Social Networking
Riding the social media wave
Sunday 26 October 2008, 7:56 PM
‘The Crunch’ Sparks Commuting Revolution
These days I’m pretty much chained to my desk at home. No matter how much I try to motivate myself to head into the smoke and pitch for new work, I can’t. I should, I know, but the commute is such a chore - and often the train is full of people who look like they live on there. Why isn’t everyone happy [and clean] like on CBeebies’ Me Too?
Luckily, I’m not alone - for a minute I thought my computer had turned me agoraphobic. It seems the credit crunch is paving the way to a travel revolution, as organisations and staff look to cut costs during the current economic turmoil. Thousands of employers are already helping themselves and their staff through workplace travel plans. Policies such as staggering work journeys, home working, and encouraging cycling and walking, are enabling staff to get to work in a better way and in the process saving time and money while improving health and wellbeing. I’m yet to work for a boss who’s so accommodating, but apparently they’re out there somewhere.
I’ve been saying for years that being green and commuting smart have never made more commercial sense, but it seems companies are finally starting to take heed. The CBI estimates that road congestion alone costs the UK economy some £20 billion per year. Even a limited take-up of travel plans could save £1.9 billion per year within five years. And with that money we could buy a new Government - wishful thinking!
In these cost-conscious times, employees and employers should look at the cost of travel and realise the absurd waste of time and resources, especially of one person commuting by car. If you’re a company bigwig you should think about making it easier for your employees to get about, travel more sustainably and tackle travel issues such as congestion, pollution, carbon emissions and health. Why not take the initiative and promote many alternatives to the usual one-person-per-car approach such as remote working, public transport, cycling and walking. Not only that, but innovative new techniques such as personalised travel planning, car sharing and car clubs - sorry, the last one sounds a bit creepy.
I might even go so far as to suggest that ‘smarter commuting’, such as walking, cycling, car sharing and reducing the number or journeys by allowing remote working, leads to better productivity and cuts business costs. There are not only direct savings, such as mileage allowances, but also hidden costs such as parking provisions, staff retention and employee health issues that can be addressed through travel planning. In the current challenging economic environment, it makes more sense than ever for employers and their staff to look at how and when people travel to and from their workplaces. But more importantly, it helps me to justify not getting out of my seat for another couple more days...
Luckily, I’m not alone - for a minute I thought my computer had turned me agoraphobic. It seems the credit crunch is paving the way to a travel revolution, as organisations and staff look to cut costs during the current economic turmoil. Thousands of employers are already helping themselves and their staff through workplace travel plans. Policies such as staggering work journeys, home working, and encouraging cycling and walking, are enabling staff to get to work in a better way and in the process saving time and money while improving health and wellbeing. I’m yet to work for a boss who’s so accommodating, but apparently they’re out there somewhere.
I’ve been saying for years that being green and commuting smart have never made more commercial sense, but it seems companies are finally starting to take heed. The CBI estimates that road congestion alone costs the UK economy some £20 billion per year. Even a limited take-up of travel plans could save £1.9 billion per year within five years. And with that money we could buy a new Government - wishful thinking!
In these cost-conscious times, employees and employers should look at the cost of travel and realise the absurd waste of time and resources, especially of one person commuting by car. If you’re a company bigwig you should think about making it easier for your employees to get about, travel more sustainably and tackle travel issues such as congestion, pollution, carbon emissions and health. Why not take the initiative and promote many alternatives to the usual one-person-per-car approach such as remote working, public transport, cycling and walking. Not only that, but innovative new techniques such as personalised travel planning, car sharing and car clubs - sorry, the last one sounds a bit creepy.
I might even go so far as to suggest that ‘smarter commuting’, such as walking, cycling, car sharing and reducing the number or journeys by allowing remote working, leads to better productivity and cuts business costs. There are not only direct savings, such as mileage allowances, but also hidden costs such as parking provisions, staff retention and employee health issues that can be addressed through travel planning. In the current challenging economic environment, it makes more sense than ever for employers and their staff to look at how and when people travel to and from their workplaces. But more importantly, it helps me to justify not getting out of my seat for another couple more days...
Sunday 26 October 2008, 7:20 PM
How I Earn £14,246 A Week
At least once a week I read something that makes me give up on humanity. While most of us (at least those reading this site) are decent folk wanting nothing more than to make an honest living and give our children a great start in life, there are scumbags who contrive sinister plots from their grubby bedsits to extract that hard-earned cash from our bank accounts. Sadly, for all its goodness, the Internet makes criminals’ lives a lot easier.
