Today we’ll talk about email, since this is one of the main ways viruses gain access to your computer. Email is so popular and widespread, that hackers know an email-borne virus will spread widely very quickly.Sometimes the Subject Line will try to entice or trick you into opening the email. I have often mentioned email spoofing or phishing, where an email will be disguised to look like an important alert from a bank, ebay, PayPal, your broker, etc. Contributing to the problem is the fact that it is just too easy to forge emails, i.e. to put another return or “From” address on it, rather than your own real address that it was actually sent from.
Most people know by now never to open unexpected or unknown attachments, which promptly causes the virus to execute. Colorful HTML email is now widespread. At first, years ago, a virus could be embedded right in the email, so that just opening the email would cause the virus to execute. This problem was patched long ago by Microsoft. Regular readers of these Tips also know that you need to see the full filename with extension (suffix) such as .EXE or .DOC. Even so, there are some file extensions that will remain hidden.
Watch for these telltale signs of a fake (spoofed) email, or possibly a virus-carrying message: poor English with many errors, filler sentences that are meaningless, or a message from a large well-known company urging you to take a certain action. Most malware exploits weaknesses in Windows for which Microsoft issued patches months previously. If everybody updated their Windows operating system once a week, or even once a month, viruses and worms would be a far, far less danger to us all.
So take a minute right now to paste this sticky note on your computer: Thou shalt Update Windows Weekly!
Your Daily Computer Security Tip is provided by noted computer security consultant and author Syd Tash, at http://mypcsecuritysite.com You may include these Tips in your publications or websites, provided they remain unchanged and include this paragraph, with the author’s name and website. Please send a reprint here.
