So. Yeah. Let’s make this brief, ok?
If you get an email, say with an attachment called invoice.doc, you will know if it’s from someone, or someplace, that you are familiar with.
Unless you’re exceptionally retarded.
A couple of quick points. Quotes are from the linked article.
“400 individuals at financial institutions, with the e-mail addressed specifically to that individual and purporting to be a complaint from the U.S. Department of Justice.”
And? If an email has an attachment that you didn’t request, at this point you should know it’s junk. Beyond that, the DOJ or BBB isn’t going to email you, douchebag, despite your inflated sense of self importance.
” The Trojan horse that gets installed on a computer allows an attacker to have remote access to the machine”
So what? This is what all of those back orifice trojans do, and they’ve been around a VERY long time. If a machine is behind a router, this is a much more difficult proposition. A firewall of any merit and the chances of a machine being controlled remotely are even lower. Assuming someone did make a trojan or virus capable of something similar to, say, Hamachi, it’s still an email from someone you don’t know with an attachment.
“The attack spoofing the Justice Department contained an executable program within a zipped file with the extension .scr, typically used by screen savers.”
Yes, the DOJ sent you a screen saver. Congratulations.
“Such attacks are both harder to detect than mass phishing attacks, and more likely to be acted on given the fact they are customized to their recipients, including things such as their name and official title.”
No, not my name and title!
“One of the big reasons behind the increase is the availability of toolkits that enable criminals to essentially have a template for the attacks, wherein they need to fill in only the targeted information.
“A year or two ago you would have to be fairly technically sophisticated in order to create these attacks,” Wood said.”
What? It’s an email attack, you retard. 10 years ago you’d need to be technically sophisticated to spam viruses to the 8 people online who received email.
“Wood added that the rise of social networks like Facebook and professional networks such as Plaxo and LinkedIn are making it easier for attackers to do their homework on potential victims.”
Homework on potential victims? That seals it, this guy doesn’t understand any damned thing. First, it’s all blah blah template blah automated, now you have a personal stalker. The truth is that anyplace your information is visible, it will be scraped by a spam-bot and your name will be added to the hellmass of the universe.
Here’s the real problem- reading comprehension. If you can read a book longer than 200 pages and write an insightful summary, you won’t be taken in by scam email. Unless you’re just hopelessly naive.
Bibles don’t count, by the way, because we all know you just skim over it, and no normal person is going to double check anything you say, because it’s an awful read.
Only once or twice have I had to actually look at an email closely to determine if it’s junk missed by my junk filter(s). Here’s a couple of simple practices for suspicious emails.
Does it have an attachment? Yeah? Screw it then, it’s gone. If it just seems too damned important to not open, forward it to your boss. He makes more than you, let him get a virus by being stupid.
Are there links in the email, to something that looks legitimate? You do realize that text can say anything, but take you somewhere else, right? In most email clients you can hover the cursor over the link text, and the actual target is shown below. Usually you’ll see things like paypal.skrewz.ch which isn’t, I assure you, a paypal associate.
Does the email ask you for personal information? Yeah? WHY WOULD YOU REPLY TO THIS?
Grow up people, the internet should be old hat by now. People like this Wood guy are paid to make you afraid, so you’ll buy more security bullcrap that you don’t really need.