A new and emerging fraud scam has been exposed by ITV1’s ‘Tonight programme’ (on television Monday 27th October). The program confronts the true face of criminals involved in deception and theft through human ‘mules’, an endearing term used for people who unwittingly become duped into helping transfer illegal money, now has a less sophisticated but equally problematic spin-off: the ‘parcel mule’. Instead of transferring money, honest yet vulnerable people are being duped into handling goods obtained fraudulently, forwarding items on to criminals in other countries.
People may know what a drugs mule is and a parcel mule is essentially the same thing. Parcel mules have been around for ages and with Internet forums and community and part-time job sites, the scheme has emerged anew. How it work: 1) Job offer is posted; 2) Job offer states you receive parcels from the warehouse for onward transfer; 3) You receive a box to a PO Box address that you create; 4) You repost the box to a new address; 5) You are paid by wire or even Paypal for each successful receipt.
Such job postings are always parcel/money mule scams. Perhaps you will get paid, perhaps you won’t. However, the scam is that parcels can be sent through the post and money can be exchanged, thus laundering the cash. Parcel mules tend to be recruited once and may even be paid, but often they are not, which means that one person has laundered one item and may have unwittingly sent one consignment of stolen goods/drugs in the post. Transfers are often seen coming from many different people and parcel mules are many different people, which creates a problem for officers trying to identify where the next one will come from as moving something once is easy. Parcel mules rely on a vast turnover of ‘staff’ to avoid detection by intelligence teams.
For criminals using parcel mules there is far less risk of being caught by using someone else to handle goods that have been obtained illegally using fraudulent credit cards. Mules are often recruited through fake ‘job’ advertisements as well as through other methods such as spoof Web sites and even dating sites. Let’s put this into perspective. Last month (September 2008), APACS, the UK payments association, revealed the extent of the problem in the UK as data showed 873 detected fake ‘job’ adverts for parcel mules in the first half of 2008, up 345% over the last three years, and 33% on last year.
However, despite the increase in attempted fraud, the fact remains that it is still safe for consumers to buy online. This is due to the diligent attitude by retailers who see card fraud as a threat to their businesses. With the financial climate as it is, retailers face an uncertain sales period during the run up to Christmas; the last thing they need is yet another scam that rips off more of their revenue through deception. Criminals may think they are invisible, but actually UK retailers have become far savvier to techniques such as parcel mules and are using shared data schemes more extensively to prevent theft.
Although fraudsters will do their best to target UK retailers during the run up to Christmas, the fact that retailers are increasingly sharing data about criminal activity has made it even more difficult for thieves to succeed. So far this year, a crack squad of cyber enforcement folk have detected and prevented £83,117,390.52 fraud. This figure is expected to increase significantly during the lead up to Christmas. Thankfully, there’s shared databases containing clearly fraudulent and highly suspicious data, including listings of bad or questionable details such as e-mail addresses, delivery addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses and card numbers.
Shared databases are not restricted to retailers as banks can also integrate their systems with services of this type. When fraud is detected a data feed is sent to the respective bank informing them that their cardholder has had details compromised. They can then act to re-issue the account number and possibly block the card. In the same way the banking community succeeded with Chip and PIN, this is another major way to protect retailers from card not present fraud.
Most tech-savvy people will be aware of such scams, but there are those who aren’t. It’s these people, especially those caught in the middle of a credit crunch with mounting debts, who I fear might consider one of these 'get rich' quick schemes. Let me leave you with a few words of wisdom:
- No legitimate company will use bank accounts of private individuals for processing payments from its customers. No legitimate business will pay 5% and more for international money transfers (for example, £250 out of £5000), when banks provide such services for only £30-50 per transaction and businesses and individuals can set up their own bank accounts in other countries if needed.
- No legitimate company uses private individuals to receive parcels and remail them.
- Any job offer that involves any of the above activities is a fraud!
Keep the day jobs people! And if something sounds too good to be true, then it is...
A new and emerging fraud scam has been exposed by ITV1’s ‘Tonight programme’ (on television Monday 27th October). The program confronts the true face of criminals involved in deception and theft through human ‘mules’, an endearing term used for people who unwittingly become duped into helping transfer illegal money, now has a less sophisticated but equally problematic spin-off: the ‘parcel mule’. Instead of transferring money, honest yet vulnerable people are being duped into handling goods obtained fraudulently, forwarding items on to criminals in other countries.
