A recent article of mine has proven very popular. It discussed the recent epidemic of "rogue" antivirus and anti-spyware programs that is plaguing the Internet these days -- such as Virus Response Lab 2009, Antivirus XP, and -- literally -- hundreds of others.
These programs are really the tools used by cyber-criminals to infect your machine with malware... not clean it up, as you're led to believe. (The article link [above] has a video demonstrating a rogue program.) As a bonus, you're asked to provide your credit card number to buy the "full" (or, "Pro") version.
What do you think criminals do with those cc#'s????
Regular readers are aware that I frequently post 'alerts' to the latest scams arriving via e-mail. Spam.
Here the latest, a classic phish:
from: AccountRobot_donotreply@e-gold.com
Subject: Notification of e-gold account update
What I'd like you to notice is the red circle next to the hyperlink .
That is the WOT (Web Of Trust) toolbar's (automatically integrated into my Gmail, because I'm viewing it in a browser) website rating.
I'm no rocket scientist.. but I am pretty sure red means "bad".. and/or, "stop".
This website rating -- with its easy to understand color code -- tool can really save you a lot of pain and loss from phishing and poisoned websites; because the criminals are going to tremendous efforts to make their scams look legit.
There are many anti-phishing tools and plug-ins and filters to choose from (some are built into your browser, if you enable them) but if you want a quick, clean, easy to understand warning tool-- give the WOT toolbar a try.Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved.
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