Alan Tay | WindowsTalk.org

Mar

Top 5 Types of Online Scams that Everyone Should Know

by Alan Tay

With the growing numbers of internet users today, online scams have become more and more popular among internet attackers to earn some income. It does not have to be technical such as infecting the victim with Trojan or tricking them with phishing website. It can be as simple as just a piece of email and here are 5 types of Online Scams that everyone should know.

You Won a Lottery! Come on. I get this type of email every day and my usual question to this email is, since when did I buy a lottery? Am I really so lucky where I was picked among zillions of people? I tried to go through part of the process and how they plan to cheat my money were to ask me to send them $150 bucks to deliver my prize. Isn’t that ridiculous? I am already winning millions of dollars and they still want to bother me about $150?
I have millions of dollars and looking for a partner like you to start a business. Yeah right. I don’t know how you managed to find me, but I am very sure you got the wrong guy. Heloo ~ I’m just a software engineer here and I don’t know how to turn your millions of dollars into zillions!
Work from Home: Earn $5000 in One Week with this awesome tool. How amazing. All you need to do is to spend hundreds of dollars to buy their awesome tool and you can earn $5000 a week. They don’t even tell you what is the name of the tool or even how it works. All they show you is some fake pay checks and fake testimonial. If you have any successful stories on this type of awesome tool, please let me know.
You’ve 230 infections in your computer! Oh My God, what should I do next? Relax, just follow the email and click on some link to buy an awesome Malware removal tool, a removal tool that is so exclusive where you can’t find it anywhere on the internet when you tried to Google. It is like; the Malware removal tool is made exclusively for you only. Again, if you have any successful story, do submit your tool to some Antivirus Test software to get the tool evaluated. I am really excited to see what the reviewer has to say about the removal tool.
Get listed on Google Page #1 with less than $100. SEO scam is quite a new trick and what they present in their email are details of how much traffic you will get and how fast you can get into Google Page #1. Personally, I nearly fall for that trick. Fortunately there are something called Alexa rank and Google PageRank where I manage to discover that those SEO service site couldn’t even get below 1 million Alexa Rank and Google PageRank of N/A. So, how can they improve your site if they can’t do that for their own site?

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Of course, these are not the only 5 types of online scams out on the internet. There are still many more to come and it is very important to check every detail before replying the email or even better, immediately delete those email that you have no idea who the sender is.

Categories Security, The Desktop Experience
Comments (25)

Jan

Do You Use Windows Disk Cleanup?

by Alan Tay

The Windows Operating System is one generous operating system for it comes built-in with lots of optimization tools that can really help you to have a better Operating System. Better here means faster, less space wasted, fast boot up, and also fast shut down.

Today I am going to talk about one of the optimization tools which had helped me a lot throughout my time when I suffered from insufficient hard disk space. The tool I am referring to is the Windows Disk Cleanup. Basically, the Disk Cleanup tool helps you to delete unused files such as your temporary files, unused system files, garbage inside your Recycle Bin and many more. So, why do you need to use the Disk Cleanup?

It clears space by removing unnecessary files

As I had mentioned, it cleans up all the unnecessary especially your temporary files. Those files usually are not needed anymore after certain process specifically Windows Update. I had cleared lots of space after a Windows Update patch process.

Besides, it also cleans up your temporary internet files. If you look carefully, the one advantage here is you save a lot of time simply because you don’t have to manually locate those files to remove them.

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It clears space by compressing unused files

Just in case you might not know, apart from removing unnecessary stuff to give you more space, the disk cleanup process also compress those unused files so that those files do not consume so much space.

It might take a little longer for you to open back the compressed file, but the tool does not simply compress your files. It only compress those files which have been untouched for probably from months to years.

So, the benefit?

Ultimately, the benefit of performing Disk Cleanup is to free up some hard disk space. There is one thing I need to remind you here is the methodology to free up hard disk space is not just about deleting some personal large files such as movies, MP3′s, or even high quality photo which you think you do not need anymore, but you who knows you might need them later?

