New scam – UPDATE!

My thanks to Anonymous who left the following comment:

sorry to say that email is not a scam email@mail.onedrive.com is a legitimate email address from one drive. Alot of people have one drive accounts as part of their ms products but have never used it. this email lets you know your account has been inactive for 2 years so they are going to delete it. if you have never used one drive it will be empty anyway

This is the link to a Microsoft article about it: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/why-did-i-get-an-email-saying-your-account-will-be-deleted-5ee83d1a-28da-4d05-a1ca-46a522919e45

From the Microsoft website

The screenshot above is taken from the Microsoft article referenced by the link. As you can see by the URL in the address bar, it’s a genuine Microsoft article and confirms that ’email@mail.onedrive.com’ is also genuine.

Last but not least, Microsoft advises that if you have any doubts about the email:

DO. NOT. CLICK. ANY. LINK. IN. AN. EMAIL

The hard part is knowing which email is a scam and which is not. For that reason, I stand by what I wrote in the original version of this post – don’t click ANY links in any email. It’s just not worth the pain if you get it wrong. Go to the website from your own address bar. That way you will know that you are not being sent to a scam website.

cheers
Meeks

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

I found this email in my inbox last night:

I took a screenshot and deleted personal stuff so you could see what it looks like.

Firstly, how did I know this was a scam? Simple – I don’t use Microsoft OneDrive. I have NEVER used OneDrive.

Next, if you look at the email sender it says:

’email@mail.onedrive.com’

Not even a hint of Microsoft anywhere. ‘mail.onedrive’ is a domain that has nothing to do with Microsoft. [When you register a domain, no one else can use it. But there is nothing to stop someone from registering a domain that ‘hints’ at belonging to a well known company].

And finally, do you see the big, red ‘YOU’? I put that in to highlight the poor grammar used in the body of the email. You won’t always find poor grammar, but when you do, it’s a dead giveaway. Whoever set up this scam copied trademarked elements of the Microsoft brand and cobbled them together along with a few bits of their own.

So, what’s the point of this scam email?

The point is to get you to click any one of the links in the email. Those links will not take you to a genuine Microsoft web page. If the scammers are better than most, they will fake up a second page to soothe any lingering suspicions. Otherwise they may just give you some kind of error message. But while you’re staring at the message and wondering what to do, you could be downloading a virus or a worm or a trojan or a keylogger onto your computer.

Why is that bad? It’s bad because you could lose your privacy, your internet banking password, or find your computer is being used in a network to scam yet more people. And those are just three things off the top of my head.

Given how many people use Microsoft products, this scam could cause a hell of a lot of damage.

DO. NOT. CLICK. ANY. LINKS. IN. AN. EMAIL….especially this one.

Take care and stay well,
Meeks

#Cloud storage & #sync.com…….or a positive tech post for a change!

After coping with the security issues of Windows 10, it was such a pleasant surprise to find an ‘app’ that is unabashedly security conscious! And yes, Sync.com, I’m talking about you. But first, a quick word about the problems that sync.com solves: storage, backup and version control.

Normally, when you create a file on your computer, you save it to your computer – i.e. onto the harddrive inside the physical ‘box’. If you’re super organised, you may also save that file to an external harddrive or USB device, as a form of ongoing ‘backup’. Belt-and-braces type people might save that data to a DVD as well, giving them multiple backups in case of disaster.

But all of these various types of storage have one, critical downside – a change made in one copy of the data will NOT be reflected in the other copies. If you have 3 copies of a particular file, you will have to manually update each copy.

There is also another issue that can be a nightmare – version control. Let me give you an example. Every time I work on my WiP [work in progress], I save it to my desktop, and then I copy it to my USB device. The latest version from the desktop always over-writes the version on the USB. Obviously, this is so I always have at least one copy of my work no matter what happens [e.g. the house burns down in a bushfire or some other catastrophe].

But what if I have 2 computers and want to add to my WiP on both?

That is the problem I’ve been struggling with for the last few days: there’s no point having the laptop if I don’t use it for my work, but if I do use it while I’m away from home, how do I keep the versions straight?

My fear is that if I continue with the USB device, sooner or later I am going to get the latest version of the WiP wrong. In a moment of madness or tiredness or distraction, I’ll over-write the wrong copy and then I’ll be up the creek without a paddle. Enter cloud storage.

Like the USB drive or DVD etc., cloud storage saves your files outside your pc, usually in a server on the other side of the world. The file is ‘up-loaded’ to the cloud via your internet connection, and once it’s there, you can access it from any computer device you choose. You can also share that file with others if you wish.

For me, cloud storage means I can work on my WiP at home and have it synced to my laptop so if I go out, I can continue working on the WiP where I left off.

Lovely concept, right?

Unfortunately, the grand-daddy of cloud storage – Dropbox – showed that cloud storage can be hacked, and most reviews I’ve read say their security has not improved much if at all since then. Now, I’m not working on anything ‘naughty’ that I need to hide from anyone, but privacy is very important to me, and I would die if I lost four years worth of work through someone else’s ‘oopsie’. So no Dropbox.:(

I was trawling through the umpteenth review/comparison of cloud storage offerings – there are heaps of them! – when I came across Sync.com. And guess what! The thing that sets sync.com apart from the rest is its security. 🙂 Plus it’s Canadian, so not subject to some of the, um, government sponsored hacking found over the border.

And now for the acid test – does sync.com work?

Yes, yes, it does. 🙂

The two screenshots below show my desktop and the laptop. They’ve been synced via sync.com and the test files I used have shown up on both computers with only a very short delay – approx. 20 seconds or thereabouts.

So now I know the system works, and thankfully, getting it to work is really simple too.

How to use Sync.com

1. First, register for the sync.com free, 5 GB plan: https://www.sync.com/install/
2. Then download the installer to the first pc. Install Sync to the first pc using the account name you setup in step 1. Part of the setup process is the creation of a folder called ‘Sync’.
3. Now, download and install the Sync installer to the second pc. Make sure you have a ‘Sync’ folder on the second pc as well.
4. Drag and drop [or copy/paste] a file into the ‘Sync’ folder on the first pc.
5. Wait 20? seconds and you will see that the file now appears in the ‘Sync’ folder of the second pc as well.

The Sync presence on your pc is minimal. If you need to do something with the actual app., you can find it inside ‘Show hidden icons’ on your taskbar:

All other work is done on the website itself. Once I’ve worked out how to share files with friends, I’ll detail that in a separate post. For now, I’m really happy with my new way of working.

Last question: was finding and installing Sync as easy or convenient as using the default OneDrive cloud storage app offered by Windows 10?

Simple answer: no. Installing and learning how to use Sync didn’t take me long, but it still required some time and effort on my part, the payoff, however, is more than worth it:

• I have an excellent cloud storage app.
• It has excellent security features, and
• I am in control, not Micro$oft
• oh…and Sync is free [unless I want heaps more storage]

By contrast, I pay for the ‘convenience’ of Windows 10 by handing Micro$oft my privacy on a plate. No contest.

cheers

Meeks