Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Customize your Firefox with useful Add-ons!

Tiny menuThis post deals with a few useful Firefox Add-ons, which makes your Firefox more comfortable than before.

Tiny Menu:

If you are not using the menu bar frequently and you feel that the menu bar is occupying more space in your browser, then you can shrink it with this add-on. It will help to replace the standard menu bar in Firefox with a single popup icon in the menu bar. Customization on menu to be collapsed can also be made simple with its option.

12 Tips to Maintain a Virus Free Computer

Is your computer infected with virus? Do you often get mysterious error messages? Well this is a common problem faced by almost all the computer users across the globe. There are many viruses and worms out there that could infect your computer. Some are harmless, but, they do have the capacity to do any number of nasty things, up to and including, erasing all data from your computer. However there are ways to keep viruses away from your PC. Here are the 12 tips to maintain a virus free computer.

1. Email is one of the common ways by which your computer can catch a virus. So it is always recommended to stay away from SPAM. Open only those emails that has it’s origin from a trusted source such as those which comes from your contact list. If you are using your own private email host (other than gmail, yahoo, hotmail etc.) then it is highly recommended that you use a good anti-spam software. And finally NEVER click on any links in the emails that comes from untrusted sources.

2. USB thumb/pen drives is another common way by which viruses spread rapidly. So it is always a good habit to perform a virus scan before copying any data onto your computer. NEVER double-click the pen drive to open it. Instead right-click on it and select the option “open”. This is a safe way to open a pen drive.

3. Be careful about using MS Outlook. Outlook is more susceptible to worms than other e-mail programs, unless you have efficient Anti-Virus programs running. Use Pegasus or Thunderbird (by Mozilla), or a web-based program such as Hotmail or Yahoo (In Firefox).

4. As we all know, Internet is the main source of all the malicious programs including viruses, worms, trojans etc. In fact Internet contributes to virus infection by up to 80%. So here are the tips for safe surfing habits so that you can ward off virus infection up to the maximum extent.

  • Don’t click on pop-up windows that announce a sudden disaster in your city or announce that you’ve won an hourly prize. They are the ways to mislead Internet users and you should never trust them.
  • You can also use a pop-up blocker to automatically block those pop-ups.

5. Most of us use search engines like Google to find what we are looking for. It is quite obvious for a malicious website to get listed in the search results. So to avoid visiting those untrusted malicious websites, you can download and install the AVG LinkScanner which is a freeware. This tool can become very handy and will help you to stay away from malicious websites.

6. Install a good anti virus software and keep it updated. Also perform full system scan periodically. It is highly recommended that you turn on the automatic update feature. This is the most essential task to protect your PC from virues. If PC security is your first option then it is recommended that you go for a shareware antivirus software over the free ones. Most of the antivirus supports the Auto-Protect feature that provides realtime security for your PC. Make sure that this feature is turned on.

7. Install a good Anti spy-ware program, that operates against Internet malware and spyware.

8. Never open any email attachments that come from untrusted sources. If it is a picture, text or sound file (these attachments end in the extensions .txt, .jpeg, .gif, .bmp, .tif, .mp3, .htm, .html, and .avi), you are probably safe, but still do a scan before opening.

9. Do not use disks that other people gave you, even from work. The disk could be infected with a virus. Of course, you can run a virus scan on it first to check it out.

10. Set up your Windows Update to automatically download patches and upgrades. This will allow your computer to automatically download any updates to both the operating system and Internet Explorer. These updates fix security holes in both pieces of software.

11. While you download files from untrusted websites/sources such as torrents, warez etc. make sure that you run a virus scan before executing them.

12. And finally it is recommended not to visit the websites that feature illegal/unwanted stuffs such as cracks, serials, warez etc. since they contribute much in spreading of viruses and other malicious programs.

Saturday, September 5, 2009

How to Protect an Email Account from being Hacked

Today in this post I’ll teach you how to protect your email account from being hacked. Nowadays I get a lot of emails where most of the people say “My Email account is hacked please help…”. Now one question which arises in our mind is:”Is it so easy to hack an email account? OR Is it so difficult to protect an email account from being hacked?”. The single answer to these two questions is “Absolutely NOT!”. It is neither easy to hack an email nor difficult to protect an email account from bieng hacked.

If this is the case, then what is the reason for many people to loose their accounts?
The answer is very simple. They don’t know how to protect themselves from being hacked! In fact most of the people who loose their email accounts are not the victims of hacking but the victims of Trapping. They loose their passwords not because they are hacked by some expert hackers but they are fooled to such an extent that they themselves give away their password.

Are you confused? If so continue reading and you’ll come to know…

Now I’ll mention some of the most commonly used online scams which fool people and make them loose their passwords. I’ll also mention how to protect your email account from these scams.

1. WEBSITE SPOOFING

Website spoofing is the act of creating a website, with the intention of misleading the readers. The website will be created by a different person or organisation (Other than the original)especially for the purposes of cheating. Normally, the website will adopt the design of the target website and sometimes has a similar URL.

Fake Yahoo Login

For example a Spoofed Website of Yahoo.com appears exactly same as Yahoo Website. So most of the people believe that it is the original site and loose their passwords. The main intention of spoofed websites is to fool users and take away their passwords. For this,the spoofed sites offer fake login pages. These fake login pages resemble the original login pages of sites like Yahoo,Gmail,Orkut etc. Since it resemble’s the original login page people beleive that it is true and give away their username and passwords by trying to login to their accounts.

