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 Booroondara 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.