So your email gets spammed. A lot. It happens to me on a daily basis, but that’s fine since they all go straight to my Blackberry. If you on the other hand, are opening such emails on your pc, then you have cause for concern. Almost everyone with a working computer and an Internet connection has some means of sending and receiving email. But then you get society’s pieces of trash who tend to use it for unintended purposes; sending viruses. We hate spam and for good reason, it plays a big part in the distribution of email viruses. Here's how to identify a computer virus in your email inbox.
1. Look closely at the subject lines. For those who don't know, a subject line is a summary of an email. If you happen to be getting subject lines such as: "Make.Money.Fast," most likely the email contains a virus.
2. Watch attached files. A red flag that often gets ignored. Most of the time a file that is a virus has an .exeor .vbs file extension. (A file extension is a type of file.) What most hackers would do is name a file followed by a file extension, followed by another file extension. (blank.jpg.vbs for example.) The first extension (.jpg) is just part of the name if followed by another (.vbs). Note: vbs is the extension for Visual Basic Script, the primary language of viruses as the worst ones were written in that code.
3. Read the message. Although it might be sent from someone you know, the message may leave you clueless about why it was sent. (For example, the "here you have" email virus simply says "This is The Document I told you about,you can find it Here," followed by the virus' download link. Upon reading, it will send itself to everyone in the Microsoft Office address book with the victim as the sender.) That is an obvious indication that the email contains a virus.
4. Know that email viruses may pretend to be sent from an existing company. It is important to read each email thoroughly; an email may seem to be sent from a legitimate company when it was really sent from a hacker. (This is called forging email.) A forged email may contain multiple spelling/punctuation errors, another indicator that the email contains a virus. Some of you may remember a few years back in South Africa we had an email for a bank but it was actually stealing sensitive information by luring customers in.
5. Do not follow links unless assured or necessary. This is another red flag that people simply ignore. Sometimes the virus is located on a website, rather than attached to an email. The hacker would require the victim to follow the link to a website in order for the virus to be downloaded. If not contacted/assured prior to receiving the email that the link is safe, do not follow it.
Just a few last tips:
- Never give out your email address to anyone you don't trust, this will reduce the risk of being sent infected mail (watch for those crappy “enter your email to receive your winning numbers or stuff like that). Note: UMZ does not fall in this category :-)
- If you are constantly receiving spam, you can either download an anti-spam program or (suggested) create a new email account, and ensure that your email address isn’t shared.
- Make sure you have good antivirus protection; so that in case you accidentally download a virus, it would automatically stop and delete it from your computer before it does its job. I recommend Avast since it’s the best free one right now. You can read my review of it here.
Remember as with any virus, human or PC, prevention is better than cure. Cheers, Sam
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