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How to Spot a Scam Email

Requests for Login Details or Personal DetailsScammers are very keen to get hold of your personal details, especially login details for your internet banking or your Microsoft 365 login details so they can delete your data and ransom it back to you.Generic GreetingsScammers are often sending out thousands of these emails at a time so they don’t know or care to use your name. A real company would certainly do so.Spelling and Grammatical ErrorsThese emails often originate in non-English speaking...

DKIM, DMARC & SPF - How Google Plans to Secure Email

In response to the never-ending barrage of spam and phishing emails, Google plans to implement arguably extreme measures to ensure the emails received by Gmail inboxes are from who they say they're from. Here's what all these acronyms stand for:DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance)SPF (Sender Policy Framework)DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail)As you might have guessed from these terms, the plan (in broad strokes) is to insist that emails hav...

Holiday Hours

Here are our opening hours over Christmas and New Years:We will close at mid-day on the 22nd of December and reopen at 8:30am on the 15th of January. For any urgent jobs please ring and leave a message. Kerrin will monitor the messages over the shutdown period: 07 827 7119...

How to Choose Your New Computer

Buying a new computer can be quite an investment. It's not something most people do often and it's chock-full of technical jargon. Here at Green Mouse we have minimum standards for the computers that we're prepared to sell and whether you want to buy from us or someone else, we're always happy to discuss the specifications of a prospective purchase. There are several reasons for this:We want you to have a good experience with your new computer. We can upgrade certain components to improve t...

FaceBook Messenger Scam

Over the long weekend I received a message via Facebook Messenger which was initially quite worrying, especially since I run the Facebook page for Green Mouse Computing and produce content for that page. It also turned up on my phone, which is unusual for scams, but of course I could have accessed Facebook Messenger on either my phone or my computer. I've pasted most of the text in the picture above - it was trying to suggest that I'd breached copyright somehow and the FaceBook team were ab...

Monitors on Special

We have an over-stock of these great monitors and we're running out of space so they're going on sale!Here are the specs:24" screenFull HD 1920x1080HDMI or VGA inputVesa Mount 100mmBlue Light shieldFlickerless Technology2 x 2W speakersHDMI cable included3 year warrantyPrice: $265 including GSTDown from the RRP of $29924" is a standard size monitor and with HDMI and VGA, it's compatible with most computers. Available while stocks last....

Scams, scams and more scams

On a single day this week we've had multiple clients successfully scammed via the standard phone scammers. People are getting phone calls from scammers claiming to be from legitimate companies such as Microsoft, who say that their computer has already been targeted or infected, and who offer to solve this problem. Another client clicked on a link on FaceBook and a pop-up appeared on the screen saying that infection had already occurred - in this case she called the number in the pop-up. Someone ...

New Norton Scam

Today we (and some of our clients) have received a new Norton scam email which I thought was quite clever and so worth bringing to your attention. It appears to work like this:You receive this email which suggests that you have purchased Norton Anti-virus when you didn't intend to. Maybe you're supposed to think that you've already fallen victim to a scam, or maybe they want to you remember buying Norton at some point and think that the subscription is still active. Both of these scenarios are f...

How to Set Up Password Recovery

Three global trends of the recent past have come together to make password recovery one of the best preventative steps you can take to avoid serious disruption to your life:The move to email communication and online access for almost every administrative function that people carry out in their day to day lives. The ramping up of security by the large, multi-national companies that facilitate these processes.The loss of direct customer service by the above companies. I recommend an annu...

Passwords and Parents

We have seen a few cases recently in which a parent or elderly family member has passed away, or just lost access to their various accounts and passwords, and their adult children or other family members have been unable to retrieve access to these accounts. I have written at length before about how difficult it can be to recover passwords for accounts belonging to large multi-national companies whose focus is on security, and not on customer service. Has anyone tried to directly contact Go...

Specific MS365 Phishing Email

Last week several of our clients who use Microsoft 365 received the same, very particular phishing email from the same sender - vanessa@alfosomoraleslaw.com. Of course our advice was to immediately delete it. The red flags are the usual: urgency, poor grammar; this one didn't even bother to get the Microsoft logo right. I haven't included the original link here for obvious reasons but when I hovered over it the destination was quite clearly not Microsoft. It was mostly nonsense, but it did inclu...

QR Code Scam Emails

The race is still on between scammers and email applications to produce/ protect from new technology for scams emails. Recently scammers have come up with an alarmingly clever new idea - QR codes. Spam filters rely, at least in part, on the text of an email to determine whether it is legitimate or part of a scam.So phishing emails, as I've discussed before, tend to have spelling or grammatical errors, employ urgency or threats, come from weird or incomprehensible sender addresses, contain links ...

Storage Space - Local vs Cloud

We have been noticing a bit of a trend lately relating to how people use and store files on their laptops and in the Cloud. Several years ago we all started using the Cloud (OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox etc) to sync and store our files which was a wonderful improvement in storage space and security. There was just so much space in the Cloud, for example if you have a MS365 license and OneDrive you get a full TB of space. This was much more than our computers typically had so we all started us...

