Falling prey to fraudsters online is common these days. This message is to inform and educate you on precautions you must take to ensure that you are not a victim of these fraudsters.  .

 

Please carefully read through and adopt these safe banking practices.

 

Be careful when responding to emails:

 

You may get messages that seem like they are coming from Your Bank seeking confidential information. This activity is commonly known as 'phishing'. Through such messages, you may be directed to websites appearing to be genuine, and asked to key-in your confidential information. Beware of such messages. 

Please always bear in mind that:

 

·         Your Bank will never ask for any confidential information such as password, customer ID and so on over an email.

·         A phishing email will normally have a tone of urgency – like "Your account will be temporarily suspended" and therefore please "Login to keep your account active."

       Please remember the bank will NEVER send such emails to its customers.

·         If you are doubtful about the credibility of the email, please DO NOT click on any link provided in the email. This may trigger malicious codes being installed on your PC.

·         Before you share any information on a website in response to an email, always assure that the URL shown in the email matches the URL of the bank website. If it does not, you have valid reason to suspect there's something fishy.

·         Check for the security pad lock icon at the bottom right side of the webpage, when you are connected to the NetBanking site.

 

Ensure your Personal Computer is protected:

 

Fraudsters send genuine-looking emails that contain viruses and Trojans (A Trojan refers to a program that appears to be safe, but hidden inside, is usually something harmful, probably a virus).  These viruses / Trojans, install a malicious code on your PC without your knowledge. They extract your confidential information that fraudsters use to access your bank account. 

 

Here are a few important action points that you should bear in mind:

 

·         Keep your PC updated with the latest anti-virus / anti-spyware software

·         Install a personal firewall on your PC to protect your account

·         Keep your PC updated with the latest security patches and, most importantly,

·         Do not click on links or open attachments in unknown or unsolicited (spam) emails

 

 

DO NOT transfer funds to OR share your account details with, unknown / non-validated sources:

 

Many phishing fraudsters are located overseas. They need a Money Mule to route the money into their country of origin. A Money Mule is someone who receives the illegal funds into his account, withdraws it and sends it to the fraudster after keeping his commission. This may be easy money, but is illegal. Such requests could come to you through emails, advertisements on genuine recruitment web sites, instant messaging / SMS, and advertisements in newspapers and even on social networking websites.

 

Follow these Dos and Don'ts:

 

·         Do not be conned by emails offering you a chance to make 'easy money'', especially if it is coming from overseas

·         Check out the company making you a job offer if any fund transfer to them is involved. Check their contact details to find out if they are genuine

·         NEVER share your bank details

·         Beware of ads / notices seeking 'UK Representatives' or 'Agents' to act on their behalf for a period of time  

·         Should you get any suspicious email, IMMEDIATELY forward it to your bank officials.

 

CAUTION: Remember, if you agree to participate in any such money transfer schemes for a commission, you are performing an ACT that is ILLEGAL.

 

Be aware, practice safe computing rules and protect your money. 



So Ready to sleep?



It is confusing rite?

Interview with Soma Shekar, Corporate VP Microsoft



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திரு.சோமசேகர் 1989 ஆம் ஆண்டு முதல் மைக்ரோ சாஃப்ட் நிறுவனத்தில் பணிபுரிந்தவர். இவர் ஒரு நாடக நடிகர், விமர்சகர், என பல பரிமாணங்களில் பிரகாசிக்கும் திரு.சோமசேகர் அவர்களுடன் உரையாடல்.

Mr.Soma Shekar is working with Microsoft since 1989. He is also a Drama Actor and he has other cultural faces. This interview was given by him to Tamil FM Radio. He talks about India, his work like @ Microsoft, about Bill Gates, Current B.E IT/CSE Field, Watching cinema, Drama experience in New York, his wife Akila, T.Nagar life, Tamil Cinema, Humanity, his Father, Time Management



GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google GMail account, allowing you to use GMail as a storage medium.
GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google GMail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your GMail account directly from inside Windows Explorer. GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag’n'drop files to.
Ever since Google started to offer users a GMail e-mail account, which includes storage space of a 1000 megabytes, you have had plenty of storage space but not a lot to fill it up with. With GMail Drive you can easily copy files to your GMail account and retrieve them again.When you create a new file using GMail Drive, it generates an e-mail and posts it to your account. The e-mail appears in your normal Inbox folder, and the file is attached as an e-mail attachment. GMail Drive periodically checks your mail account (using the GMail search function) to see if new files have arrived and to rebuild the directory structures. But basically GMail Drive acts as any other hard-drive installed on your computer.You can copy files to and from the GMail Drive folder simply by using drag’n'drop like you’re used to with the normal Explorer folders.
Because the GMail files will clutter up your Inbox folder, you may wish to create a filter in GMail to automatically move the files (prefixed with the GMAILFS letters in the subject) to your archived mail folder.”

Here's how someone who had malicious intent could set you up with a Gmail account and then later hack into your new mailbox and contact list: First, they need a secondary account that isn't a Gmail address.

