Return to the Index of Articles

Website Navigation:

Homepage

Look both ways before you cross the street. Don’t talk to strangers. Sound familiar? We preach safety procedures to our children everyday. Now we need to preach safety procedures to ourselves. Think before you click. Think before you click. Basic safety. Don’t open the door to your personal information unless you want the person, company or website to have your information. Not that we deliberately leave doors open for fraudsters and cybercriminals so they can take what they want. The deception can be so, so tempting or threatening.

Trends and technology change but basic safety procedures, including internet safety preventative procedures, remain the same. Over the last few years, trends began with cybercriminals (including identity thieves, spammers and infector distributors) depending on the recipient to open an email attachment. Then, they made it easy for us to become victims by simply viewing an email that apparently had no message in the text area but could install a malicious program that could steal personal and logon information, track online activities or even render your computer useless. Then phishing scams became popular (and still are). Phishing scams ask the victim to willingly supply their personal information based on half-truths and deceptive content in emails and websites. They even found ways to infect reputable websites so online customer personal information would be sent to their databases. Now it seems the trend has completed a circle and the cybercriminals, even with more sophisticated and deceptive ways to steal personal information, seem to be back to luring internet users to open email attachments that can contain a tracking program, a worm, a destructive virus, a keystroke logger or any other kind of infector.

The FBI made public in their report that the profits from cybercrime have surpassed the profits from drug trafficking. Cybercriminals have organized and combined talents. Typically, the “higher-ups” in the organization are the control center of the organization. They supervise activities as a president or CEO of a company would. The middle managers distribute, through bought spammer’s lists, the infectors bought from the virus authors. They typically supervise the compilation of the information gathered from unsuspecting victim’s computers and make this information available at websites where information resellers negotiate about quality and price which generates substantial profits. Middle managers also oversee the quality of the botnets so when they decide to generate a distributed denial of service attack to a particular server at a particular time, they are ready.

Don't open any email attachments, even from someone you know and trust, without first running the attachment file through your anti-virus and anti-spyware software. Don’t click on links in an email. You don’t have a way of knowing for sure if the link will direct you to a legitimate webpage, a webpage that automatically installs an infector in your computer, or a webpage that appears to be legitimate but isn’t and wants you to surrender your personal information. Install the latest security updates for your computer’s operating system and all installed programs on a regular basis. Don’t leave your computer physically connected to the internet when you aren’t using it. And, remember the basics of personal safety and crime prevention. Then apply those procedures to the internet.

Return to the Index of Articles