Solution:

  • Never try to login/access your email account from the sites other than the original site.
  • Always type the URL of the site in the address bar to get into the site.Never click on the hyperlink to enter the site.

2. BY USING KEYLOGGERS

The other commonly used method to steal password is by using a Keylogger. A Keylogger is nothing but a spyware. The detailed description of keylogger and it’s usage is discussed in the post Hacking an email account. If you read this post you’ll come to know that it is too easy to steal the password using a keylogger program. If you just access your email account from a computer installed with keylogger, you definitely loose your password. This is because the keylogger records each and every keystroke that you type.

Solution:

Protecting yourselves from a keylogger scam is very easy.Just install a good anti-spyware program and update it regularly. This keeps your PC secure from a keylogger. Also there is a program called Anti-keylogger which is specially designed to detect and remove keyloggers. You can use this program to detect some stealth keyloggers which remain undetected by many anti-spyware programs.
3. ACCESSING YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT FROM CYBER CAFES

Do you access your email from cyber cafes? Then definitely you are under the risk of loosing your password.In fact many people loose their email account in cyber cafes. For the owner of the cyber cafe it’s just a cakewalk to steal your password. For this he just need’s to install a keylogger on his computers. So when you login to your email account from this PC, you give away your password to the cafe owner. Also there are many Remote Administration Tools (RATs) which can be used to monitor your browsing activities in real time.

This doesn’t mean that you should never use cyber cafes for browsing the internet. I know, not all the cyber cafe owners will be so wicked but it is recommended not to use cafes for accessing confidential information. If it comes to the matter of security never trust anyone, not even your friend. I always use my own PC to login to my accounts to ensure safety.

How to Protect an Email Account from SPAM



Most of us get SPAM every day. Some of us get more and some little. Even a newly created email account will begin to receive spam just after a few days of it’s creation. Many times we wonder where these spam come from and why? But this question remains unanswered within ourselves. So in this post I will try my best to give every possible information about the spam and will also tell you about how to combat spam.

What is SPAM?

Spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. Most widely recognized form of spam is email spam.

Where do these SPAM come from?

These spam come only from spammers and never from a legitimate user or a company. These spammers send a single email to hundreds (some times thousands or millions) of email addresses at a time. They either send it manually or use spambots to automate the process of spamming.

Why do spammers SPAM?

The main goal of spammers is to send the spam (unsolicited bulk messages) to as many people as possible in order to make profit. For example, John builds a small website to sell an ebook which gives information about weight loss. In order to make sales he needs publicity for his website. Instead of spending money on advertising, John decides to create an email which contains information about his site along with it’s link and send this email to say 100 email addresses in his contact list. If 1 person out of hundred buy this book john gets $10. What if he sends this email to 1000s of email addresses. He gets $100. Imagine, if he sends this email to 1 Million email addresses he gets $100000.

Now I hope you understood the idea behind spamming. So in order to make money, spammers send their advertising emails to as many people as possible without respecting the recipient’s privacy.

From where do SPAMmers get my email address?

On the Internet there exists many sites who collect the email IDs of people and sell them to spammers in bulk. Most often, people sign up for monthly newsletters and take up surveys. This is the time where these scam sites get their email addresses. Also many spammers collect email addresses by using spambots. These spambots collect email addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists. Such spambots are web crawlers that can gather email addresses from Web sites, newsgroups, forums, special-interest group (SIG) postings, and chat-room conversations.

Spammers also use the trick of creating Hoax Emails for gathering a huge list of email IDs. For example, a spammer sends a hoax email which says “Forward this Message to Help Severely Burned Child”. This email claims that 11 cents will be donated to the child’s family every time the message is sent to others. Most of the people believe this and start forwarding this hoax email to all of the IDs in their contact list. In this way the email spreads rapidly and eventually when it reaches the creator (spammer), the spammer gets a huge list of valid email addresses in the email header. When you get these kind of hoax emails, you can see for yourself in the email header which contains a huge list of email addresses of all those people to whom the email is being forwarded to. This is one of the effective methods used by spammers to gather email addresses.

Is SPAMming legal?

Spamming is completely illegal. Yet it is really difficult to stop spammers from spamming since they keep moving from one hosting company to another after getting banned. This makes it practically impossible to catch spammers and prosecute them.

How to protect my email account from getting SPAMmed?

The following methods can be used to combat email spam.

1. Use spam filters for your email account. If you’re using email services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc. then spam filters are used by defaut. Each spam filter has it’s algorithm to detect spam emails and will automatically move them to SPAM folder. This keeps your inbox free from spam. However some spam emails become successful to make their way into the inbox by successfully bypassing the filters.

2. Do not post your email address in public forums, user comments and chat-rooms. Give your email address only to trustworthy websites while signing up for newsletters.

3. While taking up online surveys and filling up feedback forms, it is better not to give your personal email address. Instead singup for a dummy email account and use this for surveys and feedback forms.

4. While posting your contact email address on your website use this format: emailaddress [at] yoursite.com instead of emailaddress@yoursite.com. This protects your email address from being indexed by spambots.

5. Do not respond to hoax messages. When you receive a hoax email, avoid forwarding it to your friends. Examples of hoax messages can be found at www.hoax-slayer.com. If you really want to forward it to your friends, make sure that you use “Bcc” (blind certified copy) option to send the email. This will hide all the email IDs to which the mail is forwarded to.

Call phones from Gmail- Calls from PC to Phone with Google Talk ~~~~ Now in India ~~~~

Free International Calls from PC to Phone with Google Talk and Talkster (GTalk-to-VoIP) Google has officially unveiled its new Google Mai...