Phishing scams and attacks long been a popular way for crooks and hackers to steal your personal information, then your money. Any request for your data, whether online or offline, the alarm bells should ring in the head set: identity theft alert!
Most people have now heard of phishing, and are reasonably on guard against them. But the criminals are very inventive and resourceful and constantly invent new ways to deceive us, and con us out of our hard earned cash.
Such a method, which is been around for a while, known as scareware. It works as follows. You suddenly get a pop up on the screen that warns you that your computer infected with a virus supposedly was. The box looks the same as the usual dialog box are used to from the Windows, so that you do not suspect.
you see a link to a website where you can buy a program to remove the malware. However, if you buy and run the software, it will do the opposite. It provide real viruses and spyware on your computer. This malware can scan your computer for credit card numbers, passwords and banking credentials. Even worse, the hacker has now actually your credit card number.
As the popup scored primarily on your computer? You may like a phishing scam accidentally. Or you can have the victim of a drive-by download. She visited a well-known and respected website, which had been attacked and compromised. The simple act of visiting the site causes a malicious program to be downloaded and installed on your computer without any other measures of you.
Here are two other common attack vectors. You clicked on an ad on Google or other news site. The ad was in fact placed by a hacker. This leads you to a malicious website that infected your PC. Or determine the crooks, what is these days very popular and in the news. They then create websites with these topics deal.
By optimization techniques, they get their pages appear in the top 10 of Google's search results. This is known as poisons the results. Clicking on one of these "wrong" results, you will receive a scareware pop-up or other malware.
Twitter and some social networking sites have been attacked repeatedly, different combinations and variations of the above method. No one is quite sure on the World Wide Web. A recent survey found that nearly half of web surfers were confident that their security programs that protected them. But in fact, the programs have not been updated, and so protection were hardly ever provides. Identity Theft Alert
your antivirus software should be updated once a day two or. Anti-spyware programs should be updated once a week. A few times a month to see if there are any windows updates for you.
Before we get to some other helpful tips, you should be careful, as you know that the pop-up window to close the screen. If the pop-up click itself or the little red X in the upper right, instead, the dialog box to close, can initiate actually the malware download! To do this:
right click on the pop-up tab in the taskbar at the bottom of the screen, and click Close. If this does not work, press Ctrl + Alt + Del. Find your browser in the list of running programs, and then click End Task. Then turn off along your popups in your browser.
So what should you do if you unfortunately fell for the scam and bought the software? Update Windows and your anti-virus, anti-spyware and other cleaner programs. Drag from the Internet. Start and run your security programs, until they come clean one by one. Look at your credit card statements closely in the coming months. Report any unauthorized charges at once.
Get only all your software from reputable sources. Never buy something in response to a popup or spam. Keep all your programs and applications up to date, not just your security software. The hackers love Adobe Reader or to use Flash or media players that are attacking you. I know can keep everything up to date, a time consuming and tedious chore.
A relatively painless, but the way to do it, the Secunia Software Inspector to use . Online It will scan your computer for the most popular software. If it finds a bit dated, it will warn you and help you patch the recalcitrant programs. Currently Secunia reports that 26% of all programs it scans are uncertain. Well, that's definitely a scary thought! Run the inspector once a month or so.
Identity theft is a messy, costly affair. It may take a year of frustration and bring teeth grinding your life back on track. The good news is, apply these policies and a little common sense, you should keep safe. Happy (and safe!) Surf.
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