Safeguarding Yourself From E-Mail Phishing

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What is Email Phishing?

Phishing is when a third party, usually a hacker or malicious website, uses the branding of a well known company to lure a user into exposing private information.

There are two types of email phishing schemes:

  • Phishing emails that come to you
  • Phishing emails that come from you

Phishing emails impersonate legitimate businesses to implant malware in an attachment or download or obtain login credentials. Phishing is the primary method of obtaining user information or passwords for attacks. You need to know how to protect yourself, your employees, and your business from phishing.

Identifying Phishing Emails
Phishing groups and hackers are constantly changing their patterns to improve both their targeting and the effectiveness of their emails in order to exploit users, but there are a few characteristics in common for every phishing email.

Phishing emails impersonate a strong brand

Big brands such as Paypal, UPS, Fedex, financial institutions, credit cards, banking and insurance industries are often impersonated to trick users into thinking an email message is authentic. Always ask yourself these three questions: Do you really have an account with that company? Is this the email address i provided for that account? Have you done anything with the account lately?

“From” domain and Return Path Domain will not match

It is relatively easy to spoof a “From” address. Email Standards allow ANY 3rd party to send email messages on the internet on behalf of another domain, otherwise hosting providers like Google and Outlook.com or bulk email providers could not send email for the business or personal domains they host. If for example, you recieve a message that looks like it came from PayPal, make sure the from address ends in PAYPAL.COM. There also may be text after the .com, for instance, PayPal.com.something.somethingelse. In this instance, you have a phishing email! –

There is an (often unexpected) attachment

If you are required to download anything that you did not ask the company for, then it is probably a phishing email and will most likely contain malware or viruses. PDFs or Word DOCs can contain malware payloads. They are trying to trick you into thinking that their fake attachment is real so that they can get personal, private or financial data from you. Don’t download attachments you did not ask for.

There is a sense of urgency

These kinds of emails will usually ask you to “take action soon” or it will cost you money. This sense of urgency makes you react before you think. Take a breath before acting on any email that looks really important.

Links on the page go to a different domain

Often a phishing email will include a link to a 3rd or 4th domain or just to an IP address. The goal here is to get you to click unsuspectingly on any link so they can further the con and grab your information when you attempt to login to their fake website. Sometimes the domains even look like subdomains or related domains. Always check links before clicking on them.

It is always best practice to open a clean window and navigate to the company’s website and login to your account from there to check on the issue. for Example, if you received an urgent email from Your Bank, either open a new browser window and go directly to your bank’s website by typing in the address yourself, or give your bank a call.

Quality Varies

Some phishing emails, look good on the surface. For example, the logos look correct, the fonts and color scheme are appropriate and some of the language is even straight from legitimate emails. However, when you read deeper you can see spelling mistakes, grammatical errors or other areas where it is clear the writer was not a native English speaker.

Our Spam Filter Has You Covered


While no spam filtering solution exists that can eliminate this problem, our spam filtering has intelligent, adaptive, and learning based heuristics capabilities, allowing it to detect and block most of these emails before they ever hit your inbox. While having spam protection helps, its always up to the end users to follow these guidelines and become aware of these warning signs.

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Coming Soon To ShowMyOffice (Parallels or 2X) – Office 2016!

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microsoft office 2016

Check Back For Updates, The Launch Date Will Be Announced Shortly!

The 2016 version of Microsoft’s productivity suite includes features for easier collaboration and sharing. Excel gets a boost in power, Outlook streamlines everyday tasks, and most applications help you find the command you need.

The latest version of Microsoft Office includes many new productivity, collaboration, and data analysis features. Here are just a few of the top new features.

Work Faster with “Tell Me”

The Tell Me box in most applications helps you perform important tasks even if you don’t know how to do something. Rather than using Help or just poking around, you can type what you want to do in this box. Office shows you a list of commands you can use to complete your task. If you have selected something in your document, you will see commands specific to that object. For example, if an image is selected, you will see commands related to images

Get Quick Answers with Insights

Insights lets you search for information from within Word, Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint. Right-click a word or phrase and choose Smart Lookup. Microsoft’s Bing search engine uses what you selected and what’s near the selected text to show you definitions, images, Wikipedia articles, and other related information. This appears right in Office, not in a web browser. You can also access Insights via the Review tab and Tell Me.