People may know what a drugs mule is and a parcel mule is essentially the same thing. Parcel mules have been around for ages and with Internet forums and community and part-time job sites, the scheme has emerged anew. How it work: 1) Job offer is posted; 2) Job offer states you receive parcels from the warehouse for onward transfer; 3) You receive a box to a PO Box address that you create; 4) You repost the box to a new address; 5) You are paid by wire or even Paypal for each successful receipt.
Such job postings are always parcel/money mule scams. Perhaps you will get paid, perhaps you won’t. However, the scam is that parcels can be sent through the post and money can be exchanged, thus laundering the cash. Parcel mules tend to be recruited once and may even be paid, but often they are not, which means that one person has laundered one item and may have unwittingly sent one consignment of stolen goods/drugs in the post. Transfers are often seen coming from many different people and parcel mules are many different people, which creates a problem for officers trying to identify where the next one will come from as moving something once is easy. Parcel mules rely on a vast turnover of ‘staff’ to avoid detection by intelligence teams.
For criminals using parcel mules there is far less risk of being caught by using someone else to handle goods that have been obtained illegally using fraudulent credit cards. Mules are often recruited through fake ‘job’ advertisements as well as through other methods such as spoof Web sites and even dating sites. Let’s put this into perspective. Last month (September 2008), APACS, the UK payments association, revealed the extent of the problem in the UK as data showed 873 detected fake ‘job’ adverts for parcel mules in the first half of 2008, up 345% over the last three years, and 33% on last year.
However, despite the increase in attempted fraud, the fact remains that it is still safe for consumers to buy online. This is due to the diligent attitude by retailers who see card fraud as a threat to their businesses. With the financial climate as it is, retailers face an uncertain sales period during the run up to Christmas; the last thing they need is yet another scam that rips off more of their revenue through deception. Criminals may think they are invisible, but actually UK retailers have become far savvier to techniques such as parcel mules and are using shared data schemes more extensively to prevent theft.
Although fraudsters will do their best to target UK retailers during the run up to Christmas, the fact that retailers are increasingly sharing data about criminal activity has made it even more difficult for thieves to succeed. So far this year, a crack squad of cyber enforcement folk have detected and prevented £83,117,390.52 fraud. This figure is expected to increase significantly during the lead up to Christmas. Thankfully, there’s shared databases containing clearly fraudulent and highly suspicious data, including listings of bad or questionable details such as e-mail addresses, delivery addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses and card numbers.
Shared databases are not restricted to retailers as banks can also integrate their systems with services of this type. When fraud is detected a data feed is sent to the respective bank informing them that their cardholder has had details compromised. They can then act to re-issue the account number and possibly block the card. In the same way the banking community succeeded with Chip and PIN, this is another major way to protect retailers from card not present fraud.
Most tech-savvy people will be aware of such scams, but there are those who aren’t. It’s these people, especially those caught in the middle of a credit crunch with mounting debts, who I fear might consider one of these 'get rich' quick schemes. Let me leave you with a few words of wisdom:
- No legitimate company will use bank accounts of private individuals for processing payments from its customers. No legitimate business will pay 5% and more for international money transfers (for example, £250 out of £5000), when banks provide such services for only £30-50 per transaction and businesses and individuals can set up their own bank accounts in other countries if needed.
- No legitimate company uses private individuals to receive parcels and remail them.
- Any job offer that involves any of the above activities is a fraud!
Keep the day jobs people! And if something sounds too good to be true, then it is...
Sunday 19 October 2008, 10:08 PM
Credit Crunch Spurs Bedroom Start-Ups
The current economic climate sucks, that’s for sure. While some of us are thinking of slitting our wrists, others are taking advantage in this uncertain time to become their own boss. In fact, it seems there are about 16% more businesses being run from home than last year - around 2.5 million - accounting for over half (53%) of the 4.7 million small and medium-sized enterprises in our Little Island. And most of them aren’t even asking for credit card details to see their wives naked!
It seems home-based businesses are also bucking the trend when it comes to confidence in their prospects during the financial crisis. They are buoyantly optimistic about beating the adverse economic conditions, with 72% optimistically planning to win new customers over the next 6 months, two thirds (66%) planning to increase turnover and more than half (58%) developing new products and services (source: BT 2008 Home Business Survey). All that work sounds positively exhausting!
It probably comes as no surprise that the greatest concentration of home businesses in the UK is in London, the East of England and the South East - probably because commuting in these areas is like trudging through hell in an astronaut’s spacesuit whilst chewing a Bhut Jolokia. London also leads the way with the greatest number of home business start-ups over the last year, followed by Leicester, Nottingham, Bristol and Coventry.