The best way to do so is to remove things that you are sure that you don’t need. Even the computer experts who are extremely proficient with their computer skills will use Disk Cleanup to do this tedious stuff, so why not you?

Alan Tay is the author of IT Security Column, a blog that features on IT security news, tips and tricks and also security product reviews. If you are interested to learn more about IT security, pay his blog a visit and subscribe to it by email to get the latest cool stuff about IT security.

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Categories Microsoft, Software, The Desktop Experience
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Nov

How to Check If Your Account is Hacked

by Alan Tay

I’m sure we all live in a world where we assume our accounts are all safe as long as we can still use them regularly. Same goes for our banking account, as long as the amount does not disappear suddenly, we will assume our account is safe.

What if I were to tell you that your account is already hacked and someone knows your username and password? By having these two criteria, it is sufficient to enter into sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Paypal, and many more to try out your username and password combination.

I’m sure today with every one of us holding at least 5 online accounts, we share the same username and password between accounts. If you are one of those, you are at the right place for today I am going to share with you a site where you can check whether your account is hacked or compromised.

Pwnedlist.com is a creation of two security researchers Alen Puzic and Jasiel Spelman from DVLabs, a division of HP/TippingPoint. What you need to do over there is to enter the username or email address (not the password) which you usually used to login into any online websites and hit the Check button. In just seconds, the result will be shown whether your account is compromised or not.

Up to now, they had discovered close to 5 million sets of username and password which were compromised. Those data were collected from places like Torrent dump or Pastebin where hackers love to upload those stolen accounts at.

If you are worried that sending your username to Pwnedlist could be dangerous, then you don’t have to worry as you are on HTTPS where your transmission is encrypted. Whoever that can tap into your transmitted data will get something that is total gibberish and needs to be decrypted to know the actual values.

Lastly on the security of Pwnedlist, they don’t store your username or email address on their server. This means that if anyone hacked into Pwnedlist, they will not get the 5 million records of username and passwords combination.

If you somehow found yourself in the list among the 5 million records, don’t panic as no one is sure that your account is used out there. What you need to do now is quickly log into all your accounts and start changing passwords. Do ensure that you create a strong password where it should lengthy and complicated.

So now, do run a quick check for the sake of your account safety. Trust me that it does not take any longer than 1 minute to complete the process.

Categories Security, Technology
Comments (50)

Sep

5 Reasons Why Your Life Will Be Miserable Without an Antivirus

by Alan Tay

Although antivirus programs are affordable today, there are still certain computer users who still do not have one installed. If you are one of those who still do not have an antivirus installed in your computer, this is why your life will be miserable. Read More→

Categories Security, Software, The Desktop Experience
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Aug

5 Tips to Improve Security in Windows

by Alan Tay

An Operating System (OS) like Windows comes by default with a reasonable level of security. However as we use the Operating System for a period of time, there could be certain adjustments which we have made that will reduce the security level without our noticing it and these adjustments are basically for the convenience of the user. In general, convenience and security does not work very well together (at least for now).

Therefore, here are five tips that users commonly do to achieve the convenience mentioned and tips on how we can re-adjust to have a better IT security.

Categories General, Security, Software
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Jul

Measuring a Strong Password

by Alan Tay

Having a strong password is getting more important today with the increased of computer crime reported. People usually create a password that is simple and easy to remember rather than a complicated and more difficult to remember one. There is a saying that if you managed to forget a password, then that is a strong password. Hence if you are going to create a strong password, it has to be as complicated as possible.

There are many criteria to consider when defining a strong password. Firstly is the type of characters used in a password. The type of characters here are referring to lower case, upper case, numeric, and special character. A password should combine at least three of the types mentioned and it is highly recommended to combine all of them.

Categories Security
Comments (23)