Collaborate and Declutter in Outlook

Outlook has a number of new features to help you work more efficiently, collaborate more easily, and manage email overload, including

Fast integration with other Office applications. When you attach an Office document to an email you’re about to send, Outlook shows you a list of the files you worked on most recently. No more hunting through folders for that recent spreadsheet or document you want to email to your colleagues. If it’s a file you worked on in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint, the file’s icon has a little cloud on it.

Collaboration with work groups. If you use Outlook with Exchange Server, you can set up work groups, which are like powerful distribution lists. Members of a work group can share conversations, calendars, and files. You can choose whether they get messages in their individual inboxes or in a group inbox.

Cleaning up clutter. Some people’s inboxes get very cluttered — someone you know, perhaps? So, if you use Outlook with Exchange Server, Outlook has a new feature called Clutter. It moves low-priority messages into a folder called Clutter. You can define which messages should or should not go to this folder. More than that, though, Clutter looks at what you’ve ignored in the past and moves new, similar messages out of your inbox so you can deal with them later.

New Analysis and Forecasting Features in Excel

Excel has gotten quite a bit more powerful in 2016. New features include

Pulling in data from almost anywhere. A former add-on called Power Query is now built in to Excel. Power Query can pull data from various sources for analysis, including websites and SQL, Azure, Access, and other databases.

More charting options. Excel also has six new chart types.

  • Box and whisker charts are most commonly used in statistical analysis.
  • Histograms show frequency data in columns.
  • Pareto charts highlight the biggest factors in a dataset.
  • Sunburst charts show levels of a hierarchy that are represented in concentric rings.
  • Treemap charts compare proportions within a hierarchy.
  • Waterfall charts show a running total as values are added or subtracted.
  • Predicting the future. The new time series forecasting functions can predict future values from historical data. The more data, the better the forecast.

Real-Time Co-Authoring in Word

If several people are working on a Word document that is stored in OneDrive for Business, real-time co-authoring allows multiple users to collaborate, edit, and update simultaneously. Everybody can see what everybody else is doing. They can see changes as they are made and even where cursors are currently placed.

Microsoft plans to include this feature in other Office applications in the future.

Sharing Made Easy

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint now have Share buttons at the top right of the window. When you click a Share button, you are prompted to save your file to an online location, such as OneDrive. Then, in a panel on the right side of your window, you can enter the email addresses of the people you want to share the file with or select the addresses from your address book. You can choose whether they can edit the file or just view it.

The Ribbon Has a New Look

Office 2016 also looks a little different from Office 2013 or Office 2010. In Office 2013/2010, the default background for your document and ribbon was white, but you could also choose light gray or dark gray. In Office 2016, the default background for the ribbon tabs is the color of the application’s icon. For example, Word is dark blue, Excel is dark green, and PowerPoint is orange. But you can go back to white or dark gray if you like. The dark gray theme is designed to be helpful to people with impaired vision.

Creating Outlook HTML Email Templates

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Step 1: Creating your HTML template

You should create your HTML email template as you would any normal HTML page. The rules are relatively straight-forward for this. Use tables and nested tables like you would for a 1998 era web-page. No background images, limited CSS. The cool, fancy stuff you can do with CSS3 is out.

Step 2: Getting your template into Outlook

Once you’ve built your email template as an HTML document with all of its images and styles you’ll need to open that HTML template in Internet Explorer. Once you have it displaying in IE you’ll need to send it to Outlook. You can do this by opening IE’s File menu and selecting Send. Hovering the Send option will give you the option of sending it as an email. Clicking this will open your new template in an Outlook Email window.

Step 3: Saving your template

First you must File > Save. Wait, you’re not done. Once you’ve saved the email you can then save the email template. Now you must File > Save As. Select the save as Outlook Template option in the selection list that appears in the dialogue that opens. You have now saved your template and can now use it.

