Ask the Experts Q&A for May 2006

Staysafe readers have a lot of questions, ranging from how to use social networking sites, to fighting spam and scams. Net-mom® answers a few of the questions that reflect your concerns.

• I want to know how to clear the browser history and also of the history of my searches in every search toolbar. Read more.
• My wife messed up her MSN email account password and none of the options they suggest will work for me. What is a number I can call or is there another way? Read more.
• MSN Sympatico has advised me that I have won a lottery but they want me to send them $450.00 to insure the check from the UK. I've looked them up and they indeed have lotteries but how can I be sure I'm not getting ripped off? Read more.
• What can we do to know what’s new in the global fight against malware, spam, and other things? Is there some kind of list where we can subscribe? Read more.
• I am getting weird emails from overseas like London, and other foreign cities. Is there anything I can do to stop this? I am also receiving spam mail that has advertisements in it upon opening the mail. I see pop-up ads all the time. My computer is running slower, too. I have tried everything to rid my PC of it. Nothing works. Thank you. Read more.
• Two questions, one from a mom and one from a teen. Read more.

Your browser keeps a list of web sites you have recently visited. This is called the browser history. If you're using a public computer in a library or cyber café, it's a good idea to clear your browser history file when you're done. This helps maintain your privacy and may even prevent identity theft.

How did they get your address in the first place? Let me count the ways! First, they can just guess. There's a good chance that at any given domain name (like hotmail.com) there's a mary@ or a dave@ or any other common first name.

But that’s not the only trail of breadcrumbs that leads back to where you’ve been on the Internet. Some people don’t realize that search toolbars keep track of their recent searches, too. This is meant as a helpful shortcut, allowing users to move quickly between topics and search strategies. A person who desires a little more privacy will erase his search history as well.

How to do it? There's not enough space here to give instructions for every possible browser and toolbar, but below you'll find links to information on clearing some of the major ones.

• Search history for MSN Newsbot and MSN Toolbar, plus clearing Internet Explorer history and cookies
• Google Toolbar
• Yahoo Toolbar

A related topic is how to prevent your browser from auto-completing words when only part of the word is typed. Again, this is a handy feature that saves keystrokes, but is something you may want to scrub after using a public computer. If your browser isn't listed below, look for its “Preferences” or “Settings.” The controls you want may be available there under “Privacy” or “Advanced.” Some browsers call this feature “Autofill” or “saved form information.”

• How to turn off auto-complete in Internet Explorer
• Firefox offers an easy way to clear browser history, saved form information, the download manager, cookies, and more all from one page.
• Internet Explorer 7 has similar controls, but it is currently in pre-release beta version form. Here’s the link if you want to try it.

Did you know that some search engines offer a “recording” feature that records your searches and saves them at the search engine's end, not at your local PC? If you frequently perform the same searches on multiple computers, this may be for you. Find out more in this informative article.

Finally, there are many free, shareware, and commercial software packages that claim to erase your tracks on all of the above as well as in more deeply buried places in your computer's hard drive. A quick search will turn them up!

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I get a lot of questions from people who want to recover lost MSN Hotmail passwords on behalf of someone else. While you may have a perfectly legitimate reason for asking how to access your wife's account, you could also have a reason that isn't so nice. As you already know, MSN provides several ways your wife can get back her account, and all of them involve ways to prove that she's who she says she is.

She should start here and type her email address plus the squiggly letters shown in the picture. If you can't make them out (they ARE hard to read) you can click the audio speaker button and type the letters you hear instead. By the way, this is called a CAPCHA--an “almost” acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart--and proves that the letters are being entered by a human. The twisty letters are hard for a computer bot to decipher, and bots sometimes try to break into accounts, too.

If your wife does not recall the answer to her secret security question, did not already specify a back-up email account to which the password can be mailed, or has no additional way for MSN to establish her identity, it's time to move on and get a different email account. Better yet, get two: one to establish as a back-up at the time she registers her primary account. If she forgets her password again, she can have MSN send her password to the back-up account.

You can read more about MSN's privacy practices and policies here. Numerous additional contact options for Microsoft products and product support are here. Phone numbers are included.

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While http://lottery.sympatico.msn.ca/ is a real Canadian site, it doesn't sponsor lotteries, it just reports results of national and provincial lotteries. (They also offer some interesting statistical reports, too, such as how often particular numbers come up as winners. Take Lotto 6/49 for example. As a bonus number, 11 is apparently quite lucky, but don’t bother choosing 15. But I digress.)

