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The Decoy, The Bait, and the Smarter Twitter User

by Jimmy Marks

Growing up in a rural community, you get used to hunting and fishing terms and techniques. Two such techniques I've seen used to great success are decoys and bait. 

The decoy is a preferred method of staying out of the sight of waterfowl. Lulling them into a false sense of safety with fake ducks or geese and getting them to draw closer so you can fire is a skill that many successful hunters learn early. Bait, obviously, is a key part of the fishing equation - without tempting bait, it's tough to draw a fish's attention. While these methods are important to hunters, they're even more important to Spammers. Regrettably, they're just as effective online as they are in the outdoors.

A number of credit union and finance Twitter accounts have been compromised lately. Our own Twitter account, twitter.com/DMI_CUSoapbox, received a number of direct messages from our followers/friends imploring us to click links and enter our personal information. Thankfully, we ignored most of these links and paid attention to the Twitter explosion that followed.

"Accounts hacked!" followers exclaimed. 

"Do NOT click the link," others noted. 

And from one or two Twitter accounts being compromised came three or four. And from all that hubbub came a stinging reminder: 

SPAM will always be around to ruin the party. 

Should Online Acquaintance Be Forgot? We Think So.

by Ron Daly 

I came across this story the other day from Usability Post which asks "Is it time to make 'Remember Me' the default for password protected websites?" This question comes as the result of a few articles about password memory, one which asks if it's time to do away with the option of "Remember Me" and go with automatic login. Another article by web-genius Jakob Nielsen suggests we get rid of the "dots" in the password field (i.e., "Password: ******"), because doing so would increase confidence in those who have trouble with passwords and save them the trouble of copy-pasting passwords. 

What do I think? No. To all of the above, I say no. No, no, no. 

Maybe I'm a little kooky about auto-login and password protection standards. I have to be, it's part of my business. DigitalMailer has lots of clients to manage and those clients all fall under the heading of "information too important to compromise". So we don't use "auto-fill" here, we don't use "save password/remember me" fields, we don't have "oops, I forgot" lists for passwords - none of that. We don't do those things because we value our client's safety. I don't know that it's such a great idea to do with your OWN information, either.