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For Everyone! I open an email last night and got a bug downloaded to my computer. The email was titled Best Buy Cannot ship package without address correction? I've had several email like this but this last one has been the only one that have had problem with. So be Caution with opening emails unless you have ordered something from that store or not!
Comments
Be very careful. A lot of
Be very careful. A lot of those, now, have CryptoLocker in them. I won't detail what CryptoLocker is - you can find plenty of information out there - but the short is that it encrypts your documents - permanently. You then have to pay a ransom to get them back.
Quick ways to check to see if you have it.
open the registry (start, run/search, regedit), then browse to hkey_local_user\software. If you see a folder called 'CryptoLocker_anything', you're infected. (or were).
start, run, taskmgr. (task manager). Look in the process list for a four letter process that makes no sense and is constantly working. _kill it_. Also look for longer ones that have random letters, especially if they have z, x, or y in the middle of them.
BW
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Be careful out there
There are lost of bad emails floating around at the moment.
Remember even if you have ordered something from the store the Order Number in the message will be different from the one quoted in the message. It probably won't have the correct amount or customer number either. This should set the alarm bells ringing.
Never ever Open an attachment that comes with these emails.
If you are in doubt about the status of your order, simply log into the stoes website and check the order state online.
Lastly, most (approx 99%) of these emails will only work and mess up your system if you are running Windows (any variety/version). Windows Defender is not the best AV tool IMHO to detect these nasties. I'd also recomment switching to another browser if you are running IE (Internet Explorer, any version). A lot of these nasties really only work with IE. Other browsers such as Opera, Firefox are a little less prone to letting the bad guys through your defenses. If you do switch to say Firefox please consider installing two plugins, Adblock-Plus and NoScript. After some training they will also help you have a better experince online but don't forget to let all the sites/ADs referenced by BC work othewise Erin will get annoyed and we don't want that do we?
I gave up on Windows for personal use in 2008 and bought a Mac after getting fed up with speding hours a week managing the system (AV, Defrag, constant updates followed by a reboot, etc etc). I have to use Windows in my Day Job of writing software but it is with gritted teeth. IMHO, if Ford/GM started selling a car with as many problems as Windows has at release they'd soon be sued into oblivion. That shows how much esteem I give to Windows.
Other systems are not immune
Don't think that moving from windows to mac or linux will make these issues disappear. Right now most people develop nasties for windows because it's the biggest game in town, as other things become more popular the incentive to break those increases.
Having security software on your computer is always a good idea.
-
You can't choose your relatives but you can choose your family.
Agreed
especially if you are using Linux. Whilst this O/S is almost invisible on the desktop, there are billions of Mobile Phones out there running Android which itself is build on top of a Linux Kernel. The bad guy will attack everything they can profit from.
At least with Apple OSX and iOS use a very different architecture under the covers (at the moment)
MacOS is Unix
Actually, Apple OSX is based on a BSD Kernel, and a UNIX standard certified OS making it not THAT much different than Linux in terms of OS Mechanics.
The Mac OS Kernel is at the core more secure at current, but I know some old school BSD hackers that say if you dig deep enough, it can be exploited JUST as much as windows.
-Piper
Yup. The difference is that
Yup. The difference is that most of the "viruses" that can hit any of the UNIX variants (Linux distributions, Mac OS'es after 9, BSD, etc) are limited. They can only target certain sections of the permissions structures.
I just dealt with a hack attempt on a server - someone guessed the email password of a user, and tried to send out 36,000+ spams. That only had permissions/structures of the postfix user. Another not too long ago was a hack through a php script - it only had permissions of the web server, so it couldn't affect their documents or read anything else.
Now, using that as an example, a user could still lose all of _their_ files to something like CryptoLocker - it's just that you could use another user account to log in and remove the thing. In windows, it runs as all users, mostly.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
But had you ordered anything?
I got an email purporting to be from Walmart about "my shipment" -- obviously a phishing scam,
since (1) I hadn't ordered anything from them, (2) the address and link went to somewhere other
than Walmart, (3) it just was. It was stupid.
Clicking on a link "just to see" isn't a good idea.
Received the Same One Just a While Ago
It went to the spam folder. I would never order anything from Wal-Mart.
Portia