There has even been an increase in spare time start-ups, with a third of people (33%) running a home business in their free time. This thriving 5pm to 9am economy offers would-be entrepreneurs a low-risk route to starting their own business - should you want to opt out of sleeping. But let’s look on the bright side: the freedom to make your own decisions is an overwhelming reason to go alone, closely followed by the benefits of a better work/life balance. Let us not forget the fact that you’ve managed to shake the boss...
If you decide to go alone, the use of technology is a critical factor in the start up and growth of a home business. Home business owners should view their spending on technology as a valuable return on investment as it helps to keep costs low and sales and productivity high, giving you the ability to compete and grow. More home business means more dynamism in the economy, less traffic on the roads and tighter social cohesion as parents stay home to run a business and the household. What are you waiting for?
# Disclaimer: I accept no responsibility for bankruptcy, divorce, or your children looking for foster parents who have time to play...
It seems home-based businesses are also bucking the trend when it comes to confidence in their prospects during the financial crisis. They are buoyantly optimistic about beating the adverse economic conditions, with 72% optimistically planning to win new customers over the next 6 months, two thirds (66%) planning to increase turnover and more than half (58%) developing new products and services (source: BT 2008 Home Business Survey). All that work sounds positively exhausting!
It probably comes as no surprise that the greatest concentration of home businesses in the UK is in London, the East of England and the South East - probably because commuting in these areas is like trudging through hell in an astronaut’s spacesuit whilst chewing a Bhut Jolokia. London also leads the way with the greatest number of home business start-ups over the last year, followed by Leicester, Nottingham, Bristol and Coventry.
There has even been an increase in spare time start-ups, with a third of people (33%) running a home business in their free time. This thriving 5pm to 9am economy offers would-be entrepreneurs a low-risk route to starting their own business - should you want to opt out of sleeping. But let’s look on the bright side: the freedom to make your own decisions is an overwhelming reason to go alone, closely followed by the benefits of a better work/life balance. Let us not forget the fact that you’ve managed to shake the boss...
If you decide to go alone, the use of technology is a critical factor in the start up and growth of a home business. Home business owners should view their spending on technology as a valuable return on investment as it helps to keep costs low and sales and productivity high, giving you the ability to compete and grow. More home business means more dynamism in the economy, less traffic on the roads and tighter social cohesion as parents stay home to run a business and the household. What are you waiting for?
# Disclaimer: I accept no responsibility for bankruptcy, divorce, or your children looking for foster parents who have time to play...
Sunday 19 October 2008, 9:15 PM
Talk Business Now
Whether you’re a student, accountant, lawyer or the CEO of a multinational company, your success is probably determined by the strength of your contacts - gravediggers are of course excused. In an age where business is no longer confined to one locality, and the pressure to prise cash/engage with a global market place intensifies, more and more of us are under growing pressure to manage and develop our networks more effectively. On a daily basis most of us talk to colleagues, potential buyers, employers or suppliers in markets spanning a myriad of times zones.
If you’ve read this far, you might be interested in a new online workplace for business professionals. I’ve spent a little time at Talkbiznow and although a little rough around the edges, it seems a pretty decent attempt to allow business people to communicate effectively, unlike the social networking sector which is full of teenagers competing to have the most ‘friends’. Talkbiznow is worth a peek as it combines online networking and business tools to enable professionals of all types to connect. For instance, it lets you host free Webinars, post free advertisements, file share (gulp!), post blogs, and annoy/nudge contacts.
Best of all, it is completely free - Talkbiznow founders told me that they do not intend to ever charge its members subscription fees like the other sites in the market today. The site may have a dream to create a significant paradigm shift in the way that business professionals and companies engage with each other in a global market place, but this type of business is a numbers game and only with a large volume of users will it be of any use.
If you’ve read this far, you might be interested in a new online workplace for business professionals. I’ve spent a little time at Talkbiznow and although a little rough around the edges, it seems a pretty decent attempt to allow business people to communicate effectively, unlike the social networking sector which is full of teenagers competing to have the most ‘friends’. Talkbiznow is worth a peek as it combines online networking and business tools to enable professionals of all types to connect. For instance, it lets you host free Webinars, post free advertisements, file share (gulp!), post blogs, and annoy/nudge contacts.
Best of all, it is completely free - Talkbiznow founders told me that they do not intend to ever charge its members subscription fees like the other sites in the market today. The site may have a dream to create a significant paradigm shift in the way that business professionals and companies engage with each other in a global market place, but this type of business is a numbers game and only with a large volume of users will it be of any use.
