Valuable Feature: Google Using Data to Protect Online Users from Malware

Originally posted on Google Online Security Blog

The Internet brings remarkable benefits to society. Unfortunately, some people use it for harm and their own gain at the expense of others. We believe in the power of the web and information, and we work every day to detect potential abuse of our services and ward off attacks.

As we work to protect our users and their information, we sometimes discover unusual patterns of activity. Recently, we found some unusual search traffic while performing routine maintenance on one of our data centers. After collaborating with security engineers at several companies that were sending this modified traffic, we determined that the computers exhibiting this behavior were infected with a particular strain of malicious software, or “malware.” As a result of this discovery, today some people will see a prominent notification at the top of their Google web search results:

This particular malware causes infected computers to send traffic to Google through a small number of intermediary servers called “proxies.” We hope that by taking steps to notify users whose traffic is coming through these proxies, we can help them update their antivirus software and remove the infections.

We hope to use the knowledge we’ve gathered to assist as many people as possible. In case our notice doesn’t reach everyone directly, you can run a system scan on your computer yourself by following the steps in our Help Center article.

via googleblog.blogspot.com

More Notes from Google:

• The malware appears to have gotten onto users' computers from one of roughly a hundred variants of fake antivirus, or "fake AV" software that has been in circulation for a while. We aren't aware of a common name for the malware.
• We believe a couple million machines are affected by this malware.
• We've heard from a number of you that you're thinking about the potential for an attacker to copy our notice and attempt to point users to a dangerous site instead. It's a good security practice to be cautious about the links you click, so the spirit of those comments is spot-on. We thought about this, too, which is why the notice appears only at the top of our search results page. Falsifying the message on this page would require prior compromise of that computer, so the notice is not a risk to additional users.
• In the meantime, we've been able to successfully warn hundreds of thousands of users that their computer is infected. These are people who otherwise may never have known.

 

Interesting Point of View: Twitter Spam and Motivation to Report it

Point of view from Marco Arment

I don’t know how Twitter handles spam internally. They’re probably devoting a lot of time to fighting it.

But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to observe so much repetition in the still-visible spam techniques and conclude that Twitter is being extremely conservative about deploying automated heuristics, relying heavily on the “Report Spam” feature instead.

Spam-fighting is always a tricky balance: if it’s too aggressive and automated, it’ll prevent some legitimate messages from reaching their recipients. But if it’s too conservative or manually triggered by user reports, a lot of spam will get through.

The operators of spammable services need to decide where their priorities are on that spectrum: severely annoy a small number of your users by not delivering some legitimate messages, or moderately annoy a large number of your users by showing them too much spam.

Twitter seems to have chosen the latter. At this point, given their resources, it’s almost certainly a philosophical choice — e.g. “every message must be delivered” — and not because of a lack of spam-fighting abilities.

There are three big problems with this approach:

• A lot of spam is shown to users before it’s cleared away by the few that report it (and whatever actions result from that). The spam succeeds. And if only, say, 1 in 100 people report spam that they’re shown, the spam is annoying quite a lot of users before anything is done about it.
• It appears to users that the service is taking a passive, almost neglectful approach to spam, which diminishes the motivation to use that “Report Spam” button. If the ratio of spam views to reports gets worse — say, if only 1 in 500 people report it — then spam starts to anger even more users before anything is done about it.
• Report-and-respond-later systems are far less effective when the barrier to posting new spam is extremely low. In Twitter’s case, who cares if they ban a spam account after it has spammed 500 users, if the spammer has hundreds or thousands of other accounts that it can keep creating at nearly zero cost?

Fundamentally, I believe Twitter’s priorities here are wrong. Twitter needs a far more aggressive, automated, proactive, heuristic-based anti-spam system. And if someone has trouble legitimately tweeting a link with no text to 100 people in a row who don’t follow them at precise 1-minute intervals, that’s just the price we’ll have to pay.

