As you are likely well aware, hackers are constantly changing their tactics to increase their chances of infecting you with malicious code or stealing your personal information. The purpose of this post is to let you know some of the most common tactics currently being employed and how you can protect yourself.
The most common one is compromising legitimate sites. This is when hackers add malicious code to legitimate websites. This takes advantage of the fact that people believe if they know a website then it must be safe, right? Wrong. But I have posted a link below to a free tool from McAfee called Site Advisor. While this (and no) tool will be a silver bullet of protection it help you surf more confidently.
http://www.siteadvisor.com/download/windows.html
Another common tactic is sending emails claiming to be updates from Microsoft, Adobe, Office, etc. Always remember that no legitimate companies should send you unsolicited emails with updates for their software. If you receive an email like that, delete it! If you believe an update is needed simply go to their site and update your software from their website.
Similar to the paragraph above remember that your bank, EBay, PayPal, Amazon, etc. will not send you an unsolicited email requesting information like your user name, password, credit card info or any personal info like you SS number. They should already have this information. If you believe the request is legitimate, call the company or go to their website on your own. Do not click on a link within an email. It is trivially easy to make a link seem like it's going one place when it's actually going somewhere else.
Stolen user names and passwords for online banking have become a huge money maker for criminals. So big in fact that some of the software designed to steal your information can actually do it while you are logged into your online banking. This is accomplished by silently hijacking your session and changing the information real-time. So essentially, when you log in and say pay a bill, you say you want to pay $50 to someone. That information is intercepted changed to $500 and paid to a criminal instead of your intended payee. Yet, because the transaction is hijacked the information sent back to you indicates that you paid the $50 and everything seems fine. Scary, I know. But, don't fret there is software out there that will protect you from this as well as many other Internet threats. I have a link to the software below. It's called Rapport and it's free to customers of certain banks. Central Bank in Lexington is offering it free to customers and non-customers. Non-customers need to manually protect their bank's website but CB customers are protected automatically.
This software protects against a myriad of threats and assumes your PC is infected with spyware even if it is not.
https://www.centralbank.com/news/rapportsoftwareprotectsyoufromonlinethreats
Since this is my first post, I will stop here but I will post helpful information from time to time to help you better protect yourself online.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment