The latest twist on “phishing” is spear phishing. No, it’s not a sport, it’s a scam and you’re the target. Spear phishing is an email that appears to be from an individual or business that you know. But it isn’t. It’s from the same criminal hackers who want your credit card and bank account numbers, passwords, and the financial information on your PC. Learn how to protect yourself.

Email from a “Friend”
The spear phisher thrives on familiarity. He knows your name, your email address, and at least a little about you. The salutation on the email message is likely to be personalized: “Hi Bob” instead of “Dear Sir.” The email may make reference to a “mutual friend.” Or to a recent online purchase you’ve made. Because the email seems to come from someone you know, you may be less vigilant and give them the information they ask for. And when it’s a company you know asking for urgent action, you may be tempted to act before thinking.

Using Your Web Presence against You
How do you become a target of a spear phisher? From the information you put on the Internet from your PC or smartphone. For example, they might scan social networking sites, find your page, your email address, your friends list, and a recent post by you telling friends about the cool new camera you bought at an online retail site. Using that information, a spear phisher could pose as a friend, send you an email, and ask you for a password to your photo page. If you respond with the password, they’ll try that password and variations to try to access your account on that online retail site you mentioned. If they find the right one, they’ll use it to run up a nice tab for you. Or the spear phisher might use the same information to pose as somebody from the online retailer and ask you to reset your password, or re-verify your credit card number. If you do, he’ll do you financial harm.

Keep Your Secrets Secret
How safe you and your information remain depends in part on you being careful. Take a look at your online presence. How much information is out there about you that could be pieced together to scam you? Your name? Email address? Friends’ names? Their email addresses? Are you on, for example, any of the popular social networking sites? Take a look at your posts. Anything there you don’t want a scammer to know? Or have you posted something on a friend’s page that might reveal too much?

Passwords That Work
Think about your passwords. Do you use just one or easy to figure out variations on just one? If you do either, you shouldn’t, because you’re making it easy for a scammer to get access to your personal financial information. Every password for every site you visit should be different, really different. Random letters and numbers work best. Change them frequently. Your security software and operating system can help you keep track of your passwords.

Patches, Updates, and Security Software
When you get notices from software vendors to update your software, do it. Most operating system and browser updates include security patches. Your name and email address may be all it takes for a hacker to slip through a security hole into your system. And it almost goes without saying, you should be protected by Internet security software, and it should always be up to date.

Be Smart
If a “friend” emails and asks for a password or other information, call or email (in a separate email) that friend to verify that they were really who contacted you. The same goes for banks and businesses. First of all, legitimate businesses won’t email you asking for passwords or account numbers. If you think the email might be real, call the bank or business and ask. Or visit the official website. Most banks have an email address to which you can forward suspicious emails for verification.

And always remember: Don’t give up too much personal information online, because you never know who might use it against you. Or how.

Reprinted from Norton Anti-Virus website.

Well, not really new. But now we have developed a separate business area just focused on lawyers, called NY Lawyers Online. For many years, we have worked closely with small and mid-sized law firms, so much so that this group has become a special area of expertise for us.

In conjunction with Carol Greenwald, our colleague and legal marketing expert, we have helped dozens of attorneys get more out of the Internet. Whether it is designing and developing a modern, compelling website, improving the writing (Carol’s specialty) or putting together a newsletter or blog, we understand how to help the legal profession.

Please take a look at our newest sub-division.  www.nylawyersonline.com.

Clients often ask about SEO, how it works…does it work? How do we do it? Is it difficult?

Well, here’s a brief summary.

The goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to make it easy for your website to be found when people search the Internet for your kinds of products and services. This is no small feat and SEO is an octopus with many tentacles, but in fact, it boils down to a very simple concept: Planting the right words in the right places on the Internet.

Google considers many variables in determining where to rank your site in their results for a given search term.  At Nexxite, we seek to master as many of these variables as possible, but for a popular search term, like “digital photography,” there are tens of millions of web pages that have that phrase somewhere, so the competition can be insurmountable. And no matter how many factors we address, it may not get you to the first page of Google. But there is hope.

What can be done?

One important thing we do is narrow the search topically and geographically as much as possible. It is much better to compete for the phrase “digital landscape photography in Montana” than “digital photography.” So, the number one priority is coming up with the right specific keyword phrases where the competition is less, but where there is still search traffic.

How we do it – on your website

We (or you) set up your website to be optimized for the right keywords. The following is a list of website optimization tasks:

1. Identify web pages to optimize. The right pages to optimize are those relating to your specific products and services that people might search for. There is no need to optimize a contact page or a page of testimonials, for example.
2. For each of these distinct pages you wish to optimize, identify a “universe” of plausible search terms, up to five for each area.
3. Research the phrases to identify first and second best choices for each practice area. Google Webmaster Tools contains an application to help with this research. Good phrases have significant search volume and not too much competition with other websites.
4. Create separate web pages for each separate topic or category with meaningful URLs. In other words, don’t simply create a web page with the file name web_gallery_2.html. Instead name it something like montana_mountain_landscape_gallery.html.
5. Create and insert title tags, description tags, and keyword lists in meta tags for each page.
6. Create new visible text on each page, incorporating keywords for each page. At a minimum, the dominant keyword phrase for each page should appear as the first readable text on the page in an H1 tag.
7. Create internal links from keyword phrases on other pages in the site back to the main page where the subject is presented.
8. Create and insert ALT tags for any graphics on these same pages. Use keywords in the tags wherever possible.
9. Submit the site to the major search engines.
10. Monitor results over subsequent months and adjust keywords as needed

Elsewhere on the Internet

And that’s just for the on-page SEO.  Then there is the rest of the Internet. A key variable is the number and quality of links to your site from elsewhere (other websites, blogs, articles, etc.). It is easy to link within your own website, but how do you get links from other locations on the Internet? Wherever possible, you want appearances in other appropriate and reputable websites with keyword links back to your website. Again, this can be a challenge. You have to give people a reason to want to link to your website.

Here are some things you can do:

1. Write or call owners or webmasters of other relevant websites (the bigger and more important the other website, the better) and ask them to link to your site. You may have to offer a reciprocal link back or a link to a specific useful article you have on your site or blog.
2. Write comments or articles that appear on other people’s blogs
3. Write articles for online publications in your field. Always insert a link back to your site, from a keyword(s) in the article.
4. Become active with your own Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts (Similarly, insert links back to your site.)
5. Issue press releases, news, success stories and other announcements online.
6. Try to get published in local papers and magazines that also have an online presence.
7. Create and promote a video. Post it on YouTube with relevant keywords and post it on your own site.

Remember, for all the above, it is critical to link back to your website.

Those are some basic ideas. There are many more things you can do (or we can do for you). They all take work, but if you want more people to see your website, these steps can make a big difference.