of installation of Windows 7 Pro.  This looks a great successor to Windows XP and I feel very confident about using it when I replace my main work PC.  Office 365 - there's lots to explore. Familiarity comes with time and practice.

Antivirus update

I'm now uninstalling Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 from my main Windows XP system, and will give a try-out to Microsoft Security Essentials. If that doesn't work out, I'll be back to AVG. Kaspersky seemed to be unable to give reasonable performance in the set-up that I have for that system:

• Toshiba Tecra M10 with 3 GBytes memory and 150 GBytes of disk
• Windows XP Pro Service Pack 3 
• Microsoft Office Pro 2003 including Outlook 2003 
• Mozilla Firefox as the default browser, though Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari are also installed and were tried out to see if performance would be any better
• Microsoft Task Switcher power toy used to move from application to application

The system would hang up frequently, usually when Outlook was used.  Moving from message to message could cause processor utilisation to go to 100% and stay there for minutes on end.  One of the key components in Kaspersky, avp.exe, seemed to clock up a colossal number of page faults as shown in the Processes tab of Windows Task Manager, and the system fan seemed to be operating most of the time.  I tried reducing the e-mail scan heuristics intensity to 'Light' in the Kaspersky settings, but to no avail.

Of course, it's quite possible that cumulative security updates from Microsoft may have messed up Outlook's performance.  I felt that performance worsened after about April 2011, and this happened to coincide with updates for AVG Internet Security, which I was using at the time.  It will be instructive to see if Outlook performs as well as I'd expect with Microsoft Security Essentials.  

The experience of uninstalling Kaspersky and installing MSE has been pretty painless and fairly quick - about three quarters of an hour, including one reboot and the initial quick scan.  I decided to opt for Advanced membership for the Microsoft Active Protection Service in the MSE settings, but 'No' to Customer experience monitoring; the former should only be invoked if something happens, while the latter could impact performance at all times - presumably it starts a service at Windows load time.

By the way, MSE is free for small businesses with up to 10 PCs and for domestic use.  I'm still running Kaspersky on the Windows Vista PC without any obvious problem, although I don't run Outlook on that system.

More platforms than Clapham junction

It used to be professional IT that had to cope with a large variety of platforms and operating systems, but innovation in recent years, particularly the development of web services, means that individual users are likely to meet an increasing number of very different environments, even for fairly simple requirements. For every one of these, there are issues of familiarisation, protection and authentication that need to be addressed.

At the start of the home computing story, we could store data locally and back up our key files to a floppy disk, or later something like an Iomega drive. Now we have a bewildering array of possibilities including very large capacity home network attached storage. I'm just getting to grips with the WD My Book Live which has 2 Tb capacity and a price less than £100 before you add VAT and delivery. That's less than £50 per Terabyte! If you prefer online storage and don't have a capped broadband deal, the likes of Microsoft's Skydrive, or the Apple iDisk (part of the current me.com offering) or the forthcoming iCloud, may be even more attractive.

Skydrive is well worth getting to know because it supplies free storage and Office applications - all of a sudden we have a real document sharing and update environment for private users, something that in the past was the province of the better-organised professional IT shop. I suspect that things that I've been able to introduce to corporate projects through the innovative use of Sharepoint will rapidly become commonplace for groups, clubs, societies- anyone with a common purpose and the need to maintain documents together.

But just think what this means in terms of the number of platforms for home computing - you don't have to be an extreme case to use Windows and/or Mac systems, iOS or Android or Nokia smartphone, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Picasa, MS Office or Open Office, and maybe a Kindle reader. That's before we've thought about your e-mail system, your choice of browser or browsers, various plug-ins such as Adobe Flash and Adobe Air, Twitter, Windows (MSN/Live) Messenger, Facetime (on Apple products), online banking (card reader to give additional authentication), a multiplicity of online shopping platforms, Skype, Wordpress or Blogger. And you'd be mad to venture out on the Internet (particularly using a PC platform) without virus protection. Your data is important, and you should have a strategy and the facilities to back it up (see above). Every one of these does useful work, but every one of them also needs to be maintained and can carry a burden in terms of time if not of expense. Why does Adobe have to pester me to agree with its terms every time it updates one of its plug-ins?

