I was browsing my twitter feed this morning and remembered one of my followers/followees (?) had just spent some time changing their website and thought I would have a look.

Their twitter profile had their website link in it and I duly clicked it and found the landing page for their hosting company – oops.

What had been forgotten was that “www.domain.com” is a different website to “domain.com” they had omitted to make a second entry in their DNS server for “domain.com” easily done in the rush to launch. Some companies actually use it for a second machine for redundancy or extra pages. I have found internal servers using this function and being presented with Microsoft Small Business Server login screens before now, giving access to the local network with some username and password social engineering, not really where you want customers to end up even by mistake.

borrowed this image from SBS Diva’s blog, thank you.

I recently had a big debate with the branding department of a major UK  organisation where they said that “domain.com” looks better in documents than “www.domain.com” they had no idea of the ramifications when they did it on sites that they had no control over.

This made me think of how lazy our web browsing has become, we now use the browser address bar as a search bar:

This means we stop typing http:// or www and just enter the company name. We could end up anywhere !! Mostly Google, Bing etc. show you the right sites (after having noted your search history) but there are a lot of phishing sites out there ready to grab your details and they have been known to sell to you and take your money before you know anything about it.

I am not the only one that thinks this, HMRC has a page on it, all about emails but note the web links lower down

As do Microsoft, note the misspelt links on the page

Google’s search shows over 7m examples when you search for “examples of phishing scams”

The answer is to be very careful about DNS and your use of the search bar when you are surfing somewhere which holds your personal information and when you shorten things for Twitter feeds etc.

This is the Windows 7 version of how to find your local IP address, Vista is similar.

I keep talking people through the process of finding their local IP address, not their internet facing one, just the one issued by their router. This post shows one way of checking it on an XP computer the next one does Windows 7, Vista is somewhere in between.

Ever found yourself searching for the way to safely remove the USB stick in Windows 7, it is lost in the status bar?

Getting to this is very picky at times
So the way is to create a desktop shortcut as follows:
Right click the desktop select New then Shortcut In Location "rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll" – it is case sensitive
Give it a nice name
You can give it a nice icon if you want, Right Click the icon and select Properties
Click Change Icon
Browse to shell32.dll and pick your icon
OK and OK
When you double click you get so you can select the device you want to remove.

This tip was inspired from the official Windows Magazine.

At a recent Banbury Tweetup (usually first Thursday of the month at the Inn at Farnborough, next one on the 9th June 2011) we discussed the security issues of broken computers and hard disks. You should always remove the hard disk or use a secure wipe tool to erase all the data otherwise it might turn up in some sort of identity theft scam later in your life.

Just because a drive cannot be read by your computer (USB drives dropped on floor or USB stick/camera SD drive broken in half ) or your mobile phone sims appears duff does not mean someone could not spend time and read your life story or business secrets from it.

Did you know that an awful lot of laser printers also have hard drives/writable flash media in them, saving your documents for possible reprinting later or just caching them.

So no matter what hardware you recycle remember that you need to be careful about any personal/business information still on the hard disk or flash memory installed in them.

Remember this BBC news item, it could still happen today.

There are services that can wipe and dispose of your drives safely.