And again, the spam emails keep on coming…

So, following up on this topic, here are some of the recent spam/phishing emails received by Perfect Notes. Remember, never access your internet bank via an email link, never give anyone an email with all your personal, identifying details (allowing identity theft), and no – it’s really unlikely that you actually won the British Lottery – particularly if you never bought a ticket…

Please note – the images below go outside the normal edges of the blog, so that you can read them easily.  Also note that they are images.  Done at about the minimum resolution that makes them reasonably readable to keep the download size small.  You cannot catch anything or click on anything bad in this post.  It would be the height of bad manners for us to allow that.

1. The British Lottery (identity theft) – asking for ALL your identifying details:
1. Email 1:

1. Email 2: (after you don’t respond and they send you enough! of the initial version)

1. Email 3: (the next step up!)

1. Account Verification (phishing – which is pretending to be someone else to get your details)
1. Commonwealth Bank (I do not have any accounts with them):

1. And here is the source (the background code, that tells the internet where to actually send you) – with the part underlined that shows it is not really from the Commonwealth Bank:

1. Westpac Bank:

1. And here is the source, showing that this one does not come from Westpac either

1. And for some variety – a similar one from Optus:

1. And these ones just sound suspicious – so do not click the links:

Some of us (like Perfect Notes) have and use webmail – but that does not make these emails any more reasonable:

1. Upgrade your webmail… or not!:

1. And another version of this:

1. And one that threatens deactivation if you do not click:

1. And the source which shows that it is suspicious:

1. And this one is just a standard spam email – note that ‘they’ have been browsing many sites… but the general outline is the same

So… a sample of the latest scams/spams making the rounds… Please do not let them trick you!
If you have any concerns, send them through to us – we can check them out for you.

Ride to work day.

So I did.
Client in town.. with serious virus issue. So I went in to spend a day fighting it. Some of these new viri are really genuinely nasty. And this machine had a few.

So I rode to work. Went via the MRR training ride, the Hawthorn velodrome RTW brecky put on by Boonandara council…which was pretty good, and where I ran into my friend Wendy, and then into Fed Square in Melbourne. Where I got my picture taken. And then onto the client.

This machine had  a brand new rootkit virus,   and some malware.  And a couple of other trojans.  And a web hijacker dumping IE on a page full of trojans.  The rootkit was so new it was unremovable by Sophos.  One of the trojans actively targeted the antivirus.   All  of  the antivirus.   Scarey and nasty.    But this week the USAF announced it had issues with viri on its Predator armed drone aircraft.   You can read this story here.

 

Our mail issues sorted

The new site is up..  At  PerfectNotes.com.au. Hits are up.  All good.

We had an interesting mail issue.   We moved the site to the ABOC server and ran it on Plone but for various reasons left the mail on the Dreamhost box that Vidman Design uses.  Getting the DNS to work that way turned out to be tricky, Dreamhost is a big outfit with a bunch of mail servers all talking to each other.  And we had broken email or at least dodgy email for a day while we figured it out.

Some of the redirects from the old site seem not to be doing their job.  It looks like the  SEO tool in Plone is just not doing the job.  We are working on that.    It’s unlikely its the tool… so something is  wrong.  Next job on the list.

I am going to put some  links somewhere to some of our clients.  Hopefully get the whole Google thing working better for them and for us.  Sadly for a lot of our more prestigious clients we have confidentiality agreements and so it’s not happening for them.   But its going to have a nice synergy for a few.. so that will be a nice addition for the site.

We will also link to some of the businesses involved in our business network in Bendigo.   For the same sort of reasons.  Details are yet to be worked out but that will be starting to happen this week.

None of this will happen without discussion with all involved.  We take privacy seriously at Perfect Notes.

Been reading a lot of Schneier on Security  Its alarming and fascinating stuff.      The current post..   Us armed drone aircraft have a virus.    scary hey?  Here is a brief comment from the always relevant Dilbert on security.  Dilbert.com

 

Our new website is up

perfectnotes.com.au has a new website. Its been planned for a long time.. mostly built for most of that time. Has of course led to the other (until yesterday the visible ) website being shamefully neglected. But now its here.

