VISCOMSOFT Online Audio Video Chatting
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Google Introduce Voice and Video Chat Facility from Gmail
See and hear family and friends right inside Gmail . You can talk face to face with Gmail voice and video chat. You can Chat more ways than ever from within Gmail. From Goolgle you can enjoy Look and sound your best with high quality audio and video.
Goolge Talk is free and you need an OS having configuration Windows XP or higher.
How to using Gamil Voice and Video Facilities:
- Download the Gmail voice and video chat plug-in, quit all open browser windows, and install the plug-in.
- Sign in to Gmail.
- In the Chat section of your Gmail, select the contact you want to call. If they have a camera icon next to their name, you can make a voice or video call to them; just click Video & more.
To download the Plug-in for Mozilla Firefox Browser click here.
See this Video for more information:
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Social Networking - Safety Tipsp to protect yourself
Social networking Web sites like Orkut, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Windows Live Spaces are services people can use to connect with others to share information like photos, videos, and personal messages.
As the popularity of these social sites grows, so do the risks of using them. Hackers, spammers, virus writers, identity thieves, and other criminals follow the traffic.
The following tips are helpful to protect from cyber criminals when you use social networks.
1. Use caution when you click links that you receive in messages from your friends on your social Web site. Treat links in messages on these sites as you would links in e-mail messages. (For more information, see Approach links in e-mail with caution.)
2. Don't trust that a message is really from who it says it's from. Hackers can break into accounts and send messages that look like they're from your friends, but aren't. If you suspect that a message is fraudulent, use an alternate method to contact your friend to find out. This includes invitations to join new social networks.
3. To avoid giving away e-mail addresses of your friends, do not allow social networking services to scan your e-mail address book. When you join a new social network, you might receive an offer to enter your e-mail address and password to find out who else is on the network. The site might use this information to send e-mail messages to everyone in your contact list or even everyone you've ever sent an e-mail message to with that e-mail address. Social networking sites should explain that they're going to do this, but some do not.
4. Type the address of your social networking site directly into your browser or use your personal bookmarks. If you click a link to your site through e-mail or another Web site, you might be entering your account name and password into a fake site where your personal information could be stolen.
5. Be selective about who you accept as a friend on a social network. Identity thieves might create fake profiles in order to get information from you. This is known as social engineering.
6.Choose your social network carefully. Evaluate the site that you plan to use and make sure you understand the privacy policy. Find out if the site monitors content that people post. You will be providing personal information to this Web site, so use the same criteria that you would to select a site where you enter your credit card.
7. Assume what you write on a social networking site is permanent. Even if you can delete your account, anyone on the Internet can easily print the information or save it to a computer.
8. Be careful about installing extras on your site. Many social networking sites allow you to download third-party applications that let you do more with your personal page. Criminals sometimes use these applications in order to steal your personal information. To download and use third-party applications safely, take the same safety precautions that you take with any other program or file you download from the Web.
9. Think twice before you use social networking sites at work. For more information, see Be careful with social networking sites, especially at work.
10. Talk to your kids about social networking. If you're a parent of children who use social networking sites, see How to help your kids use social Web sites more safely.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Beware of debit card skimmers
Police in at least two cities advise consumers not to use their debit
card at a gas pump because there’s no way to be sure it hasn’t been
tampered with.
By Herb Weisbaum
MSNBC
Becki Turner got the call from her bank’s fraud department on Labor
Day. The investigator wanted to know if she had withdrawn $500 from an
ATM in California over the holiday weekend. She hadn’t. She couldn’t.
Turner was home in Puyallup, Wash.
“I was just flabbergasted,” she says. “I had the card with me, the ATM
was in another state, and the person using the machine had to have my
security code.” Turner worried crooks had gotten into the banking
system and stolen her password.
It wasn’t anything that complicated. Puyallup police say thieves
snagged her account information — along with the debit card numbers
and PIN codes of hundreds of other people — at two gas stations in the
area.
They did it by installing their own hard-to-spot card reader, called a
skimmer, on top of the card reader built into the pump. The skimmer is
able to grab the account information from the card without interfering
with the legitimate payment transaction.
