Nov
Business Advice, Luton
Watch Out - The Spammers Are Getting More Devious Than Ever
There has been a new wave of spam emails we want to make you aware of. They come with an attached ‘zipped’ file (i.e. ending in .zip) and claim to be contacting you with regard to your account. Some are more sophisticated than others and can be very effective at fooling you into thinking you are looking at a genuine email.
The more obvious ones appear to be contacting you as a customer. They are informing you that they have sent you the information you will need to ‘recover your account’. You may receive emails supposedly from your credit card companies, informing you that there has been some suspicious activity in your account and asking you to check the purchases on the statement attached. Others are from bogus customers claiming to have made some amendments to the contract attached and asking you to review it.
The most deceptive of these claim to be from a courier service regarding a parcel delivery. They say that they are from ‘United Parcel Services’ and have a ‘UPS Tracking Number’ in the subject, very neatly tricking you into thinking at first glance that they have come from a legitimate company.
Some example text in the body of the email is:
‘Unfortunately we were not able to deliver postal package you sent on Oct the 28 in time because the recipient’s address is not correct. Please print out the invoice copy attached and collect the package at our office’
With Christmas around the corner, your staff are likely to be caught more off guard than usual and some of these messages even go as far as to notify you that you have 10 days in which to collect your parcel or you will be charged by the day thereafter.
Here are our top tips on how to deal with potential spam:
1. Be vigilant. Always check that you trust the sender of the emails you are opening. Even if you don’t know them personally, you are likely to know of them.
2. Treat all emails which you are unsure of as spam. If the mail is genuine, the person trying to contact you will try again and it’s easier to cope with a slight delay than the potential after effects of a virus, spyware, etc.
3. Don’t use unsubscribe. Never click on the ‘unsubscribe’ link of an email you are unsure of as that is another way of opening the flood gates, as it notifies them that someone is at that address and susceptible to spam.
4. Never open an attached file if you don’t know the sender. Even if the file is zipped and it appears that the sender has been security conscious - this is potentially a ruse.
There are things you can do to protect yourself, minimise the potential impact that this kind of spam can have on your business, and even stop the majority of these emails getting through to you. It is very important to have good, strong anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-spam protection in place.
For further information, please see the following link to our managed security service page:
http://www.eximium.net/managed_security_services.asp
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Articles, Business Advice, Data Security, Hints and Tips, IT Advice, Managed Services . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