What you received was email about a scam designed to defraud you of your $450. These are known as “advance fee” schemes. You can find out more about them (and other email hoaxes and scams) here

Don't miss an article called the “Seven Signs of a Scam.” Visit the site yourself, but here are a few hallmarks:

• You are asked to provide money up front for questionable activities, a processing fee, or to pay the cost of expediting the process.
• The request contains a sense of urgency.
• The sender repeatedly requests confidentiality.

Sound familiar? Better hit the “Delete” key on that email.

Keep in mind there are several ways others can get access to your account. Be careful when logging on at an Internet café, at school, or at a friend’s house. The computer itself can be giving away your secrets!

When you log in to your Hotmail account, there are three boxes to select from in order to tell the computer how to handle your account information. These are:

• Save my e-mail address and password
• Save my e-mail address
• Always ask for my e-mail address and password

Over the years, Microsoft's good name has been fraudulently used in many Internet chain letters, hoaxes, and scams. Back in 1997, there was one about an email test that Bill Gates himself was supposedly conducting. The bogus email said:

"Forward this to everyone you know and if it reaches 1,000 people everyone on the list will receive $1000 at my expense. Enjoy.
Your friend, Bill Gates."

Amazingly, a lot of people thought it was real, and for a short time electronic mailboxes all over the world were clogged with this memorable missive. Some people are probably still waiting for their checks!

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The best-known spam-fighting organization is CAUCE an acronym for “Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email.” You can become a member for free. They also have regional chapters all over the world.

Even if you don't want to join, you can learn a lot by visiting their site. For example, the “Other Resources” section includes a list of places you can get DEAs—“Disposable Email Addresses”—to use when you have to give an email address for one-time access to a web page, and you don't want to give your primary email address. There is also a list of Usenet newsgroups where spam problems and solutions are discussed.

CERT is a U.S. Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security-funded group at Carnegie Mellon University. You can subscribe to their mailing list to receive automatic (and official) information on new security threats. The site also has terrific information on securing home computers.

Microsoft's own security page offers a monthly security webcast, updates, malware removal tools, live chat with security experts, and lots more.

Still crave additional information? MSNBC has a special page that tracks security news. There's also The Register that features news on viruses, spyware, spam, and similar topics. It's based in the U.K. so don't be surprised to see some unusual words!

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It sounds like there are a couple of things going on here: you’re getting email you don’t want, and the mail (or something else) may have infected your computer with spyware, a virus, or both.

There are several ways to cut down on spam email, and it starts right at your Internet Service Provider. Many of them offer anti-spam filters as part of your subscription; you may just have to enable them. Visit your provider’s home page to see what is available.

• Choose to receive email only from people in your address book.
• Set the mail program's “tolerance” for mail it thinks is spam. Usually suspected spam will then go into a junk mail folder you can check from time to time to see if the filter snagged anything by mistake. Too many false positives? Just raise the tolerance a little and see if that is better.
• Ability to “train” the filter to recognize things you don’t want to see at all, like mail containing drug offers, vulgar words, and so on.

You might also try some of the suggestions offered at the Federal Trade Commission's anti-spam page for consumers.

You should also know that there are services (some are free) that offer to scrub your email before you get it. You can find a list of these here.

Don't forget that one way to protect yourself from getting on spam mailing lists in the first place is to use a “disposable” email address. Sneakemail.com provides this service for free. Find out how it works in this example.

Back to that computer slowdown problem and those annoying pop-up ads you can't seem to shake: Microsoft has a “Signs of Spyware” page you can check to see if you recognize any symptoms. There's a link to an article on how to get rid of spyware once you've got it, and how to prevent the little gizmos from taking over in the future (hint: download and use Windows Defender, and keep up with your Windows security updates.)

Don't forget about viruses, either. Check Microsoft's Viruses and Worms page for information on security for both your PC and your mobile phone. Click the download link to get the latest Microsoft Service Pack, a malware removal tool, and third-party free trials of anti-virus software.

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My Space.com, and other social networking sites like it, is a true Internet Phenomenon, on the order of Amazon, EBay, and Google. There’s even a U.S. Government Cyber Security Tip about it, “Staying Safe on Social Networking Sites.”

Net-mom also reviews websites for CommonsenseMedia.org, and of course, I've reviewed MySpace.com. Beside my review, click on the “Kid Reviews” and “Adult Reviews” for a full spectrum of public opinion about the site.

You can get a lot of information about how to stay out of trouble from sites like Blog Safety and MySpaceSafetyTips

While it's next to impossible to keep your teen off these sites, it is possible for parents to get their own MySpace accounts and monitor what their kids are writing about and doing. Nothing chills a teen like a “Be my friend” request from a MySpace mom.

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