Electronic holiday cards are a great way for high-tech fraudsters to spread viruses, Trojans, and other malware and the holiday season is the perfect time to receive them. Keep on your toes regardless of the sentiments. A safe practice when getting an eCard from a family member or friend is to call or email them to verify whether they sent you the eCard. A safer practice is to let friends know that you don’t accept eCards and that a simple email will suffice.
Twitter is a great networking tool, but … things to be aware of the URL (web address) shortening programs such as http://tinyurl.com/ among others. Some tweeters may find sweet deals online and tweet that there is, for example, an amazing product at Amazon for 60 percent off but to click a shortened URL that may redirect one to a user name and password harvesting site. After entering credentials the Web site stores the information in its database and then forwards the victim to the real site’s bad password page. Figuring a typo, the victim actually authenticates none-the-wiser.
Web applications designed to get money from you are out there as well. Social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook among many others, are a great way to stay in contact with family and friends and how better to interact with each other than to play games or answer quizzes to see who is smarter, better looking, or which zodiac signs are compatible. The quizzes are normally very easy, but when it comes time for the results, the application will ask for a cell phone number to text the answer to. This also puts the victim into a one-year contract for a notification service, billable at $9.99 a month.
Rogue security software is advertised on many Internet sites, claiming that a person may have a virus and to install their product to keep their computers safe. Truthfully, they do scan and remove one virus (whether the computer has the one virus or not), but they inject many others and open a backdoor. Purchase only reputable antivirus products. Most new computers come with a trial version that can be upgraded.
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