PTNSYSTEMS NEWSLETTER FEB 2008

Email - passwords-and online banking

Firstly, sorry for the delay in getting out the first newsletter of 2008 but due to commitments at home and a very busy post Christmas period they've had to take a back seat, quite a few people have asked for them to return so, hopefully, time will allow them to become a regular feature once again.

In this newsletter we will be looking at Email settings and passwords, why we need so many, what they are for, and what, if anything we need to worry about when creating them. We'll put a link to a downloadable document at the end of the newsletter, so you can print it off and store all your necessary passwords in a safe place for future reference. There are obviously many scenarios regarding passwords which we will not be covering here and if you have any concerns regarding them please feel free to email the office and someone will get back to you as soon as possible.

Windows Login Password

When you turn on your computer in the morning you may or may not be asked for a password before being able to continue using the computer, you only really need a password on your home computer if you don't want other people in the house accessing your files/email etc, i.e. to keep things private. Don't assume if you have a password on your computer and it is stolen that the information is safe, because it is quite easy to circumvent this level of protection and if you ever dispose of a computer or sell it make sure you keep the hard drive or physically destroy it if you have sensitive data stored therein. Even formatting can be undone in some cases, again if you ever need to make sure your data has been destroyed please ask. If you don't have a password on your computer login, the machine will boot straight to the desktop which is OK, but if you would like to protect your computer by using a password at the login stage, open the control panel and select the user accounts option to configure passwords.

Email Passwords

Without going into too much technical detail, you will use one or both of the following methods for collecting email on your home PC:

POP3  - This is Outlook Express or Windows Mail (Free with Windows) or Outlook (not Express) which is part of Microsoft Office (not free). You put your details into the software on your computer which then sends requests to another computer where your email is stored i.e. by pressing send/receive, as long as your details are correct the mail server allows you to collect your email through your internet connection to your computer, the email is removed from the mail server leaving space for more email to be delivered. Think of it like a post office box (POP3 = Post Office Protocol 3), once the email is on your PC it can only be accessed on your computer and if your computer breaks you lose it (please see previous newsletters on backup!).

How it works-Basically

Lets imagine I send you an email under this system, for example purposes my email address is me@BB.com and your email address is you@somewhere.co.uk. The email I send contains, amongst other things, the following information: source: me@BB.com destination: you@somewhere.co.uk and possibly my username and password (more on this in a mo) Firstly I need to get the email on the wire and on to it's destination so I open Outlook Express create the email and press send, my computer in turn, immediately tries to get the email on its way by connecting to the Internet which leads the email to its first stop on its journey, the ISP.

If you are connected to the Internet, someone must be connected to you to service your requests for email and/or web pages, this will be your Internet Service Provider or ISP. If I send an email to you and I have a broadband package from the imaginary broadband supplier BB.com and my email address is me@BB.com my email's first stop is the sending, or relay server at BB.com, this server, known as the SMTP server, strips down the binary information and looks for the destination data which is you@somewhere.co.uk. Your ISP may want to know if you are who you say you are and not some spotty spammer sending out hundreds of junk emails via their server, so before your email goes any further it checks to see if the username and password on the originators email is OK, this is know as SMTP authentication and not all ISP's require this, but if you ever get in a situation where you can receive, but not send, email, make sure this setting is correct in your email software.

If all is OK at this stage your email is sent on its merry way to you@somewhere.co.uk and as long as you@somewhere.co.uk exists, the somewhere.co.uk server puts the email in a folder on its POP3 server and waits for you to collect it. When you press send/receive on your computer it sends a request, together with username and password details to the somewhere.co.uk server which, if all is well, forwards it to you.