The crooks used the stolen data to create (or clone) fake debit cards
that were used at ATMs in Washington State over the Fourth of July
weekend and in Northern California on Labor Day weekend. The bad guys
like three-day holidays because it gives them more time to use the
cards before the unauthorized withdrawals are spotted.
“We are looking at a sophisticated, very well-organized group of
individuals,” says Detective Jason Visnaw with the Puyallup Police
Department. When all the victims from these two incidents are
identified, the total loss could reach half a million dollars.
Why steal debit card numbers? “With a credit card you have to go and
buy merchandise and then you have to fence it or pawn it,” Det. Visnaw
explains. “With a debit card, you’re getting cash money.”
This is not an isolated case. Gas pumps are being compromised in
cities across the country. “We don’t view it as an epidemic, but there
are cases open in at least a half dozen states right now,” says Ed
Donovan, spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service. These investigations
are underway in California, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Delaware and
Washington.
Donovan tells me the Secret Service believes some of these crimes are
inside jobs, involving someone at the service station.
Gas pumps are just the latest target
Skimming credit cards and debit cards is not new. Portable card
readers make it possible for anyone to copy the information stored on
a card’s magnetic stripe. This information is not encrypted so it’s
easy to steal.
“You just run it through the skimmer and it has all the information
right there in plain text,” says former White House cyber security
advisor Howard Schmidt. “It’s very easy to imprint that data on
another magnetic strip and use it somewhere else.”
The first skimming cases were reported at restaurants and stores where
dishonest employees ran cards through their reader before ringing up
the sale. As technology improved, the bad guys developed skimmers for
ATMs. Now they’ve added gas pumps.
The skimmers are designed to slip over the real card reader. They can
be hard to spot. And quite frankly, most of us would never look for
something like this anyway. We want to pay and go.
So how do they get your PIN number? They can hide a little camera in
the skimmer or on the pump. It shows your fingers as you type in the
number.
There are also fake keypads that slip over the real keypad that can
transmit the PIN code as you enter it.
In Las Vegas, police have discovered even more sophisticated
technology – wireless transmitters installed inside the pump. “They
can actually sit in the parking lot with a laptop and get real-time
information as victims use their card,” explains Lt. Robert Sebby of
the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Because there’s nothing
on the outside of the pump, there’s no way you can tell the pump is
compromised.
Not a safe way to pay
Nancy and Jim Tew no longer use their debit cards to pay at the pump —
and for good reason. They both had their debit card numbers stolen at
one of those gas stations in Puyallup, Wash.
Nancy Tew found out about the theft when her card was rejected at the
grocery store. “To my astonishment, I had no money in the bank,” she
said.
The thieves used her account number at ATMs in Hollywood, Calif., to
steal $600. They got $900 from her husband’s checking account. She
tells me it was “totally bizarre and really scary” to be targeted like
that and not even know it.
The Tews now pay for their gas — with cash or debit card — at the
register. That may sound paranoid, but other victims of this skimming
attack tell me they now do the same thing.
Police in Puyallup and Las Vegas now advise residents not to use their
debit card at a gas pump because there’s no way to be sure it hasn’t
been tampered with.
That’s smart advice and here’s why. Debit cards do not offer the same
fraud protection as credit cards. If crook armed with a skimmer snags
your credit card number and uses it to buy things, you can dispute the
charges with the credit card company. You won’t owe a thing while they
investigate.
If the crook grabs your debit card number, he can go to a cash machine
and pull money out of your checking account. It could take days for
the bank to investigate and put that money back into your account.
During that time checks could bounce or you might not be able to pay
your bills. That’s why the only way I pay at the pump is with a credit
card.
card at a gas pump because there’s no way to be sure it hasn’t been
tampered with.
By Herb Weisbaum
MSNBC
Becki Turner got the call from her bank’s fraud department on Labor
Day. The investigator wanted to know if she had withdrawn $500 from an
ATM in California over the holiday weekend. She hadn’t. She couldn’t.
Turner was home in Puyallup, Wash.
