Do you leave photocopies for others to see?

It sounds like a no-brainer: put a hard drive into a standard photocopier, so you can have a digital version of anything you run through the machine. That way, if the original is ever lost, you can always go back to the backup. Copiers have in fact been fitted with hard drives for several years now.

But now people are finally waking up to the wrinkle in this plan, which should have been obvious: what do people use copiers for, anyway? Yes, for company flyers and employee manuals, but also for tax returns, passports, photo IDs, and Social Security paperwork. Now what happens when that copier gets old and is sold on eBay? Same as a PC with a hard drive - the data could be accessed by all and sundry.

Copiers are hardly highly-secure devices, and such data could be accessed via a network connection, too. The wake-up call is, surprisingly, being delivered by Sharp, a manufacturer of these devices. The company polled Americans and found that 54% of those surveyed had no idea that photocopiers stored digital versions of everything put on the glass. What to do? Naturally, Sharp is promoting its newer copiers, which encrypt digitally stored copies and "virtually shred" recent ones so they can't be recovered. If you've got such features on your office machine, make sure you use them.

But also remember that next time you make copies at Staples or another photocopy shop or even in your own office, you could be leaving behind a copy of anything you reproduce. Scary?
__________________

Ten things NOT to do.......

Here are ten things NOT to do:

1 Plug your PC directly into the mains rather than via a surge protector
2 Surf the internet without a firewall
3 Don't run or update antivirus and antispyware software
4 Install and uninstall lots of prgrammes, especially beta versions
5 Keep disks full and fragmented
6 Open all attachments
7 Click on everything
8 Share and share alike
9 Pick the wrong passwords
10 Ignore the need for a backup and recovery plan.

Think carefully.......

The battle against spam

A tool that could help in the battle against spam and phishing attacks has received industry approval. The DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) system is a method of validating the identity of the sender of an e-mail. Read the article here

This is an unusual problem........

I thought I'd share this one with you as it's (certainly in my experience) unusual!!

A client called me about a problem which seemed to manifest itself mainly in Microsoft Word and Excel. She said that she would be typing and then the program would start to enter "gibberish" seemingly on its own. Resisting the urge to ask if it really was the software creating the gibberish I dug around a bit: it seems what was appeared were real words but gibberish none the less - a little bit like the latest generation of spam emails where they are prefaced with real everyday words but in no meaningful order.

Searching on Google yielded nothing, if for no other reason that it's quite difficult to formulate the right search!! So I looked at the PC and specifically the processes shown as running in task manager. One of the processes I was unfamiliar with was SAPISVR.EXE. A quick search for that on Google brought up this link. The short answer was that speech recognition was enabled and a microphone that is no longer used, but still plugged in and sitting on a shelf was picking up the ambient sounds in the room and trying to translate them to words - hence all the words were real words. It was even filling in the search box when activated - spooky!!

It's probably something I'll never come across again but interesting nonetheless!

As I was saying......

Just to prove my point about spyware........see this BBC article about research undertaken by Google.

Ten things you should know about fighting spyware in Windows XP

One of the most common calls for help is “my PC is running really slowly” and often the reason is that the machine has become riddled with spyware. Today's cybercriminals are a crafty bunch, and they've mastered the art of infiltrating your computer and populating it with spyware—a broad category of malicious software programs installed on your computer without your knowledge or permission.

Spyware is designed to operate in the background to perform such dubious tasks as gathering information about your computer usage and reporting back to a central database or diverting control of your computer to operations that benefit a cybercriminal's goals. Regardless of the nature of the spyware, it is definitely in your best interest to get rid of it as fast as you can. Here are ten things you should know about fighting spyware in Windows XP.

1. Identify the presence of spyware
2 Keep your operating system and software up to date
3 Use a firewall
4 Scan your system with an anti-spyware program
5 Know spyware when you see it
6 Use a real-time anti-spyware scanner
7 Keep Internet Explorer's Internet zone set to Medium
8 Use Microsoft's online Malicious Software Removal Tool
9 Use the Pop-Up Blocker
10 Close pop-ups properly

I have an article with much more detail than there is room for here - email me for a copy.

What's new in Outlook 2007?

Here are five things which are new in Outlook 2007, and while they may not instantly make you want to upgrade there are some handy features:

1. Outlook 2007 introduces the To-Do Bar, which sits on the right side of the main Outlook window. The To-Do Bar gives you a consolidated view of your calendar, upcoming appointments, tasks and flagged mail, making it easy to see (and act) on priorities. Instead of looking at scraps of paper, notepads, planners, and the Outlook Inbox, you can see everything you need in the To-Do Bar. In the To-Do Bar you see a Date Navigator (a small monthly calendar), your upcoming appointments and a list of your tasks. Here you can accept/decline meetings, quickly access the full Calendar, add new tasks, categorise, rearrange, and change the dates of your tasks - all while responding to email.

2. Cut through inbox clutter with Instant Search. It doesn't take long for inbox clutter to make it hard to find old messages you need to review. With the Instant Search feature in Outlook 2007, you can locate email, tasks and appointments you're looking for from within the Office Outlook 2007 interface. Instant Search also looks for those keywords within your email attachments. Instant Search in Outlook works by accessing indexed content; indexing Outlook content results in quicker search results. By default, the text of all unrestricted Outlook items - including attachments - is indexed, a process that starts when Outlook 2007 runs for the first time. Indexing takes place in the background and only when there is extra processing capacity available on the user's computer - so it's not going to bring your PC to a grinding halt.

3. Instantly preview attachments: opening email attachments is often a cumbersome process with no easy way to get a quick view of the attached content. For instance, to look at an attached Word document, your computer has to open Office Word and load the file. With Attachment Preview, you can easily view attachments in one click directly from within the Outlook 2007 reading pane.

4. Share your calendar with those outside your company: Outlook 2007 offers new and easy ways to share your calendar information to plan meetings with others who aren't part of your organisation or network. One method is called Calendar Snapshots. You can create and save an HTML representation of your Outlook calendar that you can then send along to a vendor or team member outside your office in an email. With new native support for Internet calendars, you can also create a new Internet calendar from within Outlook 2007 and publish it to Microsoft Office Online for others to view on the Web. Finally, there is also the Calendar Printing Assistant for Outlook 2007, an add-on for people who need an easy way to print and customise their Outlook 2007 calendar information.

5. Use email Postmark to fight spammers: Outlook email Postmark is a new technology from Microsoft to help curb junk mail. This technology asks the mail sender's computer to perform a computation or puzzle, and then assigns this work as a token of legitimacy to the mail. Creating an Outlook email Postmark makes it difficult and time-intensive for spammers to send mass email, but does not change your experience when sending legitimate email. When an email with a postmark is received by Outlook 2007, the system will verify the validity of that message (taking into account some of the unique characteristics of the message) and delivers the message to either your inbox or junk email folder, as appropriate. Outlook 2007 does not create email postmarks when the recipients are entirely within your organisation, or the message is signed, information rights management-protected, or encrypted, or you have chosen to turn off the feature.