Is Identity Theft a Real Threat?

Friends, this article is serious. Based on a study conducted by Paypal in 2008, Internet users in the UK are much more likely to be victims of identity theft than their peers in both Europe and the USA.

The recent survey by PayPal and Ipsos Research of 6,000 online shoppers in 6 countries revealed that 14% of respondents in the UK admitted that they have had their identities stolen online. This can be compared with only 3% in Germany. More than half of respondents said that they used personal dates and names as passwords, making it relatively easy for hackers to gain access to accounts through manual efforts of trial and error. The French are particularly bold – two-thirds of the respondents claimed to use easily guessed passwords such as birthdays and telephone numbers but the icing on the cake was that over 80% of the French post this sort of personal data on social-networking sites. Unfortunately, the hackers enjoy trolling the very same social media sites too.

The article did not reveal how users could protect themselves so, in an effort to provide some form of public service… here are my recommendations:
1) Do NOT reveal detailed personal information on a public internet site such as myspace, facebook etc
2) If you have already ignored recommendation number one, check all of your passwords and ensure that they are at least 10 digits long and that they contain a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols such as # $ % ( ^ ) etc.
3) a strong password is something like RtY7f*e#2U and a weak password is something like 041277. To check the strength of your passwords, try using the Password Meter – you can even download it to increase your security based on what I am about to reveal to you in the next recommendation.
4) You may have already inadvertently downloaded some sort of spyware that is recording what you type and then transmitting the result to a hacker, a hacking community or an online thief. If you are running Microsoft windows without anti-virus or firewall protection, you might as well raise the white flag and surrender today. Even with both anti-virus software and a leading firewall installed, if you were teased into clicking on some sort of advertisement that downloads a file or more to your computer, chances are reasonable to good that your machine has been infected. One last comment on this topic before we move on – many people have a free version of an anti-virus software installed and they somehow manage to forget to update it regularly thus leaving their machine susceptible to attack. Solution… get a Macintosh and don’t click on links that promise ‘free porn’ or music downloads. For the paranoid among us, add anti-virus software to your Mac and then get back to work
5) Change your password regularly. Do not keep the same password for more than 60 days
6) Create a secure place to store all your passwords and keep them protected with encryption. Put them somewhere safe but easily accessible. My suggestion is to create a secure email account and use their document repository service to give you access from any location. Here is a leading secure email service that offers a free secure email address.
7) Review ALL of your passwords for online banking, email, secure web sites etc and change the password to something stronger today.

enough said, now let’s get back to our regularly scheduled broadcast ;-)

The Right Clients

Someone recently asked me why I chose to capitalize the words ‘Client’ and ‘Customer’ in my texts. Well, the simple explanation is that I appreciate their business. As a sign of respect and acknowledgement of their importance to my company, I want to show my appreciation in every article that I write containing these words.

It’s wonderful to have successful, paying Clients but even better to do business with the right Clients. To start with, we are either big fans of our Clients or we become big fans as we get to know them better. I hear our employees and freelancers raving every week about some of the great things our Clients are doing to grow their businesses. I want to maintain this positive culture and have therefore decided that our sales teams will only target companies that we really want to do business with. I want to be selective with the people that we do business with so that the result is and continues to be a positive experience for all involved.

Today we have four business relationship guidelines that steer our Client acquisition decisions:
1. Essential elements of our Client’s business culture MUST match ours or at the very least, are similar to those that we value and respect on both an ethical and moral basis. We take pride in our reputation and credibility and wish to work with those with similar ideals.

2. The potential for success is reasonable to fantastic. We want to ensure that we have the necessary competencies and availability to deliver the project successfully and exceed our Client’s expectations. Should a prospect have what we determine to be unrealistic goals, we will gladly recommend a competitor. We will never try to convince a Client that an apple is an orange or that we can deliver something that we know we are not capable of delivering because we want to help each of our Clients solve their problem(s) and, as a consequence, recommend our services to others.

3. Profit = Fun. It is a simple equation and there is a ton of truth behind it. A project must be profitable and have the potential to be carried through to successful completion with high levels of motivation and contributions to our bottom line. In essence, we ask for a win-win deal. If our Client wins, we win as well and if our Client is not able to achieve their objectives, we reconsider our role and our efforts to provide the necessary ingredients for success. Competing on price has little merit in this equation since the team requires rewards for a job well done.

4. Bandwidth is an annoying topic for us because our product is based on people with specific skills and limited availability. We want to give our Client’s the best possible service and that means that we need to have a well rested, physically and mentally fit team ready to jump into action. Success brings with it some level of frustration as you learn that you simply can not please everyone all the time. Our people tend to be booked solid for 60 to 90 days out and that means that there is little available bandwidth to acquire new business unless we add additional people to the team. On some occasions this is exactly what we did because we were interviewing superb people at the same time as we acquired a new Client that required the type of services that these new people were capable of delivering. That was a lucky situation and in 10 years has only occurred twice. Most of the time, we are approached by prospects that were referred to us by Clients or read about a Client success story that we created. These prospects usually have some urgent needs and therein lies our challenge. We want to help such companies but only if we can put the right team together to increase the probability of success.

Naturally, there are exceptions to the above guidelines but truth be told, we learned our lessons in the past and such exceptions are rarely worth the time and effort when a win-win is simply not possible.

We count on people like you to understand our thought process and although it may seem in some ways to be rather exclusive given the way that we filter our opportunities, please know that we really appreciate new business opportunities, they are the lifeblood of our business model. BoxONline is currently undergoing some growing pains and thus further expansion is necessary to achieve our objectives so, if you know of people who may fit into and support this Client oriented model of exceeding expectations, please do get in touch with me directly using this form.