“I was just flabbergasted,” she says. “I had the card with me, the ATM
was in another state, and the person using the machine had to have my
security code.” Turner worried crooks had gotten into the banking
system and stolen her password.
It wasn’t anything that complicated. Puyallup police say thieves
snagged her account information — along with the debit card numbers
and PIN codes of hundreds of other people — at two gas stations in the
area.
They did it by installing their own hard-to-spot card reader, called a
skimmer, on top of the card reader built into the pump. The skimmer is
able to grab the account information from the card without interfering
with the legitimate payment transaction.
The crooks used the stolen data to create (or clone) fake debit cards
that were used at ATMs in Washington State over the Fourth of July
weekend and in Northern California on Labor Day weekend. The bad guys
like three-day holidays because it gives them more time to use the
cards before the unauthorized withdrawals are spotted.
“We are looking at a sophisticated, very well-organized group of
individuals,” says Detective Jason Visnaw with the Puyallup Police
Department. When all the victims from these two incidents are
identified, the total loss could reach half a million dollars.
Why steal debit card numbers? “With a credit card you have to go and
buy merchandise and then you have to fence it or pawn it,” Det. Visnaw
explains. “With a debit card, you’re getting cash money.”
This is not an isolated case. Gas pumps are being compromised in
cities across the country. “We don’t view it as an epidemic, but there
are cases open in at least a half dozen states right now,” says Ed
Donovan, spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service. These investigations
are underway in California, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Delaware and
Washington.
Donovan tells me the Secret Service believes some of these crimes are
inside jobs, involving someone at the service station.
Gas pumps are just the latest target
Skimming credit cards and debit cards is not new. Portable card
readers make it possible for anyone to copy the information stored on
a card’s magnetic stripe. This information is not encrypted so it’s
easy to steal.
“You just run it through the skimmer and it has all the information
right there in plain text,” says former White House cyber security
advisor Howard Schmidt. “It’s very easy to imprint that data on
another magnetic strip and use it somewhere else.”
The first skimming cases were reported at restaurants and stores where
dishonest employees ran cards through their reader before ringing up
the sale. As technology improved, the bad guys developed skimmers for
ATMs. Now they’ve added gas pumps.
The skimmers are designed to slip over the real card reader. They can
be hard to spot. And quite frankly, most of us would never look for
something like this anyway. We want to pay and go.
So how do they get your PIN number? They can hide a little camera in
the skimmer or on the pump. It shows your fingers as you type in the
number.
There are also fake keypads that slip over the real keypad that can
transmit the PIN code as you enter it.
In Las Vegas, police have discovered even more sophisticated
technology – wireless transmitters installed inside the pump. “They
can actually sit in the parking lot with a laptop and get real-time
information as victims use their card,” explains Lt. Robert Sebby of
the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Because there’s nothing
on the outside of the pump, there’s no way you can tell the pump is
compromised.
Not a safe way to pay
Nancy and Jim Tew no longer use their debit cards to pay at the pump —
and for good reason. They both had their debit card numbers stolen at
one of those gas stations in Puyallup, Wash.
Nancy Tew found out about the theft when her card was rejected at the
grocery store. “To my astonishment, I had no money in the bank,” she
said.
The thieves used her account number at ATMs in Hollywood, Calif., to
steal $600. They got $900 from her husband’s checking account. She
tells me it was “totally bizarre and really scary” to be targeted like
that and not even know it.
The Tews now pay for their gas — with cash or debit card — at the
register. That may sound paranoid, but other victims of this skimming
attack tell me they now do the same thing.
Police in Puyallup and Las Vegas now advise residents not to use their
debit card at a gas pump because there’s no way to be sure it hasn’t
been tampered with.
That’s smart advice and here’s why. Debit cards do not offer the same
fraud protection as credit cards. If crook armed with a skimmer snags
your credit card number and uses it to buy things, you can dispute the
charges with the credit card company. You won’t owe a thing while they
investigate.
If the crook grabs your debit card number, he can go to a cash machine
and pull money out of your checking account. It could take days for
the bank to investigate and put that money back into your account.
During that time checks could bounce or you might not be able to pay
your bills. That’s why the only way I pay at the pump is with a credit
card.
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