'Verified By Visa' - Is This Another Scam?

[Bobbieo]

Verified by Visa protects your existing Visa card with a password you create, giving you assurance that only you can use your Visa card online.

Simply activate your card and create your personal password. You’ll get the added confidence that your Visa card is safe when you shop at participating online stores.

You may activate now by entering your card number over our secure server. If your card issuer is participating in Verified by Visa (most issuers are) you’ll complete a brief activation process. You’ll verify your identity, create your Verified by Visa password and you’re done.






© Copyright 2008, Visa U.K & U.S.A . All rights reserved.





__________ NOD32 2277 (20070518) Information __________

[robbedvoter]

1. Wow! next they'll think of ATM cards only you can use! or e-mail accounts!

[mikelgb]

2. are you series?

[spirit of wine]

4. No, Parallel

[Bobbieo]

5. I'm not a 'series' yet, but I'm working on it

[Stephanie]

3. If it didn't come from your own credit card company, ignore it.

Don't get involved with any third-party passwords, that does sound like a scam.

[mcscajun]

6. This is a legitimate program from Visa, But I wouldn't do anything

unless you get to it directly through the VISA website. Don't click on any links in an e-mail.

[bemildred]

7. Yeah, that was my take.

There is a legitimate program from Visa, but there are also sophisticated phishing emails out there that try to exploit it.

[Prophet 451]

8. One simple rule

I work in IT, I deal with stuff like this all the time. Here is a very simple rule:

Never, ever, ever, under any circumstances, at any time, for any reason, enter your financial details in a link from an email.

There are NO exceptions to this rule. If you think you may have a genuine problem or there is a service you are concerned about, go to the companies website and check it out independantly.

Identity theft is big business. For the financial year 2005-06, the estimates are 7.8 million victims at an average cost of around $1500 each. ALWAYS use an anti-virus, ALWAYS use a firewall. Keep your virus definitions up to date (you can set most virus scanners to do that automatically now). If you routinely keep financial info on your PC, consider investing in encryption and a secure delete program (I'll happily offer advice if you need it).

[Blackhatjack]

9. Some don't work together well... which do you recommend? n/t

[Prophet 451]

10. For doing what?

For anti-virus/firewall, take your pick from McAffee or Symantec (aka Norton). They're the best in field. Symantec is slightly more customisable but because of that, slightly more complex. McAffee is slightly more user-friendly. In terms of doing the job, there's little to pick between them so it's down to personal preference, I use Symantec. If you're broke or cheap, the best ones available for free are Anti-Virus Gold (http://free.grisoft.com/) and ZoneAlarm Firewall (http://www.zonealarm.com/store/content/catalog/products/sku_list_za.jsp).

For encryption, you just can't beat PGP (www.pgp.com). Massively secure, it's virtually impossible to break. There's not much to say about this because encryption is not somethign you can say much about without getting very technical. It just works.

For secure delete, the most reliable and easily integrated one I've found is Window Washer (http://www.digitalriver.com/v2.0-img/operations/webroot/html/061108/webroot_ww_uk.html). Secure deletes, rewrites the area with random data up to 30 times (the NSA classifies "unretrievable" at 12, the DOD at 3; mathematically, 27 is the magic number), cleans your browser cache and cookies, Office records and so on. Fully configurable (i.e. you can tell it what to keep and what to shred) and, from personal experiance, theyr customer support is pretty good too.

[Blackhatjack]

11. I am using California Associates eTrust EZ Armor provided free by TWC Road Runner...

I struggled for some time to get the Antivirus program to work with the Firewall program, both in the same suite.

The fix that customer service finally recommended is not the best, but it no longer freezes up my computer.

WHat has been your experience with CA products? (The suite is a fairly expensive product if purchased separately without using Road Runner as my broadband cable connection).

