Done-For-You Newsletter Content for Techs

[allanc]

Just checked your account and it showed that it was sent but not opened. Just resent another email.
Its available in the members dashboard too.

Me neither.
I just went to the Web site and downloaded it to MailChimp.

 

[Mainstay]

@Bryce W - could I also get a sample of the newsletter? The auto-signup threw an error.

Thank you!

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

I got the notification on Monday and sent it out the same day.

 

[fencepost]

@Bryce W a possible suggestion for a future newsletter - searching safely, evaluating the results and recognizing dangerous links - in particular links with a domain name (often gibberish) plus a path of only 2-4 characters.

I mention it because a user searched for "aetna claim reconsideration form 2017" on Bing and of 11 results, 10 were malicious and 1 was Aetna's homepage. Results on DuckDuckGo were similar though slightly better (including a link to the actual relevant part of the site). Google was pretty clean. Doing the same search without "2017" gave a very different and much better set of results on both Bing and DDG.

My immediate reaction was "I need to remove Bing as a search option on everything, what's my best approach...." but now I'm thinking some user education is also due.

 

[TechLady]

^ Yes. Bing is just horrible. I remove it everywhere I see it.

 

[fencepost]

I'm not a huge fan of Bing, but since I got the same exact thing when I tested on DuckDuckGo (my daily driver) I can't be too harsh on them. I just thought it was very interesting that in this case just including the year changed the results from "pretty good" to "dangerous crap" for both of them. I think a lot of folks have gotten into the habit of including the current year as an attempt to weed out obsolete results, and someone's clearly noticed and taken advantage.

What set the whole thing off was our antivirus - when it blocks something I get an email notification to 3 different accounts (1 shared "events," 1 my work, 1 my GMail). A single anti-phishing block is no big deal, but something malicious can mean my phone blows up with 30 notifications within a 1 minute period and that sure gets my attention. In the past month I've seen at least 2-3 of these a week that come up with assorted warnings and a couple with announcements playing, though a lot of the systems lack sound.

I can't always respond immediately to them, but I do when I can - if nothing else, it lets customers that I may not have seen in a month or more know that "yes, we really are doing things for you."

 

[Bryce W]

@Bryce W a possible suggestion for a future newsletter - searching safely, evaluating the results and recognizing dangerous links - in particular links with a domain name (often gibberish) plus a path of only 2-4 characters.

I mention it because a user searched for "aetna claim reconsideration form 2017" on Bing and of 11 results, 10 were malicious and 1 was Aetna's homepage. Results on DuckDuckGo were similar though slightly better (including a link to the actual relevant part of the site). Google was pretty clean. Doing the same search without "2017" gave a very different and much better set of results on both Bing and DDG.

My immediate reaction was "I need to remove Bing as a search option on everything, what's my best approach...." but now I'm thinking some user education is also due.

Just searched for that via Bing and then Google myself. For me, ALL the front page Bing results were malicious whereas none of the Google ones were.

I'll be doing this search safely topic for this months residential newsletter.