phishing emails

There are new varieties of phishing emails going out which look more and more real. One came from the bank Wal-Mart credit card is with now appearing very real and actually had muy name on it but had wrong last 4 digits of credit card shown. It had a mis-leading link that wanted you to click link to get important message. However hovering over the link neither Wal-Mart or Synchrony bank was the domain but some bill paying domain. Wal-Mart told me it was a phishing email when I contacted them to see if real. Now one has come from Adobe which looks ok except that it is supposedly receipt for signing up for Creative Cloud and has an attachment that appears is a word document on hovering, but I suspect has links or other in it. The two give aways are 1.) I have not signed up for anything form Adobe recently and 1.) it is written to Dear Customer instead of my name. If it was a real receipt it would have my name and normally receipts by email are in the body of email. Looking at the headers further shows it cdid not come from Adobe but somewhere else. These people did try harder and set sender and reply to as billing@adobe.com but then when they sent adobe.com would not verify that address to yahoo as a sending ip address. Furthermore in looking I see the email address it came to is my old version I have not used in years as it was supposedly closed on that subdomain. I have written adobe at phishing@adobe.com and you can use same address (it is on their web site). When I get response I will follow up. Don't click on links in emails that look suspicious like these as it may download malware on your machine to steal information of ask you for information that you should not give from a link like social security number, credit card info, bank accounts, passwords, etc. Be safe and be careful, but enjoy the world wide web.

Bringing manufacturing back to USA

This weekend I am in Rogers Arkansas at the Daisy National BB Gun Championship Match. Daisy headquarters and their assembly plant are here in Rogers and have been for 50 years or nearby. I assembled a gun here several years ago I still have. Tonight (July 4, 2014) at the opening ceremony for the match (55 teams of kids from across the USA who placed in top three in state competitions), the president of Daisy announced that he is beginning the process of moving the full manufacturing of their BB guns back to the USA. He said it will take several years as they will have to locate or start organizations to make the parts and that it will result in increased employment. Next year is the 75th year of the Daisy Red Ryder BB gun and tonight they gave all coaches and staff (including me) a 75th anniversary edition of the Red Ryder ahead of future release of the gun. Next year will the 50th match. I do the web site and photos for the match and have been at the match either as this or coach, match director, national director for 19 years.

Registering names in Asia emails

In the last few weeks I got notices several times about companies wanting to register my name in China. I have researched it and this is what I found Many businesses and private domain owners have received emails from a company in China or elsewhere in Asia recently telling them that someone in China or another country in Asia has requested to register their domain name and use of it as a keyword in China or whatever country. It states they found you are the registered domain owner and as that are the legal trademark holder in China and you need to let this registrar know or they will sell your Chinese domain name. This is a phishing letter. They are not contacting you to protect you but in turn to ask for financial information so they steal your money. I received one of these letters for dwightwatt.com domain which I do own and a little checking by a legitimate outfit would not write me concerning my “dwightwatt business”. If you get one of these emails trash it and do not respond to it. If you do respond, notify all financial institutions that you have answered a scam so they can put holds on your accounts. The second part is saying you will lose your rights to using your name as a keyword. There is no registration of keywords. There are some products that are out there do use a keyword but none of the browsers support that. Basically it is like AOL was back originally before merged in with Internet and companies had a specific word but every one uses domain names now except Chinese using a specific software, and as they open more to Internet it will die. We use keywords now as as a list of terms in the header of document that tells how it should be indexed. Google and other search engines do work to try to keep people from using misleading keywords so they may use all you list and they look for meaningfulness also to the page. Watch out for any emails concerning banking, domain names, etc for being phishing. This is just the latest variety of the Nigerian emails which date back to pre-email by use of snail mail (I have heard recently some are now doing phishing attempts again using regular phone and USPS mail.