Monthly Archives: January 2019

Apple customers have been receiving fraudulent calls falsely claiming to be from Apple.
The scammers are calling from an apparent “Apple” number, which seems legitimate, and pretend to be from customer services. It is reported that they will identify themselves correctly, before asking for some information from you. It is almost impossible to spot that the calls are actually coming from somewhere else entirely.

Journalist Brian Krebs reported scams are becoming so advanced that the CEO of a cyber security research firm, Jody Westby, was nearly fooled.

Ms Westby received a call, which appeared entirely to be from Apple according to information from her iPhone. The caller told her that multiple iCloud servers had been compromised, and that her data was no longer safe. For security, Ms Westby was asked to ring another number and confirm her details. Luckily, Ms Westby didn’t do that, and instead contacted Apple who confirmed this was not a legitimate call.

The number is run by scammers who would ask for details such as logins which they could then use to break into iCloud accounts, or possibly even transfer money.

Like many of the world’s largest companies, Apple has repeatedly been targeted by scams. Users will often receive scam emails, which look entirely like official messages, that send your data off to the hackers simply by clicking through the message.

Attacks like this have been becoming increasingly advanced, and appear to be getting more detailed and believable. Such phone scams are almost entirely impossible to distinguish from a legitimate call, making them very difficult to deal with, and so it is crucial to be sure who you are speaking to before exposing any of your data. We recommending verifying the company/provider calling you – e.g. for account specific information that they should know, which you have not given to them on the current call.

We are proud to show the results of our latest project for REL Building Services, working on leveraging SharePoint within their company.

REL work across the industrial, commercial, education and residential sectors, designing and delivering sustainable solutions for mechanical, electrical, data and technical projects.

We have developed and built their first SharePoint site, for internal use”REL Intranet”.
Features include dynamically updated content across the following:
• Team calendars
• Leave planner
• Employee documents
• News and updates
• Current projects
• Company contacts
All documents can also be managed using OneDrive on managers’ PCs, linked to site libraries on SharePoint.

In creating this site REL intend to:
• remove micromanagement for administrative functions
• increase engagement of distributed teams (they have a head office and multiple site offices)
• provide a resource for staff for Health & Safety information and other important documents
• provide direct access to staff facilities such as, Leave Planning and team calendars

This site constituted the first phase of REL’s SharePoint plan, and we look forward to working with them on the next phases in the near future.

It has been found that users with certain Samsung phones cannot fully delete Facebook on their devices. Samsung responded to this saying they provide a pre-installed Facebook app on selected models with options to disable it, demonstrating the app as inactive – however the true implications of this are unknown.

Consumers are becoming more aware of their digital rights and more vigilant about their privacy, following last year’s revelations about Facebook’s information-sharing practices and scrutiny of online data collection. Users are suspicious as to whether the Facebook app is truly inactive when not yet accessed or disabled.

Facebook have declined to provide a list of the partners with which it has deals for permanent apps, meaning that consumers may not know if Facebook is pre-loaded unless they specifically ask, and therefore are unaware of how to disable it if they don’t wish to use it.

However, Facebook is not the only company whose apps show up on smartphones by default. The Samsung Galaxy S9, for example, also comes loaded with many Google apps such as YouTube, Google Play Music and Gmail, shown by a T-Mobile US Inc. list of built-in apps. Twitter is another app which is preloaded onto certain models by default, however, the app won’t collect any data unless a user had opened and logged on to an account.

Apple, whose iPhone is the top-selling smartphone in the U.S. but not the rest of the world, doesn’t pre-install Facebook or any other third-party apps on its new phones.

Yahoo have closed down their YQL service (Yahoo Query Language) with very little notice. The YQL platform enabled users to query, filter and combine data across the web through a single query interface. The closure of this platform will affect users of datatables.org as well as developers who built features using YQL services.

The YQL service was often used by developers as an intermediary service for various things. Their endpoint services including query.yahooapis.com and weather.yahooapis.com were retired on January 3rd this year.

Yahoo closed this service with only 48 hours of notice, and developers are actively looking for replacement solutions. Yahoo have fully closed the YQL services, rather than forcing upgrades to paid accounts or similar monetisation approaches.

The Yahoo Weather API is still available, but you need to register and use the below as your new endpoint:

weather-ydn-yql.media.yahoo.com/forecastrss

There has been no official explanation as to why Yahoo has closed the YQL services, however there have been some major changes at Yahoo since the takeover by Verizon last year.
It is apparent that Yahoo has experienced a major hit in recent years. In 2008, Yahoo was offered $45 billion by Microsoft for their acquisition, but eight years later Verizon purchased Yahoo’s core business for just $4.8 billion. And just before the acquisition by Verizon, Yahoo suffered a massive data breach that exposed personal data of more than 3 billion users. It also suffered another attack that leaked the personal details of ~500 million users – effectively every single account on Yahoo, Flickr, Tumblr and other Yahoo properties were compromised.

We are pleased to announce the completion of a project in collaboration with our partner, Your Brand Matters, for Succession Wealth.

Succession Wealth delivers tailored wealth planning solutions for private and corporate clients. They required a new website for their ‘Be Retirement Ready’ campaign, which promotes their services in this sphere, gives information to their audience regarding key tenants, and provides interactive features such as local office and specialist search functionality.

The site includes:

Creative and design by Your Brand Matters. Your Brand Matters recently rebranded Succession Wealth, and this campaign site uses the fantastic new brand to great effect. We are looking forward to working on more collaborative projects this year for Succession Wealth.

You can visit the site here: beretirementready.today

Secure browsing (also known as HTTPS) is now the industry standard, due to global changes being made by search engines, to web browsers, and by major platforms. Servers and web hosting used must use an SSL certificate, which enables secure browsing to your users/visitors.

Our Standard SSL certificates provide:

• Proof of domain name ownership,
• Shows site is who it claims to be,
• Improves search results (eg Google ranking),
• Marked as secure by all web browsers,
• Encryption of all data between your site and the end user.

Our Advanced SSL certificates also provide:

• Legal validation of the organisation,
• Organisation name in green address bar.

Below are key ways in which sites are affected without SSL certificates:

Search results
Google actively downvotes sites in their search results which do not offer secure browsing. See here for more information: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html

Web browsers
Latest versions of web browsers now show sites without secure browsing as “Not secure”:
https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/milestone-chrome-security-marking-http-not-secure/

Social media
Facebook has announced that from October, all integrations/uses of its platform will require secure browsing. Other social media platforms are sure to follow. See here for more information:
https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2018/06/08/enforce-https-facebook-login/

If your site is temporary or a simple holding page, an SSL certificate may not be required. Otherwise we recommend all active businesses and organisations have an SSL certificate in place. Please contact us for assistance obtaining and implementing SSL certificates.