In the meantime, I’m never using the “Report Spam” feature again, because it just seems like I’m wasting my time.

via marco.org

I have to admit, I still report Twitter spam, but it does seem like it's increasing. Doesn't that happen with each Social Media platform we see? What do you think?

Infographic: Is Social Media A Viable Customer Service Channel? #custserv

You have a customer service issue. Should you go to the company website? Call their toll-free number (if they actually even have one)? Post a message on their Facebook page? All of the above? And on the flip side, if you're the company, how do you track and manage touch points with customers across an ever growing number of sources?

To find out, the folks over at ClickFox, a company specializing in customer experience analytics, conducted a survey to assess the potential cost savings from addressing customer service issues via social media, the impact of word of mouth influence in the social sphere, and the degree to which customers understand the tools currently available to them.

They found 40.2% of customers who weren't able to get their issues resolved in a timely manner via social media then resorted to calling the company's toll-free number. ClickFox estimates each phone call to customer service can cost companies $15 or more--avoidable costs that can directly impact a company's bottom line.

It will probably come as no surprise, but word of mouth was HUGE. 96.5% of customers indicated they were "somewhat influenced" to "very influenced" by other customers' comments about companies. That means only 3.5% responded that they were "not at all influenced" by customer comments. As the social commerce market continues to grow, the role of consumer reviews and comments will become an increasingly important factor when making buying decisions.

"Companies must figure out a way to incorporate social channels into a total customer service solution that they can manage throughout the complete lifecycle of the customer" says Amir Dekel, director of product marketing and communications at ClickFox. "They need to be able to capture what happens during every interaction--to create a link between an anonymous Twitter user and their CRM system" Dekel added.

Read more at fastcompany

via fastcompany.com

Science of Customer Service: Data Proves Faster Response Means Happier Customers #custserv

People are constantly chasing the question “how do I make my customers happy?”. There’s a lot of suggestions out there. We’ve covered many of them.

But what actually works?

We dug into tens of thousands of tickets in our UserVoice Helpdesk system and researched some of the actions that demonstrably made customers happier. Today we’re going to cover speed.

Fact #1: People like to hear from companies quickly

There’s nothing more frustrating than having an issue and waiting, waiting, waiting to hear from a company. And the numbers prove it: 25% of kudos were given to responses that came within 15 minutes!

Fact #2: People like to have their issues resolved quickly

In our research, we found that 46% percent of kudos were given after just one admin response. People also want their issues solved quickly, not over the course of many messages.

Fact #3: Quality is most important

Despite the numbers above, we still saw large numbers of kudos for issues answered more than two hours later and involving more than 5 messages. Why? Because people want the right answer, not just the quick answer.

So what are the action items for your organization? Work hard to increase your response time, but also focus on accurate solutions in your first message.

via blog.uservoice.com

Hat Tip to my buddy, Evan Hamilton of UserVoice for these quick tips!

How Millennials impact Boomer Spending: There Are Huge and Odd Impacts

We talk a lot about the impact of millennials living at home with their parents and what that means for the upcoming generation. Stats vary, but somewhere between one in 10 and three in 10 seems to be a good guess for how big of a population we're looking at, although we've seen stats of up to 85% of graduating college seniors planning to move back home.
Some of these so-called Boomerangs are saving money by not renting, but many more just don't have any money to save because the unemployment rates are so high for people in their 20s -- almost 15% for those aged 20-24.
But we don't talk a lot about what it does to the spending habits of their boomer parents. Turns out, in some cases there are huge and odd impacts.
The chart below illustrates some data from Experian about differences in boomer households where the kids have flown the nest and those where the birds have returned to roost.

The findings also showed that these boomers are also more likely to be still shopping for their kids. Retailers such as American Eagle Outfitters, Banana Republic and Express are still popular with boomers whose kids live at home, despite being more directly targeted to those kids themselves.

via adage.com

Maybe boomers are not doing the economy any good by housing their millennials