Smart TSG

Technology Security Group

10 things google maps can do, which you might now know about.

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http://lifehacker.com/5525758/top-10-things-you-didnt-know-google-maps-could-do

Periodic review of Facebook privacy settings

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As a best practice we recommend that you periodically review the privacy settings on your Facebook account.  Facebook originally had a decent policy and approach to privacy, but over time Facebook has changed these policies sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worst.  We typically find out about this stuff pretty quickly, but as a best practice we recommend that people review the privacy settings of their Facebook accounts on a periodic basis.  In particular we suggest a reviewing any applications installed on your Facebook account.  Remove any unused or unknown applications and check what actions those applications are allowed to do.

Xobni

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Xobni is an Outlook plugin.  Xobni provides several enhancement to Outlook including enhanced searching, threaded conversations and links to social networks.  As a general rule we do not encourage our clients to load extra plugins or add-ons to Outlook, because they often create conflicts and issues, but we have several heavy email reliant clients who are using Xobni, so we decided to give it a try ourselves.

One of the features we really like a lot in our office is Xobni’s ability to lookup email address from your contacts/address book directly from the “To” or “CC” line of an email.  Outlook provides similar functionality, but Xobni’s lookup searches your address book (Outlook searches a separate cache of recently used emails addresses).  The result is the Xobni find the email addresses you are looking more often.  We have found this to be a big boost to productivity.

Initially, we were not that interested in Xobni’s ability to link to social networks, but we are finding this functionality also quite useful especially when dealing with a new contact whom we have not meet face to face yet.

You can download the plugin from www.xobni.com

Network Solutions sites hacked (again)

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We are not big fans of Network Solutions for many reasons and here is yet another reason.  Read the full article on the Network World site.

New malware can take control of the Mac

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The Macintosh OS has long be a safe haven from viruses and malware, but eventually this security by obscurity would have to end.  Right now it is not all bad news the malware has not been reported in the wild…however it is only a matter of time.  Read more in the article from Network World.  Read the full article on the Network World website.

Windows 7 (64-bit) & OpenVPN GUI

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We have been running and testing several computers with Windows 7 since the launch late last year.  In particular, we have been testing the Windows 7 Professional 64-bit.  It is great to have a computer with > 4GB RAM, but there are some applications and peripherals which do not work (scanning on our HP 2840 is a prime example).  One of the applications we were eager to get working is OpenVPN and OpenVPN GUI, because this is how we connect to many of our clients networks.

We got OpenVPN working just fine and dandy on our Windows 7 64-bit workstations today.  Here are the steps we took:

  1. Downloaded the most recent OpenVPN installation (openvpn-2.1.1-install.exe)
  2. Selected “Run this program in compatibility mode for Windows Vista (Service Pack 2)”  & “Run this program as an administrator”
  3. Downloaded & Installed OpenVPN-GUI (version 1.0.3)
  4. Ran OpenVPN-GUI as an administrator

FTP Warns companies of P2P data leaks.

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http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/022310-ftc-warns-nearly-100-firms.html

If you think that letting your staff run peer-to-peer software does not endanger your company…think again.

Google Chrome 4 “stable” release

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http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10440490-264.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Where Malicious Software Hides

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Recently came across this interesting set of statistics from the Cisco 2009 Annual Security Report.

Where Malicious Software Hides:

  • In 1 of every 3,000 Flash files
  • In 1 of every 2,000 Javascript files
  • In 1 of every 600 PDF files

Google’s Personalized Search Results

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This video explains how Google uses your previous searches to optimize your Google searches. It also explains how to opt-out of this search history.