[Prophet 451]

12. Mixed, to be honest

They do the job, not spectacurly well and not very efficiently but they do it. The EZ Armor package is being offered for free download by PC World here (http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,23132-order,1-page,1-c,alldownloads/description.html). However, as you've noticed, they're often touchy about communicating with other products, not very flexible and the anti-virus sometimes misses major vulnerabilities (if you're tech savvy, here's a report: http://secunia.com/product/4092/?task=statistics). That said, the firewall is absolutely bulletproof.

What concerns me about CA generally is the tendancy to offer workarounds rather than solutions. That is, tricking the program rather than fixing it. Ideally, you should barely notice your security packages (unless you're a techie), they should be nearly invisible once installed, not require lots of tinkering to get them to work.

[Blackhatjack]

13. After extensive tech conferences they advised I turn their firewall off...

... and use the Windows firewall that came with Windows XP.

I find it interesting that you characterized the firewall as 'bulletproof.' I like the antivirus and the pest control modules, but 'freezing up' that came with the firewall usage was absolutely unacceptable.

Any suggestions?

[Prophet 451]

14. Not one you'd like

The firewall is bulletproof, I'd imagine that was the problem you were having, it was over-sensitive. The Windows firewall is OK, it's very basic and has zero flexibility but it does the job. The fact they advised you to turn it off is a good indication of their customer service level but without actually looking at your machine, it's impossible for me to advise you on what's going wrong with it.

Whether you want to try a different one depends on how secure you need to be. The big secret of data security is that no security, no matter how good, will stop the truly determined and skilled hacker. The object of the excercise is essentially to make it more trouble than it's worth for him to steal your savegame files or collection of pr0n or whatever. It's possible he could use your machine as a platform for attacking another machine, especially if you use "always-on" broadband (average time before attack: Under 20 minutes). If what you've got on there is basic, you might well be ok with teh Windows firewall but if you've got anything sensitive, I'd suggest going up to an integrated AV/firewall package (such as the ones I suggested in the first post). You can pick them up fairly cheaply at most software stores or download.

One other thing and this is a weird thing about tech: There is NO relationship between price and quality in the computer industry.

[Blackhatjack]

15. It seems customers would be beating down the door of a vendor who made....

... an integrated AV/firewall package that is 'customer friendly' and easily configurable.

WE are not all computer savvy and we need protection like everyone else. IMHO this is the biggest impediment to people investing more $ in software --since we have all been burned by software that will not work as advertised and customer service that is either non-existent or totally incompetent to fix the problem.

Whoever takes this problem seriously will be the next computer billionaire.

If a tech person cannot diagnose a problem with their own software and make it work, what chance does the average person have of being successful?

[Prophet 451]

16. Fully agreed

I'm just a humble functionary in the tech world (and my company just got bought out by Fox, pity me) but even I can see that.

I think part of the problem is the tendancy to let techies design software for other techies, instead of for the layman. The result is software that tends to assume the end user knows more about computers than is generally the case.

[Blackhatjack]

17. Some years ago I read that we have Bill Gates to thank for this situation...

... he came up with the idea to 'license' software instead of sell it, and part of the plan was to make the software so that the average user would be dependent on their customer service as part of the licensing strategy.

OF course each new iteration of the software required upgrades and less support for earlier versions previously licensed.

WE are on the cusp of someone making software problems disappear into the background, and the money to be made by doing that will tremendous.

One step in the right direction is to allow a tech to remotely control the computer.

HOwever, the easier model is to make every computer a workstation and stash all the programs online. When that becomes functional the compatibility and virus problems will disappear. Some pretty smart people believe that GOOGLE has been working on this for years.

[Prophet 451]

18. Not so sure

The problem with remote access is a security problem. If I, for example, can get complete access to your machine then so can a hacker who's willing to work hard enough. Remote Access has been used on some of the high-end Windows variants for a while but they're had that problem as well.

Likewise, the problem with turning every machine into a workstation. Firstly, that means that by definition, the program's creators will be able to access what you write and secondly, what happen's when the servers go down (as they always will on occasion)?