Subtitles of the Movie

You hear so much today about viruses and attachments that corrupt your computers. So it's important that we take a look at e-mail security and in fact a little bit of internet security as well. Keep in mind the web or the World Wide Web was designed for interaction - it's a place where people can meet and talk or research on a myriad of different things. And because the web is designed for interaction you can't really expect it to be private. But you do want to protect yourself against malicious activity, things like viruses. Outlook 2000 by default has fairly low security or minimal security. And unless you have setup your defaults to be a little bit more secure, you can be open to viruses and things of that sort. So let's take a look at how we maximize security within Outlook. First of all you need to come up to tools, come down to options, click on options and you have a series of tabs running across the top. And what you're going to click on is security. What we're interested in here is secure content and security zones, and we have here zone settings and attachment security. First of all let's take a look at zone settings. When you click on that, a little window comes up and it tells you you're about to change security settings and it's very important that you do this correctly, and not leave yourself open to attack - so we're going to say ok. Now it opens up a window here where you can actually set the security level for this particular zone. And you can move the slide up and down. Now of course the highest security level is the safest way to browse the internet, but it is also the least functional. And that means that a lot of web sites that you visit, you won't be able to because the transfer of information via cookies, which is little packets of information that move between web sites, you won't be able to do. So this is the highest security, but it is the lowest level of web interaction. Medium is probably the most commonly used security level. It's fairly safe browsing, it prompts you if you're going to download potentially unsafe content and it is appropriate for most internet sites. But it is up to you. You may choose high, your web surfing experience may be hindered, then have a look at medium and see how that suits you. You can also customize the level of web security or internet security by customizing level here. And you can choose which settings you enable or disable. If you're not sure what you're doing then it's probably best to use these default settings here - mine is set for medium, so I'm just going to say ok. As far as e-mail is concerned, we select attachment security and this is very important. It needs to be set at high, which is the recommendation for all users, and it warns you of security problems. And you can choose whether or not to view these potentially unsafe attachments. So make sure that high is selected and say ok. You can also setup secure e-mail. There are some security setting preferences and unless you are fairly computer savvy, you are going to need a little bit of assistance with organizing encryptions and things like that. But let's come back to the main e-mail window and discuss the idea of attachments. Now generally speaking, reading an e-mail or pure text, as we can see here, you won't get a virus. Unless of course you have set your e-mail to automatically open attachments, but we've set our attachment to high, so that's not likely to happen. Most viruses come in the form of an attachment. For instance let's look at this e-mail from Donna - let's in fact open it up and you can see here that there's an attachment there. I'll just close that for the moment. Now the general rule of thumb is to not open attachments from anybody you don't know. But in fact your friends may even unknowingly send an e-mail to you that does have a virus attached to it. So it's very important these days to have an anti-virus program, there's plenty on the market to choose from and it certainly is a worthwhile investment. And once you've purchased your anti-virus program, and a lot of those you can actually download and purchase off the World Wide Web as well, you can safely check the attachments before you open them. If you're in any doubt as to the source of an attachment simply don't look at it, and in fact ideally you should virus check or virus scan any attachments that come your way. There's a couple of rule of thumb for viruses - do not leave discs in your computer when you are starting up or shutting down, because it can activate the virus which may be hidden on a disc. Don't accept e-mail or open attachments on e-mails from unknown sources, simply delete them. Do not auto run your attachments, set high security for your attachments, back up your data regularly and of course you can download patches. Now speaking of downloading patches, Microsoft acknowledges that there are some security issues with Outlook and they have patches or security fixes. And you can get them by visiting their web site http://officeupdate.microsoft.com and that is all lower case with no spaces. In fact why don't I open up a new blank e-mail and I'll type that address so that you can see it, http://officeupdate.microsoft.com And if you visit that address or that web site, you'll be able to download some security fixes for Outlook. There's a lot of hype related to viruses and often you get e-mails that say things like 'virus warning'. You can only really get a virus by opening or executing a program or an executable file, not accepting macros, and not opening any attachments is a very safe way to protect yourself. Those e-mails that say don't open this virus, don't open that virus, it's just another form of chain mail. If you are in any doubt whatsoever, you can discover the latest viruses at Semantic and I'll give you that address http://www.semantic, spell that correctly, .com. If you have purchased anti virus programs then you'll be able to visit the corresponding web site and download any updates for the latest viruses while you are there. Ok, so before we finish up, having a look at this e-mail here has reminded me of something else that's related to e-mail and e-mail netiquette, and it's a subject of quotes. See these little arrows. I can actually tell you that this has been forwarded on four times before it got to me and I can tell that by the number of quote marks. Quote marks were invented for newsgroup or newsletter users. And a quote really should only be used to mark a line that you want to comment on. People have automatically sent me this, they've just clicked forward, it's come to me. They haven't changed their default settings, so all these quote marks appear. And I don't know about you, but I actually find that a little annoying, so I'm going to show you how to fix that. We click on tools, we click on options, we go to our e-mail options. You can see here on replies and forwards you've got a couple of choices here. When replying to a message you have things that you can set and those little quotes there are prefixing each line of the original message. But I don't want to do that, I want to include and indent the original message text. Now when you're forwarding a message as these people do when they forward jokes on and you do yourself, you can again select some options here. I have selected including original message text. Those quote marks, that's here, prefix each line of the original message and you can see here there that quote appeared. So unless you are specifically responding to a newsletter or newsgroup comment they're really unnecessary and can be quite annoying. I'm just going to include my original message text and say ok.