In the old days, getting infected was a war of young kids trying to undermine Microsoft. Today it is a matter of stealing credit card or other private information or even taking control of your computer to turn it into a SPAM machine, generating fake emails while you are trying to surf the Internet. In addition to falling for the email trick, there are also other ways to download these bad files, including warnings while using Internet Explorer.
The biggest question is – How can these virus and Trojan writers be stopped? The complication is that many of these groups live outside of the US, many are specifically from Russia. This means they cannot be subject to the Rule of Law within America.
Social Engineering is used to put fear into people and to convince them to update their computer, their personal information or to download special scanning software. Recently they arrive as emails in marked as Delta Airlines ticket problems, UPS package tracking issues, and today, a critical update for Microsoft Outlook.
According to a recent article, there is a security alert from the Trend Micro security center, the Outlook Critical Update will entice the end users to click on the link, allow a download to happen, and then install a user name and password catcher to send to a server, to steal your information and your bank account. This particular variant, once installed, will “contain a list of targeted banking institutions, social networks and other sites for the Trojan to monitor, including Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Bank of America and Wachovia, Macalintal’ Once it has these user names and passwords, it is thought to save them and attempt to use them on accounts to steal as much private information as possible.
So if you have avoided downloading or using or Opera, please consider clicking on those names and downloading them, and installing the latest flash player to make these alternative browsers function properly with most web sites. Also, avoid ANY unusual warning email or critical update notice.
SPAM – How to stop SPAM from your own company
June 13, 2009
Most corporate networks have a larger budget for IT and can afford complex anti-SPAM devices. Over the past five years, those devices have been developed for the small business market, with more economical prices, yet they are still esoteric and not easy to get up and running.
A new SPAM tactic exists wherein the company or business that has its own email domain, receives strange emails from themselves. For instance – the email will be delivered from themselves, with a subject that is completely unfamiliar.
This has grown into a problem because there is an Internet email technology that moves mail and therefore SPAM, that was not well structured. It assumes that all email is real and good. This has been gowing stale over the past year… A long time since the invention of email. A new initiative has been put together to fix this problem. It is called OpenSPF, and after reading through their approach and solution, it seems the majority of the SPAM that arrives to you email address, with your own email address in the From field, can now be stopped. More on this we time goes on, but some companies actually adopted this to improve the quality of their email delivery – to reduce SPAM significantly.
For a list of domain name sellers and ISP’s who are supporting this, please click on this link.
