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Spare a thought for Winweb who are experiencing a problem with mistaken identity and a malware program that carries a similar name to their business. I’ve known Stefan Töpfer for a couple of years now. We first spoke December 2005 and I met him February 2006 when I was visiting in London. We’ve maintained a business connection ever since and you may have noticed a recent post about a business competition – it was through Stefan that my connection took place. Rather than rewrite what he says, I’ll share with you his dilemma.

Dear All,

In the past week a malware program has surfaced, which calls itself WinWeb Security (winwebsecurity.com – don’t click on any links on this website). It has, of course, nothing to do with us. If you Google ‘WinWeb Security’ you will get a picture of what is going on, that is only the public side of it. Please see my post:

http://www.sme-blog.com/comments/winwebsecuritycom-more-facts

and WinWeb’s Statement recently:

http://www.winweb.com/latest-news/winweb-winwebcom-vs-winweb-security-winwebsecuritycom

Despite the fact that we have been providing free support to anyone (1000′s) who contacted us, we have sometimes been falsely accused of being winweb security, which we are not; this is still causing real damage to our reputation, due to the name association.

I wonder if you would be willing to help us to set the record straight with your readers and maybe forward this to some of your other blogger contacts to do the same. I have provided WHOIS lookups in my posts, that should be one of the most helpful ways to show people what is what, and hopefully stop them associating us with this menace.

I’m sorry about the bulk email, but I have to react fast. If you can help – I thank you very much for your support, I of cause do understand if you do not what to get involved.

Kind regards

Stefan.

Poor Stefan and his staff. So if you have heard of Winweb please know they are not connected to winweb security.

Have you had a problem with a domain or business name that is similar to yours and has this caused problems for you? I would love to hear about them here. I think it’s important to put people straight on incorrect assumptions wherever possible. What do you think?

mistaken identity, malware, similar domain, winweb

Tags: Business Operations, Warnings by Kathie Thomas
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For the second time in a month I’ve received a message on my wall at my Facebook page saying that my photo had been seen at a site.  The first time I clicked on it unawares and immediately my antivirus program (Trend Micro) warned me of a problem and wouldn’t let me view the page.  I went to the guy who posted a message on my wall and saw there were heaps of wall messages he’d left within a few minutes – a sure sign something was wrong. I left a message for him to say he had a virus and also sent a personal email to him.

I then removed the wall notice from my Facebook so that no-one else would click on it – important you do that!

This morning one of my clients left a similar message and I immediately contacted her and her VA support to advise that one of them had a virus and it had infected the Facebook profile.

I’ve researched articles on it but haven’t found any fixes – just best to keep your antivirus program updated every single day.

Internet News – Facebook Attack

Now Public – Facebook Virus Attacks Again

Reuters – Koobface Virus

And even UrbanLegend is confirming there is a virus.

Facebook has told members to delete contaminated e-mails and has posted directions at www.facebook.com/security on how to clean infected computers.

I have a free online virus scanner (owned by Trend Micro which is the program that saved me from grief) at my site at http://www.acs-webhosting.com/ in the bottom right-hand corner of the page.

Tags: Facebook, Technology, Warnings by Kathie Thomas
12 Comments »

Last week one of my clients contacted me as they’d been approached from a company in China who was ‘concerned that a domain’ similar to my client’s was going to be registered by another business.  As soon as she asked me about it I had a feeling that it was most likely either spam or a scam.  Sure enough, once she sent me a copy of the email I was positive it was a scam, however I encouraged her to seek advice from a govt dept here in Australia just to be sure.

Today I received three of these same emails – each for a different domain I own – and all along the same lines. My suspicions have been more than confirmed and just to take it further I decided to do some searches of my own online.

Below are links to just three sites warning of this scam and there are many more too.

How scammers trick you out of your domain name (1)

How scammers trick you out of your domain name (2)

Net in China domain spam

Domain scammers list

If in doubt, always best to seek advice (as my client had sought to do) and doing a search on Google or your otherwise favourite search engine is a good thing to do.  I usually copy and paste a key phrase from the email and place it into the search engine to see if anything comes up.  Sure enough, it did!

domain scam, domain name, scammers, China

Tags: Warnings by Kathie Thomas
6 Comments »

It keeps coming doesn’t it?  It seems someone must come up with a ‘fantastic’ idea of how to scam people out of their hard-earned money and then others pick it up too.  A wave of emails with the same topic but different send from addresses.

For awhile it was job offers to Virtual Assistants, last week it was VA Certification applications and this week it appears to be bookings for airline tickets.  Or should I say ‘Your Flight Ticket Nxxx’.  To date I have received several of these from different airlines - I mean how many flights did I book recently? Ummm, none that I recall.

For the uninitiated or those very green to the Internet, they may well take these emails as genuine and for those who have been around awhile they might be a tad wary, whereas the rest of us, just hit delete and move onto the next email.

If you are in doubt about the genuineness of an email and you don’t know the sender personally, then I encourage you to Google the subject of the email – if it’s spam or a scam, you’ll soon find references to it.  And if it doesn’t come up, then possibly it’s worth checking with someone you know who is more internet savvy than you, like your ISP or webhost for example.  And even if it was sent to you by someone you know well – always worth checking anyway.  They might have been infected by a virus or trojan and are unaware the email came from their address at all.

Tags: Warnings by Kathie Thomas
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