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LinkedIn Phishing Scam Warning; How to Spot Fraudulent E-mails

Last night, I got an e-mail from someone purporting to be from LinkedIn informing me that they needed to confirm and validate my account. This is clearly a phishing attempt, so if you get a similar e-mail, do not click on the link in the e-mail. Instead, forward the e-mail to phishing-report@us-cert.gov.

Remember when it was easy to spot SPAM or Phishing attempts? English was clearly not the criminals’ first language. The sentence structures were terrible and there were spelling errors throughout the e-mail. Unfortunately, that’s not the case any more. The e-mails are written well enough to pass as legitimate correspondence from reputable companies.

Despite improving their spelling and grammar, there are still dead giveaways if you pay attention. Here are some things to look for to help spot a fraudulent e-mail.

1) Look at the “From” e-mail address. If it’s not from the actual company named in the e-mail, then that’s your first hint. For example, this e-mail claiming to be from LinkedIn comes from a hotmail account. Already, I know this was not legit.

2) What are they asking you to do? In this case, “LinkedIn” wanted me to “confirm and validate” my “new profile.” As if the warning sirens weren’t already blaring, they are at deafening levels now. I set up my LinkedIn account a long time ago, so I know for a fact that I don’t have a “new” profile.

3) Online social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace will never ask you to download a file in an e-mail, especially to validate your account. Stop and think for a minute - these sites are Web-based, not an application you download to your computer. There is NO reason to download a file to review and verify your account.

4) By now, I’m only still reading this fake e-mail out of curiosity. Look at the file extension they want you to download - it’s a .pif file extension. A .PIF is a program information file associated with early versions of Microsoft Windows (we’re talking Win95). According to filext.com, when you click on a .PIF file, the information in the file is used by Windows to run a program; including code that can be in the PIF file. It is a potentially dangerous file type, so never click on one received via e-mail.

Well, I hope this helps keep your computers safe. Remember, if you don’t have an updated virus detection program, it’s cheaper to buy a new licenses for $60 than it is to pay the Geek Squad at Best Buy three times that much to clean our your computer and then still have to pay $60 for virus protection software.

Lastly, when in doubt, do not click on any links or download any files. It’s better to be safe than spend a crap-load of money to fix your mistake. Happy Interwebbing!

20 Easy Steps to Add Google Analytics to Your Facebook Fan Page

Earlier this week, I saw a Tweet about adding Google Analytics (GA) to a Facebook (FB) fan page, so naturally I checked it out. The blog post came from a London-based Web development company called WebDigi, so kudos to them for sharing this with the rest of the world.

The only problem I found with the blog post is that their instructions aren’t very clear, as evidenced by the numerous questions that appeared in the comments section. So, after piecing together the responses and doing a little trial and error myself, I decided to come up with a soup-to-nuts list of steps for implementing WebDigi’s strategy for adding GA to FB.

1.) For starters, you will need to create a new Google Analytics (GA) account for your Facebook fan page. This is completely separate from any other analytics you use to track other sites - this GA account is specifically for your Facebook fan page.

2.) If you don’t have a Gmail account, get a free account at Google.com and then visit Google.com/analytics to get started.

3.) Once you add a new site to GA, you will get some code to add to your site. Do not copy the entire set of code. Instead, just look for a small string of code that looks something like “UA-12345678-9.” Copy this string of code and move on to the next step.

4.) Visit http://ga.webdigi.co.uk/ and generate an image tag by using Webdigi’s code generator. (You’ll need your Google Analytics UA code you copied in step 3.)

5.) Enter your GA code in the first box, facebook.com in the second box, page link information in the third box, and the page title in the last box. Then click “Generate Code.”

6.) Copy the code and then move on to the next step.

7.) Go to the Static FBML Facebook fan page at http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=Static+FBML&init=quick#!/apps/application.php?id=4949752878&ref=search&sid=616126479.2955418844..1

8.) In the upper left, click on “Add to my Page” and choose the fan page(s) you’d like to add FBML to and click “Close” when you’re done.

9.) Go to your Facebook fan page and click on “Edit Page” just below your page’s profile picture.

10.) Under “Applications” look for FBML and click on “Edit”

11.) Change the Box Title to whatever you want (i.e. Links, Contact Info, etc.)

12.) Paste the code from step 6 into the big text box labeled “FMBL:” (You can also add other text, but just put the code at the bottom.)

13.) Click “Save Changes”.

14.) Go back to your page.

15.) Click on the “Boxes” tab. (If you do not have Boxes enabled, click on the big plus (+) button and add it.

16.) Look for the box with the title you created in step 11. For this example, we used “Thanks for stopping by!” Click on the pencil icon on the right - this is the “edit” button.

17.) A drop-down menu will appear - click on “Move to Wall tab”

18.) This step is purely optional. It’s more for aesthetics. After you add the box to your Wall, you will be taken to your Facebook fan page home page (usually your Wall unless you’ve changed it). Look in the left column for the “Google Analytics” box, which is blank. Roll your cursor over the header, click and move it to the bottom of the left column.