I don't think there's any good and easy answer to this one. The big suppliers would like to make us dependent on, loyal to, and advocates of their offerings, but no one offering is ideal for all purposes. I use Microsoft Office on PCs (2003), Mac (2011), and now Skydrive (360). Each has its differences or subtleties. We're just going to have to learn to understand the quirks of the different platforms and to discourage (by voting with our feet) the ones that are least easy to use and maintain.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 beta 2

This beta version is installed on my Vista Business laptop - the one I don't use for mainstream work because it's Vista, and XP Pro is my company standard. Like IE7, it offers multi-tabbed browsing and RSS feeds - powerful reasons to move from IE6 if you haven't already done so. Some of the changes in IE8 are quite good

1) separate safety tools

2) Reopen last browsing session - so if you closed a multi-tabbed page, it will bring them back

3) developer tools let you look at the structure of the page in HTML, CSS and script, and offer a good bunch of tools

4) colour-coded tabs - if you Open in New Tab then the parent and child are coloured the same

and so far the following funnies showed up:

5) the Stockchart widget on iGoogle doesn't display properly. This seems to be a positioning issue because if you drag the widget slightly, the whole graph will reappear while you keep hold of the widget. When you let go, it's all a bit random

6) an Amazon a-store widget in a Blogger page isn't positioned properly in its frame - it's a few pixels to the right and down from where it should be. Very obvious as the design has a black background and so there's a white top and left border where there shouldn't be

Both of these were fixed using IE8's Compatibility mode setting which can be reached either through the Tools or the Page drop-downs(!)

7) Suggested Sites is a bit of a pest (keeps asking)

8) if you have multiple home page tabs under IE7, these don't open individually under IE8 from the side drop-down on the Home button (nothing happens). The whole group opens if you click the main part of the Home button.

9) the Personalise link seems to be broken

But all in all, it's a very good browser and I'll probably install it on my main laptop as soon as the Release version arrives.

Work to do:
List of popular sites that need the Compatibility mode setting. So far these include
Google
Ecademy
Blogspot
Guido Fawkes, political blogger

Microsoft Accounting Express 2008

Microsoft Accounting Professional is a possible replacement for Quickbooks, which I've used for years. I had a look at the (free) Express version of MS Office Accounting and the conclusions is yes, it's certainly a viable alternative. At £149.95, it's competitive. I need to investigate further on the update policies. Presumably I have to buy a new version each year to receive the Payroll tax updates?

Here are my impressions so far:

It's a 278 MByte download, and requires a whopping 1 GByte to install

The usual verbose Microsoft agreement

Sample company, try entering a quote: how the hell do I identify the job? Help says: this feature is only availabled in the Pro version

Forms are Excel-like with resizable columns - fine

The sample company has features that only work in the Pro version

A new Window is opened for each form - this can start to get messy

Not as operationally neat as Quickbooks; for example, instead of a simple Credit Card Charge form, you use a generalised New Cash Purchase form and have to find the credit card account (each time) on a drop down

Foreign currency handling in the Pro version

Payroll in the Pro version - though you can maintain Employees and timesheets in Express

P&L report looks OK but adverts on the Express version - relevant as this one was for BACS - are intrusive

Includes a BACS-linked e-payments service from Albany Software, though there is no clear indication of the costs of set-up and transactions; I'd want a clear indication of these before deciding to use this feature (or whether this feature is a goodreason to buy the product)

Invoices can include a status 'watermark'. To turn this off, click through Actions/Manage Word Templates and uncheck the option box

Templates can be edited in Word - very flexible xml integration

Bank account reconciliation OK, but the form opened the first time with the final balance column too narrow; this happened with the Quotes form too, and is irritating

PayPal integration - include a PayPal button in an e-invoice!

Other functions that are only available in the Pro version include

Sales Order

Purchase Order

Stock tracking

Budgets

Recurring documents - so this seems like the only way to enter a standing order or regular monthly payment; it's disappointing that this is only in Pro as it seems a vital feature