Phishing Never Takes a Holiday

No. I’m not referring to the now infamous GoDaddy employee $650 holiday bonus email. Employees who responded to the email with the requested information were later informed that they had failed the company phishing test. If you have not yet read that dispiriting story, it’s here.

I am referring to this charming email which I received this morning.

Phishing Email and Fish
Phishing Email from “[email protected]

It is from: “Mobilehelix passwordexpiration.”

Presumably, that would be warning enough for your employees to hit the “Delete” button posthaste.

If not that, then maybe those over-sized blue bands which overlap the line below would be a tip-off.

(I have obscured the recipient’s email address.)

This is a very good opportunity for me to show you a security feature in our LINK App. When you open an email in LINK you will always see the alias and below it the sender’s email address. You don’t have to tap or do anything else to display the email address. It’s there.

In this case the alias is the aforementioned, “Mobilehelix passwordexpiration.”

And the email address is, “[email protected].”

If your employee were uncertain as to whether to hit that “Delete” button, I think that seeing that the email is from “[email protected]” would be the icing on the cake. This email is definitely not from the company IT department. Delete.

We are serious about security at Mobile Helix. Much of what we build into the LINK system, such as certificate-based device registration in the new user registration process, is behind the scenes. It’s invisible to your employee and works in the background.

But this security feature is a designed to help your employees to be watchdogs for senders with devious intentions. 90% of organizations experienced targeted phishing attacks in 2019. Humans are the weakest link. This is one simple tool to help all of us to be vigilant.

-Maureen

Originally published in LinkedIn on December 28, 2020

LINK App: New Safari Button

Here is a great new feature in LINK which I use several times a day. When you open a web page in the LINK app using LINK’s browser, you can now tap the familiar Safari button to open the page in the device’s Safari browser.

You can open a link in an email, or in a document, or from an application page, then tap the Safari button to open the page outside of LINK. Here is an example.

Tap on link in Email
Opens in LINK’s browser
Tap Safari Button
Opens in Safari
Tap on “Link” to return to LINK app

I use the Safari button when I receive a link to an uncommon video conference or signature service (we test the popular ones in the LINK browser), or when a page is not rendering correctly. I also use the Safari button when I want to read something, but not now. I open it in Safari. It stays open in Safari. Then I can go back to LINK and continue working.

Sound good? Here are other benefits of the Safari button:

  1. Safari is where you do your personal browsing. If you are logged in to nytimes.com, for example, those cookies are cached in Safari. If you click a hyperlink in Link, your cookies/password manager are not available to you. Better to just browse in Safari.
  2. The LINK browser routes all traffic through your office network. The Safari button allows you to move all personal web browsing into your personal browser. This (a) keeps your work network safe, and (b) prevents web proxies that your company establishes from intercepting and monitoring your traffic. It is a simple matter of employee privacy – you should always have the ability to keep your personal business personal.
  3. Native Safari has special capabilities that LINK does not. In particular, Safari has knowledge of all the apps on your device and many sites will use this capability to automatically launch a mobile app, rather than continuing to view a website in the browser. Safari also has a few important features that are not implemented in LINK’s browser. Chief amongst them is WebRTC, which is a protocol for real-time applications like in-browser video conferencing.
  4. IT can control when Link automatically pushes hyperlinks clicked in email to the native Safari browser. For example, IT can configure Facebook links to automatically open in Safari outside of the LINK container.

Have any questions? Let me know at [email protected].

-Maureen

LINK App Enhanced Email Swipe Menus & VIP Notifications

Let’s face it, Email is vital to our work, but it’s also tedious and time consuming. In LINK we care about features which make Email management more efficient.

LINK’s configurable “Swipe Menus” are one of those features. Here are 3 key things to know about Swipe Menus.

I. Color-Coded: By popular demand, menus are now color-coded per the task.

Inbox Swipe Menus

DELETE: RED

ARCHIVE : BLUE

FLAG: ORANGE

REPLY/FORWARD/FILE: GREY

VIP: RED

READ/UNREAD: BLUE

II. More Options from Either Side

Now you can select any of these options from either Left or Right Slide: Delete, File, Flag, Unread, Forward, Reply, VIP, Archive

There are 3 swipe left options and 2 swipe right options.

III. Settings

From the Inbox, tap the Gear Icon, in the upper right to go to Settings. Select your options. Then Save.

Email Settings from the Gear Icon in the Inbox

Bonus: VIP Notifications

Don’t forget to use your VIP features. You can make any correspondent a VIP by swiping and tapping on VIP. Then in Settings, select a distinct sound for VIP notifications. Learn all about VIP notifications in this video.

I hope that these swipe menus make your life easier!

If you have any questions, please write to me at [email protected].

–Maureen