Important Techie Reminders

This is some wise advice from a friend of ours who deals with this stuff every day.

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With the 2008 coming to a end and the new year upon us, some might think
that cyber attacks where a thing of the past... which I wish was true
but is not..

I would like to point out a couple of "tech tips" concerning cyber
attacks which are on the raise.

At work I'm seeing more spam/junk email, viruses and other cyber attacks
than in previous years. (one of my geek things I have to do is review
daily reports so that is how I keep in touch with the cyber attack
levels) Just within the past 2 months, I have seen more viruses infect
computers at the bank then I have in 8 years combined.....

The following tech tips are good reminders for your home computer use.

...Tech tips....

..Email..

- Watch out for emails that come from 'me' aka 'you', this is
called a 'spoofed' email, where the sender of the email uses 'your'
email address

- Be careful of opening emails from unknown senders

- Sell gimmicks

- Strange email attachments, especially emails that have an
attachment that requires you to type in a so called 'secret' password to
open it

- Email forwards, when you see a email that has a 'fw' in the
prefix of a subject means that it is a forward, however if you see
multiple 'fw' it could be a spam or a junk mailing

..Internet..

- Pop ups... be very very careful about pop ups, if you just click
once an infected pop up could infect your computer with 'malware'

- Downloads... remember that downloading anything from the
internet should be a work related function and from a legit website

- Strange website names... take notice of the website address and
watch out for .edu,.org and third world nations, ending websites. (i.e.
.en, .fr, .uz, .pl)

- Personal info, you should never give your personal information
out over the internet unless you trust that website. I would never do it
unless that webpage had a SSL security certificate which would show up
as a 'key lock' in the bottom right of the internet browser

- watch out for websites that auto redirect you to a different
website

- if it is too good to be true on the a website, then it is a
gimmick, don't believe everything that you read online

- malware and adaware are hot buttons in the internet security.
These are normally transmitted by a pop up or a fake web site that
requires you to click on it.

A local bank internet banking website was hacked last month and had amalware root trojan virus that was being hosted on their website.. I say this only as a reminder that it is huge thing going on right now and it is important to be mindful of what/how you do online.

Another real life geek story, is just the increased amount of spam/junkemail, the bank that I work at gets about 11,000 incoming emails a day and of that only about 1,200 of it is good email.. of course these levels of spam are in a corporate environment but the amount of this being pushed/sent over the internet is on the raise.

_________

I can tell you the amount of spam to our website has skyrocketed. I delete hundreds of spam comments each day.

I just thought all of you should be reminded of these things, just like I do. Also, go over these things with your children, often!