I’m sure we’re all used to receiving Phishing/malware emails, where some rotter sends you a mail that looks like it’s from your bank. They tell you something awful has happened and you need to reply to the email, sending them confirmation of your bank details.
Happily we’ve all become pretty smart at those these days.
Over the last few days I received two new types of trying-to-trick-you emails, so we thought we’d spread our knowledge to you.
The ‘Amazon order’
The first shouted “Your order has been paid! Tracking NR:15532-849” apparently from Amazon telling me “You have ordered Sony Bravia S7108.”
I’ll be frank and say that this one did get my attention. I wondered if someone had hijacked my Amazon account and ordered a massive TV on it.
There was a file called “AMAZON_LABEL_07_07-2010.zip” attached to it, so clearly the idea was to encourage me to click on it. Happily I resisted, as The Internet tells me it contains malware that would burrow itself into my machine and do all sorts of nasty things.
The ‘URGENT: Royal-Mail Missed Delivery Notice’
This mail of a few days ago ‘said’ it was from Royal Mail telling me that “We were unable to make a delivery today. Please view the attached invoice & tracking number where you can track the package online at the Royal Mail website.”
There was a file attached called Royal_Mail_Delivery_Notice_312317.pdf.
This too contained nastiness in the form of a virus.
What to do
When in doubt, copy some of the text from the email – like the subject – and put it into your favored search engine and see if other people have been hit by the same thing.
It’s more than likely that they have, as to work, these emails have to be blasted all over the planet.
Best thing to do is to mark it as spam in your email package (the more people that do this the better) or delete it. Clearly you shouldn’t click on the attached file.
Software protection
More obvious steps are making sure you have up to date anti-virus and anti-malware protection on your machine.
There’s loads of different software around. On our PCs we use a combination of Avast and Malwarebytes.
Anyone else got any other suggestions on techniques to avoid problems or software to use?
