Managed Solutions

Anatomy of a Phishing Email

I encountered a great opportunity this evening, the opportunity to share an inside look of a Phishing Email. What is Phishing? "In the field of computer security, phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication." - Wikipedia What I noticed was an Email purportedly from Bank of America telling me that there was an "Accoun...

Possible Email Outage

12/18/2009 1407 Pacific - Our hosting provider is having issues with one of their data centers and it may affect some of our clients Exchange or Email accounts. We will update you as soon as more information is available. 12/18/2009 1414 Pacific - Services have been restored, if you note any lingering issues please contact us.

Warning Facebook Phishing Email

Today I noticed a peculiar Email message from Facebook in my Quarantine. A quick investigation confirmed what I had suspected, it was a phishing attempt to compromise my Facebook account or other personal information. This video demonstrates what this message looked like and how the URL in the link gave away that it was not Facebook but in fact a .me.uk address:

Quick Tip Email Sorting

Use the "from" and "subject" fields to sort Emails while you are cleaning up your inbox. You should find it easier to get through your back log of messages by addressing issues with certain individual(s)... or certain subjects all at once. Quite often the most recent Email of a certain subject contains all the prior information and the older ones can be deleted.

Webmail/Spam Quarantine Howto

Watch this video to learn how to access and use the Webmail/Spam quarantine options as well as our forwarding and auto responder options. If you cannot view or don't see the video the analog directions follow: There are 2 important things you should know about your new Managed Solutions email account. 1. Your spam quarantine is by default only accessible via the webmail interface. 2. You have flexibility if you do not like the default Spam quarantine options. Step 1 – Login to ...

KB910721 Spam and Virus

Just yesterday I answered a question on LinkedIn related to new scams that are circulating on the Internet. Not less than 24 hours later I saw something that was new, creative and likely to cause some damage as it actually harbors the payload Win32/Kryptik.TL - a Trojan Horse Virus that as of 6/24/2009 is not circulating much. While the format they sent has the Microsoft look and feel (Top Image), it does not duplicate the email format of Microsoft notices (Bottom Image).

Phisher Shutdown

This morning I happened to get a Phishing message from the contact form on this website. It was carefully crafted and was devised to obtain routing and bank information to most certainly relieve us of any and all funds in the account. When I went to investigate the site, I quickly learned that it had already been removed from the dns records of the hosting provider - precisely what I had intended to inform them of. Someone had already reacted to this would be phisher and stopped them in their tr...

419 Death Threat Spam

A particularly despicable scam is circulating this week. It involves a Spam email that contains a "death threat" the sender claims to be a hit man hired to kill you. In typical fashion the grammar and spelling are poor. This could indicate the authors are not skilled in the English language though it could also be an attempt to protect the guilty and obscure the trail of the actual perpetrator(s). If you happen to receive this Spam don't worry, just delete the message. They are using this method...

Tips For Effective Use of Business Email

Simplicity and convenience have made Email the primary communication tool for many businesses. According to studies performed in recent years poorly worded emails could generate negative feelings by co-workers, customers or even your boss. Poorly organized Email communications can also cause delays or even hurt business relationships. Respondents in some of these studies acknowledged that confrontations with co-workers had taken place due to Email misunderstandings. To fully take advantage of Em...

Is Your Email Secure?

There has recently been a rise in the frequency and quality of many internet scams, including "phishing" scams. Phishing scams typically involve "casting out" a mass email spam that appears to be reputable companies requesting information from their clients. The idea being that a few people will fall for the scam, allowing the scammers to use the identity of the individuals who “took the bait” to obtain resources illegally using the victims credit card numbers, bank accounts, etc. There are a tr...