Email Account Security

Over the past few years, there has been an alarming increase in the amount of hacking activity over the Internet. It is therefore essential that you pay particular attention to the security of your account information and bear in mind some of the methods that a hacker may gain access.

Passwords

Some people use easy to remember passwords such as qwerty, abc123 or password. There are published lists of easy-to-guess passwords which hackers will use before attempting to go through dictionary combinations. While we can protect accounts against a large number of failed attempts, we cannot protect your account if the password is easily guessable. Please use a mixture of upper and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols in all your passwords. Always use a unique password so that a hacker cannot find your password via a compromised system elsewhere. Make sure your password is unique. Quite a lot of accounts are hacked because the same password has been used elsewhere on a compromised system. To change your personal email account password with ourselves, please follow the instructions by clicking here.

Phishing

Over the past couple of years, there has been a large increase in the number of 'phishing' emails being sent by hackers in an attempt to gain access to usernames and passwords for email which they will then later use to send out spam. A typical email of this type may have a subject line such as 'Message From Administrator' or 'Authenticate Your Email' and will then go on to say that there is a block on your email account or that there has been an update which requires you to complete. There will be a link to a web page which will invite you to enter your email username and password. Under no circumstances should you do this!

If you see such an email, please delete it immediately. If you have entered your details using ANY 3rd party site or have any doubts regarding the security of your email account, please change your email account password/s immediately. This advice concerns ALL your email accounts and not only accounts with ourselves as these hackers are targeting everyone regardless of which provider they're using for email.

Please note that all official emails from Vision Internet Limited will be from an address ending with '@visn.co.uk' and under no circumstances should you enter any password used for our services on any site unless the address bar of your browser contains visn.co.uk/ and you see the padlock to show the page is secure.

Secure Data Communication

If you are using a network that may be less secure such as a public WiFi connection, please make sure that you always use a secure method of connecting to our mail server. If you're using webmail, make sure that you use HTTPS rather than HTTP in the address line and check that there is a padlock showing. Our servers will always re-direct you to the secure page but it's always worth checking. Equally, if you're using an email program such as Microsoft Outlook, please make sure that you enable an encrypted connection in your advanced settings and choose TLS.

Trojan Viruses

It is unfortunately impossible to filter out all viruses from your email, as new viruses are constantly being created. Some of these emails are designed to look like invoices and may contain a Microsoft Word document or Excel spreadsheet which, when opened, will try to download various Trojans and password stealers. The alleged senders (companies, names of employees etc) are innocent and have been picked at random from a long list in the hacker's possession. Therefore, you should not complain to the company whose addresses have been spoofed but simply delete the email. DO NOT open any attachment within an email unless you're expecting it. Please be aware that some viruses and Trojans cannot be detected by anti-virus software. It also doesn't matter whether you use a Mac or a PC as the hackers are not particular about the type of computer their target is using, so extra care is always advisable. It is also possible that simply viewing a web site that has been hacked can cause code to run on your computer without your knowledge. We recommend that you make sure that the software running on your computer is kept up to date as this should help to prevent that from happening.

If you believe that your computer may have been compromised, we recommend that you consult professional help and, using a different computer, change all your passwords immediately.