No doubt you’ve heard of this type of computer scam, but what is phishing?\u00a0 In the computer world, phishing is email sent to you by criminals, which appear legitimate in a vague sort of way, but with very specific consequences to you if you are duped by them.<\/p>\n
An email lands in your inbox, and at first glance it appears to be legitimate.\u00a0 Supposedly from FedEx, it says that your ebay.com purchase is being held at customs, please click here for details.\u00a0 Or an email from XYZ Furniture, stating that your payment of $4096.69 has been processed successfully, thank you for your business.\u00a0 Please click below to confirm your shipping details.\u00a0 These emails are cunningly designed to illicit a quick reaction from you and almost without thinking, you click on the link. \u00a0 At this point you are Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole.<\/p>\n
If you are lucky, your security software will recognize the link and block you from connecting, but the sad truth is that the Phishermen change their emails many times a day and security companies often can not keep up with the changes.\u00a0 What about your firewall, can’t that keep them out?\u00a0 Well, if they were trying to connect to you, it probably would.\u00a0 But, now that they are inside your computer, they get your computer to contact them.\u00a0 Many consumer firewalls do not watch the outgoing traffic from your computer very closely.<\/p>\n
So, what if my computer is now compromised?\u00a0 The bad guys will have complete access to your computer in short order, and you won’t have seen anything untoward on your screen to alert you.\u00a0 What do they want with you?\u00a0 You are a very valuable commodity on the black market, or at least your identity and financial information is.\u00a0 Also, having control of your computer lets the bad guys use it for other nefarious purposes.<\/p>\n
The best way to avoid this fate is to be patient while you read your email.\u00a0 At first glance these messages look legitimate, and, as you start to stress about the contents of the message, you look around desperately for a way out of this mess, and there it is, a link to all the answers,\u00a0 if you just \u201cclick here\u201d.<\/p>\n
If, instead, you take a breath and look closely, you will begin to notice clues that there may be something phishy going on here.\u00a0 The FedEx email has capthighliner@phishermanscove.com<\/span>\u00a0 as an email address, strangely not from someone at FedEx.com.\u00a0 And the XYZ Furniture company?\u00a0 Well, you’re pretty sure you didn’t order any new corinthian leather deck chairs, aren’t you?\u00a0 If you are still concerned, don’t click their link, instead phone your credit card company and explain your concern, or your financial institution, they will be happy to look into your account for you.\u00a0 Google up current phishing scams, chances are the ones you received will be listed there, and others you haven’t seen yet.\u00a0 For-warned is for-armed, as they say.<\/p>\n And as always, scan your computer at least once a week with your two<\/i> favourite security programs.\u00a0 This will keep your Windows computer as clean as possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" No doubt you’ve heard of this type of computer scam, but what is phishing?\u00a0 In the computer world, phishing is email sent to you by criminals, which appear legitimate in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5,7,4,6],"class_list":["post-20","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-online-with-the-techie-guy","tag-email","tag-goldtek","tag-phishing","tag-scam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/goldtek.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/goldtek.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/goldtek.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldtek.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldtek.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/goldtek.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29,"href":"https:\/\/goldtek.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions\/29"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/goldtek.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldtek.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldtek.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}