Computer Virus - More than you thought !

Just seen this on a BBC page , quite a mind boggling amount !
On malicious emails , I used to receive one about every two months . Now I must get 3 or 4 a week . These normally are requests to confirm my password or my bank account will be locked , or usually badly written requests to liberate locked away accounts in Nigeria or Syria . I refused over $3,000,000 last week !

 

I love it when they misspell things and expect you to take it seriously

 

I delete any emails asking for money, including my credit card companies, places I have accounts with, my energy suppliers, council tax, water supply company, TV Licensing, etc. You can't trust anybody.

 

Yep. It's why I've always said thereshould be some sort of mandatory test that people have to pass before being allowed to connect any device to any public network.

Lots of people think they'll never get hacked or anything. Lots of people think viruses and such are at worst an inconvenience. Both wrong.

You should never, ever respond in any way to junk email. The instant you do, a web server updates a database to indicate that your email address belongs to someone that responds, and your email address suddenly becomes of value to other spammers and scammers, who all share email lists on the black market.

As for viruses, only the primitive once still come as email attachments on junk mail. Antivirus software nowadays usually catches them, and even on unprotected machines, the email is often intercepted at the mail server. The more successful attacks use 'social engineering ', tricking the end user into doing something, either giving away sensitive information, or downloading something malicious. Some do a two stage attack where the first stage messes with system configuration, such that as soon as you start your web browser it secretly goes to a malicious site, downloads the 'payload ' then diverts to your intended site so you don't know it's happened. Antivirus often catches the second stage but not the first, so a hijacked machine just keeps getting infected again and again.

But what do viruses do? Well some do the usual schoolboy tedium, locking files and such. But, and this is why I think there should be a mandatory test, some give no indication that your machine is infected, other than random unexplained performance loss. Such happens when your machine has been hijacked and is now part of a 'bot net', under remote control of a hacker, attacking some other system. A common type of attack is the distributed denial of service DDOS attack. This is where often thousands of inadequately protected machines belonging to very ordinary people are programmed to repeatedly bombard the target server, crippling it under the sheer volume of requests.

 

My father in law got a call from 'Microsoft' yesterday about this, luckily Mrs Scrungee's picked up the phone as my FiL wanted to talk to them about it (despite having an iPad).

 

And Mrs Scrungee set up email/Outlook rules where she last worked to delete any emails sent by her managers (which would also delete follow up emails chasing a response).

She sent this time saving suggestion to 'IT Tips' in her employer's staff magazine, but for some obscure reason they failed to see the obvious benefits of her advice.