And its a Plone site.  As we are doing more and more development work in Plone  (mostly hosted on ABOC Plone  servers)  we figured we should put our money where our mouths are and run it ourselves.  You will notice that its a little bit generic Plone.   That just seemed like a good idea for a while.   We are Plone  enthusiasts and happy to spread the word about this wonderful CMS.    With Subskins and other software and a little bit of CSS development we can make it look like anything we want but for the moment this will do us fine.     

In case you are wondering we also develop in WordPress , Drupal and HTML CSS….and all that non Content Management Stuff.  We are hanging out to be asked to do something in Joomla    All these systems have their strengths and weaknesses so all have a role and it depends very much on what you need as to what is suitable.

 We have test environments for all of these so we can pretty quickly find out if something is actually doable.   Of course as with all websites.. up and running is easy..  right is rather more difficult.  

Make your voice heard

Well, they say learning new things is good – I never even knew there was an Australian Women’s Chamber of Commerce & Industry – but there is! And they are running a poll where they would like to hear from women in business. So this is our chance to participate – make our voices heard. At least now someone is asking what we do – and how we think things might need to change.

I will be filling out my poll responses this afternoon.

Click here to be part of this! (The link is in the top banner on this page).

Let me know what you think – are they asking reasonable questions? Is it worthwhile taking part?

More spam emails…

Well, we all get them. We all try to ignore them. Sometimes we are lucky and our spam filters work – but sooner or later, one is going to slip through…
So – what are the latest spam emails that I know about?
United Parcel Service Notification – if you get one of these, remember that it’s very unlikely that the parcel delivery service has your email address, so do not click on any link – they don’t know about you, anymore than you know about them!
Next – PayPal have yet again restricted my service… or something like that…. Again – NEVER click on the link in an email to update your details – go back to the original URL and follow the links.
I have had multiple emails over the last couple of weeks “Re: Career Finders” – another email telling me how I can make millions at home with very little work….
So – what prompted this post? One that just arrived – “Notification from Microsoft Outlook”. So, why do I think that this one might catch people out? Well, it says that it is from support@outlookexpress.com – which looks like a reasonable address for this sort of email. And a lot of people will be using Outlook Express – I know of a number of my customers who use this product – so it might catch them out. So, please – remember the golden rule – NEVER click on the link in an email to update/renew/revise/review any details – legitimate businesses will tell you to log in and update your details, because that way you know that it’s going to be the real deal.
So – stay safe in our cyber world – and if you have any questions, post them here and we will either answer them or point you to the authority who can tell you what the deal is.

Of the new year, resolutions, holidays(!) and progress

Firstly, Happy New Year! I hope that all of you have had a good festive season and that we are all looking forward to a good year in 2011.

Well, I had great plans for the holiday period – top of the list being that I was actually going to take a decent break. Of course, as a small business owner, this particular plan fell through… One of my current jobs is not transferring correctly from my test environment to the live server, so my break was reduced to a couple of days, rather than a week or two – but we’re nearly over that hurdle and then I will have a happy customer!
This means that the website rewrite has been postponed for a while – I’ll let you all know when it starts, so you can have a look at it when it is relaunched. Keep an eye out for the notifications!

So, my first BIG task for next week is to work out the immediate priorities for 2011 – and some longer term goals. Do you have plans for changes in 2011? Let us know by leaving a comment – remember, one of the best ways to make sure that you actually carry out your plans is to be accountable – so put it out there – we’ll help you make it happen. Also, if there are issues stopping you from carrying out your plans, we might be able to help you work out how to overcome the obstacles too.

Here’s to a good year for everyone!