So, if you've stuck with it thus far, well done, and have a look at the options in your email software where all these settings are stored and should now make a bit more sense, you should make a note of the following which will save a great deal of frustration in the future should you ever need to set up your email software again:

Email address, outgoing mail server, incoming mail server, username (not always the email address) and password (the stars or dots sometimes signify how many characters your password contains, which you hopefully have in an email or written down from when it was first setup)

WEBMAIL

This is the likes of Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, BTYahoo etc. This differs in that there is no need for specific software to be installed on your computer or indeed the need for your own computer as this can be accessed over the Internet from any computer, anywhere there is a link to the Internet. These accounts are generally free and no information is stored on your computer, great you think, why don't we all just use this, well, as always, there's a trade off. Firstly, each time you login you are generally bombarded with advertising and every action requires a new webpage and more advertising, sometimes you have to login every few months or you lose the facility and there's a limit to what you can do with this type of account compared with Microsoft Outlook for example. Another issue can be when you change over to another account type and you need to transfer data from one to the other, again not always easy with this type of account and attaching files can be a slow process. My personal opinion is this is a good backup system or if you are moving around a lot.

With webmail, as we said before, very little if anything is local to, or stored on, your computer other than a screen image representing your email stored on a remote server, you generally cannot back any of this up as this is all stored somewhere else, all you can do is see it and choose from the options given to you by the webmail provider, with these type of accounts all you need to store is the name of the webpage you use to access your email webpage and the password.

Passwords

Getting back to passwords, one which seems to catch a lot of people out, is their broadband or dialup password, this is the username and password given to you by your ISP when you first signed up for the service. This username and password is sent to you via email or post at the beginning of you contract and is configured the first time you setup your router or modem. Your computer uses this to validate who you are when your computer tries to establish an Internet connection with the ISP, it is generally NOT the same as your email username and password and is the one we have to find when you cannot connect to the Internet and/or receive email. If you don't have this I would recommend finding out what it is before you lose your Internet connection one day...... it can, and will, happen :o(

Online Banking

Other passwords we may use include membership passwords for online services, and forums etc. but the last one we want to talk about is our online banking password. People often ask if online banking is safe and my opinion is I'd rather use online banking than giving my details to an unknown over the phone or handing over my card in a shop where it can quickly be scanned and compromised. If you generally apply the same concerns as would to any other financial dealings the Internet is a perfectly safe place to trade, check the following:

• Is the site secure? Look for the padlock symbol at the top or foot of the browser window or a https prefix to the website, this indicates you are using encrypted data transfers, making your information virtually useless to anyone who may be intercepting it.

• Make sure you are on the right website, i.e. if you are using LLoyds bank you should be on:

         http://www.lloyds-tsb.com/something     or similar, not     www.dodgydealings/LLoyds

        If suspicious log off.

• If your 4 teenage children, grandchildren, or mum downloads everything available on the Internet and your machine is plagued with slowness and other nastiness, it might be prudent to avoid any financial dealings on that machine. Amongst other things you may have a key logger which records the key inputs on your machine and sends them to a third party with obvious consequences.

• Wireless, I would never personally send my card details or use online banking over a wireless connection, if you have to, only do so if you are using WPA or greater security and are sure you are connected to a bona fide wireless connection. Just because your computer finds the Hotel named wireless network doesn't mean it belongs to the Hotel !!

• Public places/airport lounge/Internet Cafe computers = online banking madness.

Email passwords and computer logins are not generally that useful to anyone else, but for online financial dealings always use a long password with numbers and characters such as ~[@ etc, not your postcode, school, street name, car registration or anything else that can be easily guessed or sourced online. I have seen people scan bank cards and store them on the computer or make a document containing all their bank details, this again is the sort of thing that makes fraudsters smile.

Hopefully this newsletter has cleared up some grey areas for those of you that had them, here is a link to a downloadable form that can be printed off and filled in at a later date so you have all your important computer information in one place.

COMPUTERINFO.PDF

Please feel free to email or call the office if you have any questions, or suggestions for future newsletters or know anyone who would like to receive notifications of new newsletters,

looking forward to your suggestions.

PTNSYSTEMS LTD