Sunday 12 October 2008, 9:54 PM
Another Day, Another Data Loss
Earlier this year the head of Revenue & Customs resigned after his department lost the details of as many as 15 million child benefit claimants in what was believed to be the world’s biggest ID protection failures. Disks used to store information including home addresses, dates of birth, National Insurance numbers and bank details went missing in transit. I was pi**ed because my details were out there in the wild...
Unsurprisingly, this incident was not the first security breach involving HM Revenue & Customs: earlier that month (April) the BBC reported that a CD-ROM containing the personal details of thousands of Standard Life pension holders had gone missing, leaving them at risk of fraud. Do you still trust the Government to store your data safely and appropriately?
There’s more. An investigation is now under way into the disappearance of a computer hard drive containing the personal details of approximately 100,000 members of the Armed Forces. The information includes bank details, dates of birth, passport numbers, addresses and telephone numbers. The disk was being held by EDS, one of the Government’s main contractors, according to media reports.
This latest security blunder involves unencrypted disks that contain extremely sensitive information and at this stage it is not known how long the data has been lost for. Whether data was lost by the Government or a contractor, without implementing the necessary security procedures to protect data in transit, data leakage will continue, exposing thousands of innocent people to identity theft.
This incident demonstrates that decisive and effective measures still need to be taken to protect against data leakage. Although taking control of data leakage is no mean feat, any organisation holding sensitive data needs to take responsibility for establishing and enforcing device control policies that assign permissions to individuals and devices.
Moreover, all data needs to be encrypted to ensure that if it falls into malicious hands it is inaccessible and worthless. It is simply no longer enough to write a computer security policy and expect everyone to follow it to the letter. This is especially true in the case of contractors - monitoring your information and knowing where it is at all times becomes much more complex when multiple parties are involved in the process.
The proliferation of data loss occurrences due to the inappropriate or sometimes criminal use of removable media devices has reached alarming levels, with no sign of abating. The only way to eliminate data loss from removable devices is to take control of the flow of inbound and outbound data from your endpoints and encrypt the data during transmission. These solutions exist today; policy needs to enforce their usage.
The Government released a report into Data Handling Procedures in June 2008 addressing this issue and we are seeing isolated moves to proactive implementation of policy, such as NHS boards across Scotland injecting funding into the improvement of IT security. But, we can only ask when will all organisations start taking this escalating data loss seriously and act preventatively?
Unsurprisingly, this incident was not the first security breach involving HM Revenue & Customs: earlier that month (April) the BBC reported that a CD-ROM containing the personal details of thousands of Standard Life pension holders had gone missing, leaving them at risk of fraud. Do you still trust the Government to store your data safely and appropriately?
There’s more. An investigation is now under way into the disappearance of a computer hard drive containing the personal details of approximately 100,000 members of the Armed Forces. The information includes bank details, dates of birth, passport numbers, addresses and telephone numbers. The disk was being held by EDS, one of the Government’s main contractors, according to media reports.
This latest security blunder involves unencrypted disks that contain extremely sensitive information and at this stage it is not known how long the data has been lost for. Whether data was lost by the Government or a contractor, without implementing the necessary security procedures to protect data in transit, data leakage will continue, exposing thousands of innocent people to identity theft.
This incident demonstrates that decisive and effective measures still need to be taken to protect against data leakage. Although taking control of data leakage is no mean feat, any organisation holding sensitive data needs to take responsibility for establishing and enforcing device control policies that assign permissions to individuals and devices.
Moreover, all data needs to be encrypted to ensure that if it falls into malicious hands it is inaccessible and worthless. It is simply no longer enough to write a computer security policy and expect everyone to follow it to the letter. This is especially true in the case of contractors - monitoring your information and knowing where it is at all times becomes much more complex when multiple parties are involved in the process.
The proliferation of data loss occurrences due to the inappropriate or sometimes criminal use of removable media devices has reached alarming levels, with no sign of abating. The only way to eliminate data loss from removable devices is to take control of the flow of inbound and outbound data from your endpoints and encrypt the data during transmission. These solutions exist today; policy needs to enforce their usage.
The Government released a report into Data Handling Procedures in June 2008 addressing this issue and we are seeing isolated moves to proactive implementation of policy, such as NHS boards across Scotland injecting funding into the improvement of IT security. But, we can only ask when will all organisations start taking this escalating data loss seriously and act preventatively?
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