State of INFOCOM July 2014

Greetings Marines,
Before getting into the monthly report I would like to mention something that happened to me last week.  My Mom called and told me she had received an email from her bank saying her account had been suspended and it required her login into the Bank with a link provided in the email to verify her account information.  Luckily she remembered me telling her to never click a link in an email, especially anything from the bank.  I had told her she should always use the link she had saved in the browser favorites.  I explained to her what was happening.  This was a Phishing email trying to direct her to a fake bank website and they would be able to get her account information.  I have received a few of these myself but they were from banks that I didn’t have an account with.  Here are a few things to look out for in these type emails.

• Links that appear to be your Bank links but aren’t. If you place your cursor over a link in a suspicious email, your email program most likely shows you the destination URL. Do not click the link, but look closely at the URL: A URL that is formatted yourbankname.fakewebsite.com is taking you to a location on fakewebsite.com. Just because “yourbankname” is part of the URL does not guarantee that the site is an official Bank site.
• Requests for personal information. Bank emails will never ask you to reply in an email with any personal information such as your Social Security number or PIN.
• Urgent appeals. Banks will never claim your account may be closed if you fail to confirm, verify or authenticate your personal information via email.
• Messages about system and security updates. Banks will never claim the need to confirm important information via email due to system upgrades.
• Offers that sound too good to be true. Banks will never ask you to fill out a customer service survey in exchange for money, then ask you to provide your account number so you can receive the money.
• Obvious typos and other errors. These are often the mark of fraudulent emails and websites. Be on the lookout for typos or grammatical errors, awkward writing and poor visual design.

If you are like me and need assistance with grammar and punctuation I would suggest you check out Weird Al’s word crimes video on YouTube, it the best thing since conjunction junction what’s your function.
With less than two weeks until IC, I’m scrambling to get everything ready to go for my trip.  Time is ticking down fast and this coming weekend is the last one before I head out to IC.  So I’m a bit stressed out.  I should be calmed down when I get to IC.  If you are attending IC/IM this year please flag me down at some point, introduce yourself.  I would love to meet a lot on folks this year at IC.  Also if you have any questions feel free to ask away.

Please join me in welcoming to the INFOCOM staff Major David Anderson Jr.  He will be the new ADO/ADOE editor.  I will be working with him to get up to speed as fast as I can after IC.

In closing here are the pingdom stats for June 2014.
Uptime: 100%
Outages: 0
Downtime: 0
Response time: 420 ms
Mark “Slayer” Anderson
Brigadier General, SFMC
COINFOCOM
Team Delta]]>