These people need to get a life…

Posted by RRR on Apr 14, 2010 at 3:51pm | Page Views: 3,054

Yup, there are all kinds of predators using the Internet. And although this statement brings to mind a variety of seamy references, in this case, I’m talking about those hackers trying to infect or otherwise commandeer your computer. They’re pimply-faced guys sitting behind six monitors at once in dark rooms located in countries like Taiwan, Denmark, Malaysia, Russia and Turkey, sending out millions of emails each day from a network of  computers they’ve already infected all around the globe. They have nothing better to do than to wreak havoc on our computing lives and they are the reason we need to shell out big dollars each year for anti-virus software.

Stupid hackers. They really do need to find something better to do.

Just so you know, we will never send you an email like this one I received today, even if it looks like we are legitimately the senders of the email:

Dear Customer,

This e-mail was send by roundballreview.com to notify you that we have temporanly prevented access to your account. We have reasons to beleive that your account may have been accessed by someone else. Please run attached file and Follow instructions

(C) roundballreview.com

How can you tell this is a malicious email?

Clue No. 1. The grammar and spelling errors. Seriously. Hackers are notoriously bad spellers.

Clue No. 2. The context of the greeting is all wrong. “Dear Customer” certainly wouldn’t apply in any email we might send to you. If we send something, it would have a greeting like “Dear RRR Fan” or “Hey, Basketball Junkie!”

Clue No. 3. The file that was attached to this email  I received was a compressed (zip) file. Under no circumstances should you open a compressed file attached to an email — or an execute (.exe) file for that matter — unless you are expecting someone you know to send it to you. These files could take  you right to the blue screen of death (right). If you’ve never experienced a blue screen, consider yourself very fortunate.

And this ends our Internet safety lesson for the day. :-)

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