Windows Users – Remember to Defragment your hard drive

Well, I have not been very diligent about this…

When you open Accessories – System Tools – Disk Defragmenter, you can click the Analyze button, to check whether your hard drive needs cleaning up. Hopefully, you get a picture with a lot of blue and white, some green and a minimal amount of red – or, you could get a picture like I did:

Obviously, my hard drive needed to be defragmented – with a vengeance!

Unfortunately, there is also a requirement to have 15% or more of the hard drive free in order for Disk Defragmenter to work correctly. So – as I had less than 15% free on both occasions that I have used this tool, I was not able to get the full benefit from the tool… But it DID improve the situation each time I ran this tool. Running it repeatedly moved files around, improving the situation, even if it is still not ideal.

While it might still look like some kind of Jackson Pollock or Pro Hart art work, if you look carefully, you will see that the first blue section has moved further to the left and there is less colour on the right hand side – all of which means that your files will load faster on your PC – which has to be good!

So – learn from my mistakes – don’t leave it 12 months between times that you run the Disk Defragmenter tool on your hard drive! Backup your files regularly and run the defragmenter about once a month – don’t let your picture get as colourful as this.

Networking – does it work?

One of the issues that Perfect Notes has with getting Virtual Assistant customers is trust – if a business hires a Virtual Assistant and the relationship works, the VA is going to learn a LOT about the business! So, necessarily, you have to be sure that you trust the person who is going to be doing your work. But… in this modern world, most people come to your website to work out whether they want to use your services. Which is totally reasonable – but how do you convince someone who is reading your website that you are trustworthy? I mean, I could write all sorts of words, but how do the people looking at the page know that we are not snake oil salesmen? I have not yet found a solution to this question, although this will be focused on more when the website is rewritten (hopefully by the New Year) – but part of the solution is to actually meet potential customers face to face, to build a relationship and let people get to know us – hence the fact that Perfect Notes often attends networking events.

Do they work? Well, I would have to say yes. 30% of Perfect Notes’ customers came from networking of one kind or another.

Are they hard work? Well – for me they are – for a lot of people they are just fun, because they are people who love chatting to other people, so it’s just an extension of that, talking about their business. But the more I do this, the better I am at talking to people about how we can help them and the more comfortable I am with the whole process – so it’s all good. And every time I speak to someone about the business problems we can help them to solve, that potential business relationship is happening and the possibility of building enough trust to allow access to business knowledge – which is the only way that potential customers can learn who we are and what we stand for.

So – if you see us out and about, come and say hi – if we can’t help you, maybe you can help us – not all business relationships are as customer and supplier – partnerships are possible too!

On the other hand – does your business need to establish a face-to-face relationship with your customers? If so, think about networking – it really can work for you, as well as for us. And if you want to know some of the details, talk to me – it can’t hurt to have more information, surely?

What is a ‘Virtual Assistant’?

So… you might have heard the term ‘Virtual Assistant’ used – especially if you know a bit about Perfect Notes – but you don’t really know what it means… Let me see if I can explain it a bit – particularly in regard to the things that we can help you with!

Wikipedia tells us, as a start:
Virtual assistance (or VA) is the professional service of remote administrative office and other specialized support by a virtual assistant who works with clients in an ongoing, collaborative professional relationship.

But that doesn’t really help me to understand it any better, so I doubt that it helps you either! So let’s try to describe it a bit more clearly.

A virtual assistant takes some of the administrative tasks of running your business off your hands, so that your time is free to do the stuff that makes you money – or keeps you happy.

So how can you tell whether you need a virtual assistant to help you run your business?

• Do you spend all of your day selling to customers, or creating widgets, or training people, or installing machines – then come back to the office and spend another hour at your desk catching up on all the paperwork?
• Do you know that you need a holiday, but dread the thought of going away, because you are the only one who knows how your business should run?
• Do you know that your website should be updated but have no time to do that? And you suspect that you are missing out on customers because your website is a long way down the list in Google Search results?

If you answered ‘Yes’ to any of these questions, a virtual assistant could help you.

So, send us an email or call us on 03 9894 0530, to talk about how we can help solve some of your business problems – and make your life easier!