I know from my family and friends that there is nothing that worries the older IT user more than harming their computer by opening an email that starts a virus attack on their computer, or they are they are subjected to an email scam that will leave them short of money at best, and with compromised bank accounts at worst. I wanted to bring this excellent short article from April 2015 in Which? to your attention. It summarises the Top five UK email scams. Definitely ones to be on the look out for!
My golden rule as I mentioned in the previous post is “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is”.
Luckily these days the scammers and phishers have to rely on you actively letting them have access far more than used to be the case. Most (if not all) email programs and anti-virus software (as long as you keep it up to date – very important) are adept at picking out the genuinely evil messages which can do harm to your computer. So “you can look but you better not touch” to paraphrase the words from a Bruce Springsteen song. Just don’t click on a link – however inviting – in an email if you have any doubts, however small, of the sender’s authenticity!
I also wanted to tell you about this rather useful resource from Pat Howe which kept a running list of all known threats up until the end of 2014. He left his mail servers open to the possibility of threat to harvest all the attacks. All of them, or variants of them, are still around, so if you have any doubt about a message you receive, you can always check-it-out on Pat’s website.
An American resource that is also useful in defining the threats can be found at Stay Safe Online and their page on Spam and Phishing is worth a look, but for a UK slant (as mentioned in my last post) the best starting point is Get Safe Online and they have a page on Spam and Scam eMail which I also recommend looking at.
It’s a huge shame that we’re bedevilled with spam, scams and phishers, just as we’re hassled by cold telephone callers. Technology has brought us a load of benefits but with those it has also enabled those with a criminal, or just malicious, bent to make our lives a misery.
What you will learn hopefully from these blog posts is that good habits are our best hope for getting the most beneficial use from using IT. There’s nothing really to fear as long as you start from a naturally cautious stance, and you have reasonable organisational skills and a willingness to embrace a bit of logic :-).
Yorkshire Sculpture Park
A great day out with Stuart at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. I’m sure he lost count of the times I said – I don’t do culture. That’s of course not strictly true, but I do find it challenging to engage with abstract sculpture and most modern art. It’s therefore not surprising that the pieces I enjoyed best were ones that I could work out what they were!
A collection of the images I took during our visit can be seen here on Picasaweb. In time, when the new Google Photos has got itself sorted out, I’ll find a better way to create albums than the way I did creating this one. I plan to write a blog post on the subject on this blog as soon as I have the time!
My time has been pretty much taken up just recently with launching two new blogs. The first “Thought grazing 3A” to support a community initiative on Streetlife in North Cardiff where I’ve offered IT enablement support for Third Agers. The second has been the re-launch, with a new theme and new features, of “Moments like these …” my photo blog which also has Fundraising attached to it.
I’m not sure whether this will turn out to be a good idea, or not, but quite a few people have been kind enough to say how much they’ve liked some (not all) of the photographs I’ve taken.
I thought long and hard about whether to set up an eCommerce site to sell them, but in the end changes in VAT Rules and Regulations by HMRC convinced me not to go down that route – after all, I don’t really need the income, and I don’t really want the hassle of printing and framing more than a few special requests. I just want to get out and walk and take more photographs! So if you would like a high resolution digital copy of any of my images, or you just want to show some appreciation, go to the Fundraising page on “Moments like these …” and (this year) help The Ramblers.