I think that all of us with any sense know not to open attachments.
However, just a warning about one way that scammers are attempting to instal randsomware on peoples PC's.
The pond scum are trawling through bookkeepers and accountants websites looking for contact details and sending emails professing to be from those looking for help, career advice, etc.
DO NOT OPEN ANY ATTACHMENTS FROM PEOPLE YOU DO NOT KNOW!!!!!
IF THE ATTACHMENT IS FROM SOMEONE YOU KNOW ONLY OPEN ATTACHMENTS IF YOU WERE EXPECTING THE ATTACHMENT!!!!!
I'm now sorry for any genuine job hunters, people needing advice or businesses needing help but only information within the body of emails should be considered safe. Always view that in the viewing panel first before opening emails and do not show images within emails unless you know the email to be safe.
So ar so good with myself but I have noticed a distinct rise in the frequency of these sort of tentitive emails requiring that you open an attachment.
Hope that stops someone from getting a virus / held to randsom.
kindest regards,
Shaun.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
I'm new here, but with IT being close to my heart I'd have to suggest having something as simple as a contact form on your website. Name, Email Address, Contact Number and a Brief Message should cover all the things to start a conversation with client/other and not allow dodgey attachments to emails. If they're genuine, you could then respond to their email address and start an email conversation from there, or a telephone call dependent on the query.
personally I've already got those things but also have an email address on my site.
I've always previously taken lack of an email address as similar to people giving only generic telephone number or mobile contact details which comes accross a bit fly by night.
On the telephones point my policy is that I will contact landlines that have an area code. Others have to contact me. Its another well known scam of premium rate numbers being used for contact numbers so you are effectively paying (sometimes substantially) for first contact and of course they will keep you talking as long as possible. That scam isn't seen so much now as I think that the public are becoming savvy to it but again, you can't be complacent.
We've got a few ex IT bods on here. Vince is the one who springs straight to mind (in his case not so much ex, more concurrent), I'm from a background in banking operations so very much a mainframe bod (COBOL, CICS, DB2, IMS) so I can identify very much with the ex IT guys, ex bankers, ex analysts and ex management consultants that we have on here.
I've found that no matter how unique you feel that your skillset is on here you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be other career changers on here with similar or linked backgrounds. Makes us quite an interesting if somewhat diverse group. Sure that yoiiu are going to fit in just fine here.
I look forwards to chatting further,
All the best,
Shaun.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
Good to know Shaun. Lots of different mindsets and experience is always a good thing. Reminds me of 1+1=3 which has always made me think my Maths teacher at school was telling porkies.
Being a bit young and naive I've never heard of that telephone scam, good to know going forwards though so thanks!
A businessman was interviewing job applications for the position of manager of a large division. He quickly devised a test for choosing the most suitable candidate. He simply asked each applicant this question, "What is two plus two?"
The first interviewee was a journalist. His answer was, "Twenty-two".
The second was a social worker. She said, "I don't know the answer but I'm very glad that we had the opportunity to discuss it".
The third applicant was an engineer. He pulled out a slide rule and came up with an answer "somewhere between 3.999 and 4.001.".
Next came an attorney. He stated that "in the case of Jenkins vs. the Department of the Treasury, two plus two was proven to be four".
Finally, the businessman interviewed an accountant. When he asked him what two plus two was, the accountant got up from his chair, went over to the door, closed it, came back and sat down. Leaning across the desk, he said in a low voice, "How much do you want it to be?"
The accountant got the job.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
personally I've already got those things but also have an email address on my site.
Might be worth scrambling that email address Shaun. I'm not sure it's as prevalent as it was given the rise in hacking, but scammers would use harvesting tools on websites to collect email addresses.
Lol at the joke
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John
Any advice given is for general guidance and professional advice should be sought applicable to your circumstances.
Harvesting addresses from websites was once a major problem, but hasn't been a big issue for a long time - probably because it's more lucrative (i.e. you get more addresses) to harvest them in other ways.
Using a form on a website as an alternative isn't without issues of its own:
1. Some people find contact forms off putting in the same way some people don't like leaving messages on answering machines.
2. Unrelated to #1, some people prefer to use a proper email because they automatically have a record of what they said in the message in their own archives. (Copy and paste helps here, but people don't think of that - and it's still not as good as a copy automatically being saved in your archives)
3. If you have a form, there's a good chance it will be spotted automated systems designed to do one of a number of things: One is to look for vulnerabilities (or bring it to the attention of their owners to do the same), with the aim being to take over the site and (ab)use it for nefarious purposes - or in the hope that there might be a nice SQL database sitting behind it that can be opened up to provide all sorts of data! Another is to see if the form can be exploited to act as a spam relay (and even if not, it could simply mean the site owner getting a large amount of spam).
There are ways to mitigate #3:
The relay/spam problem is easily solved with a CAPTCHA - but simpler ones can themselves be defeated, with the text in the image being read using OCR, so you need to think about the more difficult ones. Either way, this solution makes problem 1 even worse. There's also a growing trend now to do away with old-style CAPTCHAs and replace them with something even simpler, such as a tick box with the question simply being words to the effect of "tick this box if you're a human" - until the bots include good language parsers, that's usable, but still see #1 (and don't forget some humans are, well, human, and could fail to notice the need to tick that box).
The hacking problem needs that the site owner (or developer) to know what they're doing when setting it up - making sure all input is sanitised and doesn't contain something that would lead to a compromise, for example.
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Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
(I only came here looking for fellow apiarists...)