19.) If you used FBML to create custom tabs (i.e. pages) for your Facebook fan page, you can add the same code (from step 11) to the bottom of each of your FBML custom pages.

20.) That’s it, you’re all done.

Now all you have to do is sit back and wait a day or two for Google to pick up on the tracking code you added to your Facebook pages. If you have questions, or would like us to blog about a specific topic, please let us know by leaving a comment below.

The Importance of Creating a ‘Dark Site’

If your Web site crashed, or went down for any significant length of time, are you prepared with a remotely hosted back-up site, or what we call a “dark site?” If you are, congratulations! You can stop reading this post and go about your day. If you do not have a dark site, keep reading…

A dark site is a fully functional, branded site or blog that remains “hidden” on a separate server from your main site when everything is peachy keen. However, it is easily accessible from any computer with an Internet connection and a Web browser. It is also updated and ready to go public in the event of an emergency or if your main Web site goes down for any reason and you need to get information out to the public.

Most companies probably have secure and reliable Web site hosting, but every now and then, even the most reliable sites can have issues. Sometimes these issues are beyond the hosting company’s control, such as natural disasters. And there is always the risk of your site getting hacked, which actually happened to one of our clients. In an extreme cases, an event (good or bad) may trigger an avalanche of traffic to a company’s site that could overload the server and bring the site down. In this case, having a dark site ready to bring into the light is essential.

So, where can you host a Web-accessible dark site? There are several free services such as Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger or Weebly. Of course, even if you have a back-up site, how are you going to let your followers know that you’re site is down and direct them to the temporary site, or what we call a “dark site?” Simple. Social media and even the traditional media - if your the public needs access to your information immediately.

Oh boy. There’s that phrase again. Social media. In addition to having a “dark site” ready in case of an emergency, your business or organization should be utilizing social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, two of most popular social networking sites on the Interwebz today.

If your Web site goes down, and you have a Twitter and/or Facebook account, you can easily notify your clients, vendors, partners and friends that your site is down and provide a link to your dark site, which by now you’ve brought into the light.

Another option is to integrate the two. Many business are using content management systems (CMS) like Wordpress to build their sites and blog. At CWI Media, however, we have a static HTML-based site, but use Tumblr to host our blog. Now, when you’re on our blog site, it looks just like our static HTML site, but should our Web server ever fail, our blog will still be active. So in our case, our dark site is actually live, but because we designed it to match our Web site exactly, you can’t tell the difference.

Hopefully your business or organization already has these continuity of operations (COOP) plans in place, but if not, I strongly recommend you add it to the agenda of your next executive team meeting. If you have questions on how to develop such a COOP plan, e-mail me at gary.cope@gmail.com.

Anti Social Media Behavior

cwimedia:

I’ve gone dark. I’m off the grid. I’ve become a ghost. Well, sort of. I am speaking, of course, about social media and the ever-increasing privacy concerns that come with posting information about your life online.

It started some time ago with Facebook and MySpace. My profiles were at one time public and anyone could see them. After getting a ridiculous number of unsolicited “friend” requests from people I didn’t know, and even some from people I actually did know, it was time to restrict access to those profiles.

I also had a accounts with, Plurk, Plaxo, SocialThing, FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, Digg, Newsvine, Reddit, Brightkite, Ping.fm and a bunch more sites. Clearly, I was on the social media overkill bandwagon. Well, no more.

In what a friend called a “scorched Earth campaign” against social media, I went through and canceled virtually all of my social media accounts, especially those that I don’t use any more. I was a bit shocked to discover that I had so many different accounts with varying degrees of personal information available to the world - some of it extremely outdated.

Here’s a partial list of the social media accounts I deleted:

• MySpace
• Digg
• Orkut
• FriendFeed
• SocialThing (bought by AOL, discontinued)
• MyBlogLog
• Squidoo
• 12seconds.tv
• Ping.fm
• Plaxo
• Brightkite
• Blogger (two blogs)
• Photobucket
• Plurk

Here’s a list of social media accounts I decided to keep, but with a restricted privacy level:

• Delicious
• Facebook
• Flickr
• Stumbleupon
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• Vimeo
• Wordpress.com
• YouTube

My Facebook is locked down pretty tight. I created multiple friend lists and restricted access to my personal date to less than 90 people, all people I trust. They are either family or friends.

Twitter is set to private and after after pruning my list of “followers,” my list is down to less than 300. So, why the sudden shift in attitude toward social media? There are several reasons, but first, why did I put all that information out there in the first place?

There was a time when I wanted my name, opinions, thoughts and qualifications out there for the whole world to see. I gloated about how I dominated the search engine results pages (SERPs) when you searched for Gary Cope. There was a time when I didn’t even show up on the first few pages. Social media was huge and niche sites were popping up left and right to cater to virtually any audience. Being a web geek and web professional, I felt an obligation to try the new “it” things as they came out.

