Issue #1- Nov 1999 Welcome to TCR Internet first issue of newsletter and many more to come. We are committed to have an issue out every month to our users. You are more than welcome to have your input and suggestions to make it better reading material. Remember that you can find this newsletter on our news section via home site: www.tcrs.com.au 1. NEW DESIGN FOR THE TCR INTERNET HOMEPAGE We have invested time and effort to create our new homepage. We want to hear from you, your feedback and if you wish to have further feature add. 2. SITE REVIEW Entertainment Sites Checkout TCR Entertainment section. Banking Sites Westpac http://www.westpac.com.au National Australia Bank http://www.national.com.au/ ANZ http://www.anz.com.au/ Commonwealth Bank http://www.commbank.com.au Bank West http://www.bankwest.com.au/ If you find any sites which you think are interesting or useful let us know! Mail to: support@tcrs.com.au 3. UPDATING YOUR RECORD. Please update your record via our member section. Using the Update User Detail button. Please use your current user name and password if asked. 4. SUPPORT CORNER. SECURING YOUR INTERNET ACCOUNT. Just as your PIN number is something that you don't tell anyone - so to should be your Internet account details, or more specifically, your password! The view taken by the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman is that the user ID and password is the responsibility of the Internet user. As a result, the owner of a User ID is liable for paying the bills it accrues, particularly if it appears that the user has been careless with their password security. If all other possibilities are ruled out, there is a chance that the account may have been remotely accessed by an Internet account freeloader. Freeloaders are people who use virtually undetectable programs to enter another user's computer and identify the user's password and user ID, giving the freeloader remote access to all the online functions available to the genuine password holder. So Who's Responsible? An ISP is not responsible for the security of each of its subscribers' computers, and it is up to users to ensure that their computer and logon details are as secure as possible. How to Minimise security risks... There are a number of things users can do to minimise the risk of having a freeloader gain access to their account. 1. Use alpha-numeric passwords, and change passwords regularly. (For our members: Visit the member section) 2. Don't save passwords onto the computer, but type them in manually each logon. 3. Maintain current anti-virus software. 4. Avoid downloading files from unknown sources, particularly screensavers and graphics and sound files. 5. Regularly check online account records to identify usage anomalies. (For our memebers: Visit member only section ) 6. Control usage by having a pre-paid account. If it happens to you... First contact your ISP to find out whether there has been some sort of error or systems problem. If not, ask your ISP to look into the logons you are disputing. Freeloading is an act of fraud. If it is established that your disputed logons are a result of freeloading, make a report to your local police. 7. TECH CORNER PROXY SERVER The idea of having proxy server is to improve your connection, speed up the downloads and reducing un-neccessary congestion on the internet. We strongly suggest ALL of our users set the proxy to improve performance. Proxy details are as followed: proxy.tcrs.com.au port 3128 HOAX EMAILS Of late many people have been receiving warnings, from friends and others, about an infectious virus that will do really bad things to your computer. We would like to point out that it is almost impossible for a virus to be activated merely by opening and reading an email. While there are ways for a program to start itself when you open an email, these ways are always due to a bug in that specific email program. These bugs are usually found and fixed in the latest version, so this is a good reason to keep you programs up to date. Viruses are transmitted via attachments. This means that if you receive an email from anyone with an attachment, you should always check it with a virus scanner first. As a second point, viruses can only be transmitted by a file type that can be executed on your computer. While in the past this has meant '.exe' and '.com' files, recent macro viruses has meant that any Word, Excel and other Office products can also transmit a virus. So basically, nowdays you should be carefull of anything you get off the Internet. Hoax emails usually come from friends. Unless that friend has received this email from a mailing list dealing with this subject, you need to be very wary of the authenticity of the email. Sometimes hoax emails will quote someone from a well known company or person. For example "Bill Gates from Microsoft has said that this is a very bad virus and people should be very carefull of it". If you really want to know about viruses and some of the latest ones to come out, go to one of the many virus scanner products web pages out there and subscribe to their mailing list. They will inform you, on a regular basis, what the latest viruses are, and also exactly what they do to your computer. Two of the more popular scanners on the internet can be found at: http://www.avp.com/ http://www.mcaffee.com/ As a last point, there is a rather prevalent email going around saying Microsoft or Disney or some other large company is tracking an email via a new software package they have written. The emails asks you to forward it on to as many friends as possible so they can test the tracking system, and states that the first XXX people will usually get something free. We would like to point out that it is impossible to track an email unless you get a reply from each receiver. This is especially related to any of these hoaxes, because they have generally gone out to millions of people by the time you receive it. While this is not a virus hoax, we are mentioning it because it is another chain mail being forwarded around. These types of emails are generally a waste of space. The best thing to do is discard them after informing the sender that the message they sent you is a hoax. For a list of the most common hoax emails follow one of the URL's below. Some of these links contain more content than others, but between them they cover almost all of the widespread hoaxes. Please do not use these links to re-start a hoax email, as they have been provided to increase knowledge of this problem, not to enable you to add to it. http://www.datafellows.com/news/hoax.htm http://www.kumite.com/myths/myths/#a2z http://vil.mcafee.com/villib/hoax.asp http://www.nai.com/services/support/hoax/hoax.asp http://www.av.ibm.com/BreakingNews/HypeAlert/ http://www.irisav.com/lab/hoax.htm http://www.icsa.net/services/consortia/anti-virus/alerthoax.shtml http://www.uk.sophos.com/virusinfo/scares/ http://www.stiller.com/hoaxes.htm http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html http://afcert.kelly.af.mil/hoaxes.html http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHoaxes.html http://www.cybec.com.au/html/vvcc/anti-virus/hoaxes/index.html That's it for this newsletter. Please feel free to email me at gm@tcrs.com.au regarding any comments or suggestions you may have. Regards, Vinh Ngo General Manager TCR Internet Services Pty Ltd Level 1, 27 Oxford Street Epping NSW 2121. Phone : (02) 9869 4580 Fax : (02) 9868 1020 Email : vinh@tcrs.com.au Http://www.tcrs.com.au ------------------------------- |