A Yahoo or Hotmail address would work fine. Now, when they generate an invitation for you, they type in your first and last name, but their email address.

The invitation is sent to them and they forward it along to you, cut and paste it into a friendly response to your request ("Try this link for an account:") or even just redirect the message so it appears to have come directly from Gmail. But what's different now is that the secondary email address is theirs, not your non-Gmail account:





You sign up, fill in the fields indicated on the Gmail signup form, leave that without thinking because "heck, it's probably just a referral" or similar, and then use your Gmail account without thinking about it again.

Some time later, when the hacker figures you've used the account enough that you'll have a good address book, lots of mail in your archive, etc. they go to the Gmail signup page and click on "I forgot my password":



They select to have a new password generated and sent to the secondary mail address - which is their email address, not yours - and you're now locked out of your account while they can pretend to be you as much as they'd like.

It's a bit convoluted, but if you are signing up for a Gmail account, make double sure that where it says "Secondary mail" that you have your own address, not someone elses address.

Note that you can also change this once you're logged in to your Gmail account by going to your Google Account Information and clicking on Security Question and Contact Info.

I believe once in a while you might came across this annoying message from Windows as you are trying to delete, move or rename a file. To make thing worse, even if you have shut down the process, the problem still persists and the blame should be on the DLL files or related files that are loaded to the active file. You might want to kill it manually but how do you know which one is the culprit?





Unlocker uses few methods to delete locked files, including attempting to close the handle, killing the process holding the file open, unloading the DLL that may have open the file handle etc. There are few more softwares that can perform the same task as Unlocker but as this particular software integrates with Windows Explorer, it can be simply accessed with a single right click on the filename within Explorer and window like in the following picture will popup.





If you have good experience with softwares other than Unlocker and would like to share it with readers here you are most welcomed to do so. So no more wrath when you get stuck with this problem (:

PDF Documents can be restricted accordingly by the PDF author and this action will effectively render certain functions to be completely disabled. The restriction can, for example, prevent copying and even printing. I came across a freeware that is able to remove the restrictions few years back (a lecturer set restriction on examination papers so that you can’t print them out - can’t figure out what’s reason behind that), but I don’t remember the program. But this time I will not make this useful software slips off my collection, so I better share with you guys.

PDF Unlocker is a perfect solution to easily remove PDF document restrictions. The roughly 6MB software needs to be installed first where a shortcut of it will automatically created on your desktop. The restriction removal is very simple; you just need to drag restricted PDF files and drop them on the PDF Unlocker shortcut. New PDF documents without restriction will be created after that and now you have full access on them (print, copy etc). Apart from its main features, PDF Unlocker also allows you to remove “password to open PDF files”.

After few issues related to Gmail security that exposed Gmail users to hijack attempts, Google has been consistently taking necessary measures to beef up and tighten the GMail security. Recently, Google has introduced SSL (secure socket layer) feature or secured connection in Gmail.

Sample slides of how it is hacked (courtesy of gnucitizen.org)






























How to be safe?


This is extremely important especially when you are using internet connection on public area such as airport (WiFi). By enabling this feature, it will effectively encrypt data being sent to and from Gmail, keeping your data safe from being retrieved by unrelated parties. You can enable this feature by clicking on the “settings” tab and scroll down to the bottom where you can see the following option.


Why such connection is not set to be secured by default I hear you ask. One of the reason why Google giving Gmail users an option to choose from is due to the trade off that need to be experienced by users. When secured connection is put in motion the connection will be a little bit sluggish because of the encryption and decryption process.

Use these sites to browse orkut when it is blocked inside your company firewall or proxy server.
1) http://www.powerscrap.com/
2) http://images.orkut.com/Home.aspx
3) http://75.101.241.187 (Powerscrap IP)
4) Proxy sites with ssl like https://standardunblocker.info/
5) http://www.orkutproxy.in/
6) http://www.kproxy.com/
7) http://www.hidemyway.com
8) http://www.proxut.com
9) http://aniscartujo.com/webproxy
10) http://www.jumboproxy.net

I'm not sure whether this is legal or illegal but it will be useful.. Some sites, forums will ask us to register just to increase the visitors count to access their contents...

In case you are wishing to bypass them then try the below site
http://www.bugmenot.com/

You will get password for most sites here...
For example
** Dinamalar.com
** Youtube.com et.c.

Incase you are struck inside company firewall/proxy like me and wanted to check your mails urgently then there are number of other ways.. But now-a-days Network/System Administrators are clever and they are blocking those ways.. Ex: Visiting https://www.proxy1.info and type your site...

Now my new idea is as below...

1) Browse to http://www.systran.co.uk/

2) Select French to English with URL option.

3) Type Gmail.com and press enter and if the page shows blocked click refresh.

4) Once userID and password is given then it will be blocked

5) Then type in the first window (systran.co.urk) http://mail.google.com/mail?ui=dhtml and press enter

6) Child window will refresh and then you will get js error

7) Hit Refresh button in the browser. Now you get gmail. How is this idea? Use this only for checking important mails and listening to tunein.in and if you start using frequently then sysadmin will notice the hig usage and block the site...