I still have a personal blog on Tumblr, but I went through all of the nearly 1,700 posts over the last three years and took down any pictures or posts about my son. They’re still there, but are “private” and only I can see them from my admin page. Sure, they might still exist in some search engine cache file, but there’s nothing I can really do about that.

Going forward, however, I have created a password-protected Tumblr site for family and some select friends. It’s a bit of a pain, but it’s better than going completely dark. I also post to Facebook, which is where most of my friends and family are anyway, so it’s not hard to keep them updated.

The recent social media enema was long overdue. I had more accounts than I could remember and more importantly, I felt a need to get my personal info off the web as much as possible. No more pictures of me and my son. Flickr got privatized, as did Twitter and my blog on Tumblr. I no longer feel the need to let the whole world know what I am doing. The world doesn’t really care, but my friends and family do, hence why I locked the sites down.

I realize that I can’t control all of the information available on the Interweb, but I can attempt to limit it.

If you have too many social media accounts to keep track of, or you are concerned about people you don’t know having to much access to your personal information, consider a “spring cleaning,” or “scorched Earth” campaign of your own.

It can be time-consuming and tedious, but once completed, I felt so much more organized and at ease.

If you have questions, comments, suggestions and/or stories to share about your social media experiences, let me know.

Don’t abuse your personal social media brand

We all know one. A person on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn who abuses their status as your social media “friend” by inviting you to join Facebook fan pages every other day, sending out 500 Tweets before lunch, or even worse, sharing links to get-rich-quick schemes.

There are a couple of folks that I know in real life (IRL) and am also “friends” with on Facebook and/or Twitter. But lately, they’ve started to annoy me with their endless recommendations for fan pages and shameless self promotion. The whole thing cheapens the overall relationship and damaged their credibility.

One person in particular has become a shill, not a living breathing human being. Often times they promote worthy causes, but when I get several fan page recommendations a week, I start to tune you out.

Perhaps you are well recognized and have an established personal brand - great! Good for you. Don’t cheapen it by treating your social media friends and followers with disrespect.

Be a person. Be real. If all you do is pimp something or send invites to everyone on your friends list, that’s not how social media works. That’s how spammers work. It’s the fastest way to get un-friended and/or un-followed.

Choosing a Lavalier Microphone (lav mic)

I recently gave a presentation on video production at the College Communicators Association’s fall 2009 conference, held at the College of William & Mary. Most of the folks who attended were either just getting started with video production, or were already producing videos, but with no real backgrounds in video production, were looking to enhance their skills.

While we primarily addressed the video production side of things during our four hour presentation, audio plays a very important role in producing quality content. Today, I received an e-mail from one the attendees and they asked the following question:

Gary,
I was in your video session on Thursday of the CCA conference just a few weeks ago. I have a question for you, we’re interested in purchasing a lav mic. What should we be looking for when we search to purchase? Thanks!

Below is my response to this question:

The first thing you need to consider is the input to your camera. More than likely, if you are using a smaller, handheld camcorder, the mic input will be much like a standard headphone-sized jack. If you have a larger, more professional style news camera, you are probably going to need an XLR input, which is a bigger cable with a three-pronged plug. You see those more in professional videographer news shops.

The next question is whether you want a wired or wireless system. Wired mics are generally less expensive and the sound quality is more reliable. Wireless systems (which we have) allow for more freedom and creative interview framing, but you also run the risk of getting interference depending on the frequency at which the wireless signal broadcasts.

As a general rule of thumb, you get what you pay for. I worked for one shop where we bought a cheap ($109) wireless mic kit with a lav mic, a receiver (plugs into the camera), and a transmitter (where you plug the lav mic into), and we got a ton of static interference with our interviews. At my current shop, we stepped up and got a mic kit for about $250 and it has worked just fine. We had to fine tune the UHF frequency, but that’s not a big deal.

Different mics have different audio pickup patterns. An omnidirectional picks up sound in all direction, which is basically the built-in mic on the camera. For a lav mic, you want a cardiod pattern. We have an Azden lav mic set and you can find it and many others on BHPhoto.com.

Lastly, take into consideration whether you might use the lav mic in wet weather, if so, check to see if your preferred mic is weather resistant or even water proof, though those mics are generally more expensive.

If you have any questions about video or audio production, please feel free to contact me at gary.cope@vt.edu.

Random “I’m up way too early” Thoughts

So, an old friend reaches out to me via Facebook last year and was all excited to get back in touch. They said it had been too long and that they didn’t want to lose touch again. Yet, they never respond to any attempt at communication. Was one of my off-the-wall, politically incorrect comments? Or, maybe it’s time to prune the “friend” list again. Since I cut about 100 people, my not-so-live news feed has become much more relevant, interesting and less cluttered.

Social media is about being SOCIAL, not ignoring people you have on your friends list. And if you don’t want to communicate with your “friends” then drop them from your list - they’ll get the hint. IF they notice you dropped them. If someone drops you and you don’t notice, are you really missing out on anything? Nope.

These random thoughts are brought you by the numbers 5 and 30, as in the time I got up on a Sunday morning. #sleepfail