To use an email message template, do the following:

  1. On the Home tab, in the New group, click New Items, point to More Items, and then Choose Form.
  2. In the Choose Form dialog box, in Look In, click User Templates in File System.
  3. The default templates folder is opened. The folder location (in Windows Vista and later operating systems) is c:\users\username\appdata\roaming\microsoft\templates. If your template is saved in a different folder, click Browse, and then select the template.
  4. Select the template, and then click Open.
  5. Make any additions or revisions to the recipients in the To, Cc, or Bcc boxes. You can also change the text in the Subject box and add contents to the message body.

    6. Note: Changes made aren’t saved to the template. If you use the Save command, this creates a draft of your message, but won’t update the template. To update the template, follow the steps for saving a new template in Create an email message template.

  6. Click Send.

FBI paid Geek Squad staff to be informants, documents show

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bulldog tech privacy

The agency’s relationship with staff in the Best Buy repair unit goes back at least a decade, say documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

by Steven Musil, CNET. Published March 6, 2018 5:16 PM PST

Read at CNET

FBI agents paid employees in Best Buy’s Geek Squad unit to act as informants, documents published Tuesday reveal.

Agents paid managers in the retailer’s device repair unit to pass along information about illegal content discovered on customers’ devices, according to documents posted online by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The digital rights group sued the FBI for the documents last year after the bureau denied a Freedom of Information Act request.

The EFF filed the lawsuit to learn the extent to which the agency trains and directs Best Buy Geek Squad employees to conduct warrantless searches of customers’ devices during maintenance. The EFF said it was concerned that use of repair technicians to root out evidence of criminal behavior circumvents people’s constitutional rights.

What the EFF found was that the agency’s relationship with Geek Squad employees goes back at least a decade. An FBI memo from 2008 describes a meeting between Best Buy employees and the agency’s “Cyber Working Group” at the company’s Kentucky repair facility.

The memo describes how Best Buy employees gave agents a tour of the facility and went on to say the bureau’s Louisville Division “has maintained close liaison with the Geek Squad’s management in an effort to glean case initiations and to support the division’s Computer Intrusion and Cyber Crime programs.”

Another document shows the FBI approved a $500 payment to a “confidential human source” whose name was redacted. The EFF said the payment appears to be one of many connected to the prosecution of Mark Rettenmaier, a Southern California doctor accused of possessing child pornography after he sent in his computer to Best Buy for repairs.

The EFF said the documents detail investigation procedures in which Geek Squad employees would contact the FBI after finding what they believed to be child pornography on a customer’s device.

The EFF said an FBI agent would examine the device to determine whether there was illegal content present, and if so, seize the device and send it to the FBI field office closest to where the customer lived. Agents would then investigate further, and in some cases try to obtain a warrant to search the device.

Best Buy said last year that three of the four employees who may have received payment from the FBI are no longer employed by the company. The fourth was reprimanded and reassigned.

Best Buy didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment but told CNET sister site ZDNet that Geek Squad employees inadvertently discover suspected child pornography on customers’ computers nearly 100 times a year.

“We have a moral and, in more than 20 states, a legal obligation to report these findings to law enforcement,” Best Buy said in a statement. “We share this policy with our customers in writing before we begin any repair.

“As a company, we have not sought or received training from law enforcement in how to search for child pornography. Our policies prohibit employees from doing anything other than what is necessary to solve the customer’s problem. In the wake of these allegations, we have redoubled our efforts to train employees on what to do — and not do — in these circumstances.”

The FBI declined to comment, saying it doesn’t provide information on its dealings with informants.

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AOL Mail Is Dead Today

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Update: AOL reporting issue has been resolved!

While we are not affiliated with AOL, or the outage in general, we’ll keep you posted as to when they fix the issue.

We’ve received numerous calls and emails today to our support line where customers could not reach AOL Mail. For the past several hours AOL has been down and some delivery problems have been noted. While AOL works to correct this, expect continued interruptions and timeouts.

These outages can happen time to time with free services. A hosted email solution is the most reliable way to ensure you always have access to your emails. These free accounts are not reliable, secure, spread viruses and are hacked on an almost daily basis.

Our Hosted Microsoft Exchange Emails gives you the power, flexibility & productivity you demand in business critical email system. Bulldog Tech offers affordable, convenient and secure email packages.

Looking to ditch AOL? Give us a call.