Outlook.com for Email

Now I know that most of you will immediately balk at this idea, but I'm going to set out a case for change, for anyone using a free email account hosted by their ISP (Internet Service Provider, such as Spark, Slingshot etc). The most common example we see are email addresses ending in xtra.co.nz. They are likely either using POP3 or IMAP and this technology has been superseded.We recommend upgrading to a new Outlook.com account, here's why:Reliability – ISP Hosted mail servers suffer from outa...

Microsoft 365 Scam Alert

A few of our clients and Kerrin have received this in an email recently. It's a scam. It looks quite convincing though, I imagine it's been fairly successful as scams go. They have the office logo correct, but it is old. Microsoft is not using 'Office 365' anymore; they're now calling it Microsoft 365. But hopefully the biggest giveaway that this is a scam is that it has come through in an email. This is not how your Microsoft 365 system will operate. If you need to enter your password the notif...

Christmas Hours

Here at Green Mouse we would like to thank our excellent clients for another great year.  It's been a big year of change for us - Josh has left us for another position and we've moved into our very nice new office at 16 Dick Street. This has put us back into the same building as the Saasam team again and it's been great to catch up with them. This year we will close for the holidays on the 23rd of December at midday and will open again on the 16th of January at 8:30am. If you need your comp...

Passwords!!

Imagine your computer suddenly dies, or your laptop and phone and tablet all get stolen from your car - will you be able to get back into your various accounts? As companies strive to improve their (and your) security, passwords are becoming ever more important but also, more numerous and more difficult to recover. It seems like every company wants you to have your own account with a password, and they all have their own requirements: capital letters, unusual characters, and numbers may all be r...

2-Step Verification for Gmail

If you have a Gmail email account, you may recently have received an email about 2-step verification (2SV). It's the same thing as the multifactor authentication (MFA) that Microsoft talks about, and it's designed to solve the biggest remaining source of risk for your account security - human error.  Both Microsoft and Google have extremely good security these days. By far the most common and effective method for scammers to get hold of login details is by asking users for them via scams an...

We have Moved!

Green Mouse is happy to announce our amalgamation with our sister company SaaSam Group Ltd. The two companies have always maintained close ties; moving forward, Green Mouse will fall under the SaaSam Group umbrella - enabling us to work even more closely together and utilise our combined strengths and natural synergies.   SaaSam is locally owned, with offices in Cambridge, Australia and the UK. Saasam provides Cloud based solutions to small to large enterprises. Also a Microsoft partne...

Josh Leaving Green Mouse

Today is Josh's last day at Green Mouse Computing. He has secured a position in the IT support team in a large national company in Morrinsville; we wish him the best of luck in this exciting new role.Here at Green Mouse we would like to extend our warm thanks to Josh for all of his work over the years. He has been a valuable member of the team and we've enjoyed his lighthearted presence here in the office. We know that Josh will be missed by his regular clients but him and Simon have worked...

Very Convincing Phishing Email

Today Kerrin received this very convincing phishing email in his inbox. Check out the picture above; it looks just like a legitimate email from the IRD. Sometimes I wonder whether the constant barrage of super obvious phishing emails are part of an elaborate plan to exploit a created hubris - we can get a bit too confident about spotting them and then miss the most clever examples.  Here's how to spot this one: It's asking you to log in via a link in the email. IRD never does this, they mig...

The Dangers of BitLocker

We had a client come in this week with a small problem that very nearly turned into a catastrophe because BitLocker was enabled by default on her computer. Luckily it was linked to her Microsoft Account and the BitLocker key had been saved, otherwise she could have lost all of the data on her computer following an otherwise minor fault. So after explaining what BitLocker is all about, Josh asked me to pass a warning on to anyone who reads my posts. Let's start at the beginning... ...

Please Restart Your Computer

I have written about this before but it bears repeating - computers need regular restarts. Back when many of us started using Windows computers we all learned that it was important to shut it down, most, if not every day. We did this to save power but also to force the computer to consolidate and cease any background activity. In recent years however, Microsoft decided that this process was too slow at start up, so in order speed it up they removed most of this functionality. A shut down is...

Is Scan to Email Broken?

Last week we had a few of our MS365 clients call us about their scan to email suddenly not working. Simon spent some time looking into it and it turned out that Microsoft had turned off a particular function in everyone's settings in an apparent attempt to even further boost security. Unfortunately this function is necessary for those who have their printers or scanners set to scan to email, as opposed to scanning to a folder. Having determined the exact cause of the issue we're able to sort it ...

The Deleted 'Folder"

We've had a few instances recently where customers have asked us why the emails they thought they were keeping safe in the Deleted folder have been disappearing. And the reason is that the Deleted folder is not a folder, despite looking like one. It's more like an email graveyard, or maybe email purgatory, where emails that you've deleted go briefly before they disappear forever. The time period varies between email applications but eventually, all emails that are deleted will be gone for real. ...