Sounds like a weird advice, don’t you think?
Well, last July 4, 2007 I received an email from my best friend in Boston and the email said I had an Independence Day greeting from America. When I opened the email, it said that I need to click the link and be taken to another website where I could view the greeting card. I could have been the biggest dork on earth had I clicked the linked: a combination of four set of numbers better known as IP address! Who are they fooling? – me the IT professional? An elementary student could immediately recognize the link to be an IP address, which was a very glaring indication that there was something fishy going on
The emails contain the following subjects and people should delete them immediately:
Happy Fourth of July
Independence Day Celebration
July 4th Fireworks Show
America the Beautiful
God Bless America
Your Nations Birthday
I tried looking for information about the Trojan on Google and learned that when one clicks on the link which, as I said, comes in the IP address format, one is taken to a zombie computer that hosts the JSecard-A Trojan downloader. A code which is called Mal/Dorf-C is then immediately downloaded and installed into to the victim's computer.
These shameless, malicious spammers, who I think are not even technology savvy and are just mediocre marketing people trying to take advantage of vulnerable people, have no qualms at all at tricking people by using important events up to international stature!
For those who may not be aware, Trojans are malicious codes that install somewhere in the back of the computer without the owner's knowledge. It is actually taken from the Greek Trojan Horse which was used by soldiers to win the battle in the guise of a giant wooden horse gift but actually contained soldiers.
A perfect example of how a Trojan works is the program called "waterfalls.scr". This program deceives people by making it appear as a beautiful waterfalls screensaver, which it actually does, but in the back, the program would open some computer ports so that hackers and other evil computer people can have access to the computer's resources. This would also open to cyber thieves the private information, including credit card numbers and even passwords, of the unsuspecting computer user.
As a safeguard, we should always use the latest anti virus and other protection software and regularly get updates. A firewall is also a very important tool for one who is on the internet. My firewall always prompts me for permission for any incoming or outgoing access to the internet so I know everything that passes through my computer.
The internet is a jungle of different kinds of beast. Millions have been lost to online thief. If one is not careful, he may lose not just computer hardware by being physically damaged by malicious codes but his bank savings as well. Worse, one may be penniless on his birthday!
Showing posts with label spams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spams. Show all posts
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Spammers getting passed through encrypted email attachments
Who doesn’t hate spams? The answer is a resounding "Nobody!" These spasms invade our internet world like bacteria and viruses and no matter how much we try to disinfect or protect ourselves, the still get through.
Many email service providers have had effective solutions to blocking these spasms. One of the most effective and commonly used ways is to filter all income and outgoing emails. Email servers try to read the contents of all emails and they have their own algorithm to detect spasm. These machines can even know the attachments whether or not they contains spasms and other malicious codes like virus and Trojans. Once these emails are identified as spasm of malicious, the IP address of the sender is then blocked. But these can be easy to overcome because there are ways to changed IP addresses.
Now, filtering has been very effective. But the thing now though is that spammers use encrypted email attachments to encode their bad plans exploiting the fact that many spam systems cannot scan inside emails that are encrypted or password protected.
Email Systems, a filtering service provider, disclosed that in the past few weeks they have detected that a steady stream of spasms had been coming out from hosts which were compromised by bots. These spasms contained the compressed version of the Storm Trojan which had victimized many people in January when they inadvertently opened the password protected attachment.
The easiest to determine whether there are spasms and malicious codes in an attachment is to look at the file size and if is 77 kb, then there is a high chance of attack.
To be guarded against email spasms and other attack these days is simply not to open suspicious emails and delete them immediately, most especially if these emails come from strangers.
Also, be very careful with giving away your email address when signing up in some unreliable websites online. These could be website who will give away your email address and other information to spammers.
And this one: as much as possible, do not forward any chain emails. Many of these chain emails may sound to have good intentions like helping a sick girl or praying for world peace. But this is another strategy of spammers to gather as much email addresses as they can. Take note that many chain emails tell you to forward the email to all your friends and each of your friends will forward the email to each of their friends. That translates to exponential growth of email address the spammers can collect!
If there are any threatening of harassing email messages coming into your mailbox, report this immediately to your internet service provider. And for phishing, those emails trying to misrepresent a reputable company to draw money from people, immediately report any incident to the company being mispresented.
If all else come to worse, you can always file a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission. Dealing with spammers is always a cat-and-mouse game. But in the end, the cat usually gets the mouse.
Many email service providers have had effective solutions to blocking these spasms. One of the most effective and commonly used ways is to filter all income and outgoing emails. Email servers try to read the contents of all emails and they have their own algorithm to detect spasm. These machines can even know the attachments whether or not they contains spasms and other malicious codes like virus and Trojans. Once these emails are identified as spasm of malicious, the IP address of the sender is then blocked. But these can be easy to overcome because there are ways to changed IP addresses.
Now, filtering has been very effective. But the thing now though is that spammers use encrypted email attachments to encode their bad plans exploiting the fact that many spam systems cannot scan inside emails that are encrypted or password protected.
Email Systems, a filtering service provider, disclosed that in the past few weeks they have detected that a steady stream of spasms had been coming out from hosts which were compromised by bots. These spasms contained the compressed version of the Storm Trojan which had victimized many people in January when they inadvertently opened the password protected attachment.
The easiest to determine whether there are spasms and malicious codes in an attachment is to look at the file size and if is 77 kb, then there is a high chance of attack.
To be guarded against email spasms and other attack these days is simply not to open suspicious emails and delete them immediately, most especially if these emails come from strangers.
Also, be very careful with giving away your email address when signing up in some unreliable websites online. These could be website who will give away your email address and other information to spammers.
And this one: as much as possible, do not forward any chain emails. Many of these chain emails may sound to have good intentions like helping a sick girl or praying for world peace. But this is another strategy of spammers to gather as much email addresses as they can. Take note that many chain emails tell you to forward the email to all your friends and each of your friends will forward the email to each of their friends. That translates to exponential growth of email address the spammers can collect!
If there are any threatening of harassing email messages coming into your mailbox, report this immediately to your internet service provider. And for phishing, those emails trying to misrepresent a reputable company to draw money from people, immediately report any incident to the company being mispresented.
If all else come to worse, you can always file a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission. Dealing with spammers is always a cat-and-mouse game. But in the end, the cat usually gets the mouse.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
