A legitimate looking email arrives from one of your contacts, a potential client, paypal, facebook, twitter or even from your own email server (see below). Something is wrong with your account and they need you to login and verify your password. Click here. Or one of a thousand other reasons why you would want to follow the link they provide.

This link is false. As is this one: http://www.client-x.com/cpanel

Hover over it with your mouse and see it links to an entirely different place on the internet. There, you’ll be greeted by your familiair (but fake) logon screen where you enter, or verify your name and password . These are now, of-course, in someone’s database, along with your IP address and possibly email address. The site might then send on your credentials to the real site and log you on so you will never even know the difference.

Or, you might not even fill in anything but an applet, or script, hidden on the page you were sent to has installed a virus, trojan or Adware on your PC. The possibilities are endless, take for example this example I was asked about this morning by client X.

Subject: your mailbox has been deactivated
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:52:46 +0100
From: notifications@client-x.com
To:

We are contacting you in regards to an unusual activity that was
identified in your mailbox. As a result, your mailbox has been
deactivated. To restore your mailbox, you are required to extract
and run the attached mailbox utility.

Best regards, client-x.com technical support.

Now luck has it, we are actually technical support for client X and we sure had not sent the email. When the client wanted to forward the email to us, their anti-virus solution gave a first indication of trouble, the attached ‘utility’ contained a virus.

So how can you know what emails to trust? It is impossible to be 100% sure. There are, however, a number of red flags and things you can do yourself.

Red Flags & What to Do

1. Read the email closely. Does it make sense? Why would a system that you own ‘lock you out’?
2. Look closely at the ‘from’, and possibly the ‘reply to’ addresses. On close inspection, are they real? In the above case, the notifications@client-x.com address does not even exist.
3. Is there a link to click? Don’t. First hover over it and see where it will take you. Is this the same location as it looks to be? You can copy and paste the link into word or notepad if you cannot see it on hovering over. Is it really a link at facebook.com ? Or if you look better, does it actually goto facebook.com.23789myserver.ru ? If the link looks legitimate, BEFORE you fill in any personal information, check the URL or location bar in your browser. Do you see a lock indicating a secure connection? Again, are you really on facebook?
4. Copy a bit of the email and paste it into Google. If anyone else has writen about it, anywhere in the world, you’ll know. I copied the first line of the above virus into Google and got 16,700 hits.
5. And do we need to say? Don’t run any attachment. And if you have to, make sure your anti virus software is up to date and running!

And if you’re worried at all, DO contact us. We probably either heard already, or can find out about it.

UPDATE 8/12/09: The ever useful on-line magazine LifeHacker just posted an article on this subject with lots of useful info and links. Find it here…

UPDATE 25/01/10: Another email in our inbox, another variety of the same scam. We’ll be adding them as comments to this post as they come in…

Fortunately, as with many technologies, full time camera surveillance is now something available to anyone, anywhere, using no more then standard PC equipment and easilly available camera hardware. Instead of using an expensive ‘time-lapse’ videorecorder, we can now digitally record any video source, from a web-cam to an wireless outside camera, straight onto a standard hard-disk using a technology called ‘DVR’, or ‘Digital Video Recording’.

Using no more then a standard personal computer, abeit one with a reasonably large hard-disk, a video capture card and one or more cameras, we can ensure 24×7 recording of your property. You can access your recordings from any workstation in your office, or even remotely, from the internet.

Our preferred software for the professional monitoring of your assets is made by ‘Argus’ (see their website here); their uniquely flexible and schaleable software allows support for almost all available camera’s, DVR cards (a card you plug into the central recording server, allowing connection of 4, 8 or 16 cameras), USB-webcams, wireless IP-cameras etc..

And what to think of:

• scheduled, motion detected or full-time recording of up to 32 simultaneous cameras,
• support for zooming & panning (moving the aim of your camera),
• automatic notification of activity on SMS (when supported by the cellular network), email and across your company network,
• access to any recorded materials by date, time and/or detected movement,
• etc..

Have a good look at the Argus DVR pages for a full overview of possibilities and if you are interested, why not visit our shop in town to see for yourself! We are using two cameras to record all movement in our shop to a central computer and will gladly give you a full demonstration of the possibilities of the system.

Using our own system to the full, combined with a number of installations in town, has given us ample experience in the setup of camera surveillance, bringing this specialised technology to the Arusha market at very affordable prices. Interested? Let us know and we’ll be in touch with more information!