And now the cyber Coronavirus
If you thought that Coronavirus was a medical issue, you would of course be right. But cyber criminals are working out ways to provide you with another unwelcome virus. one that will take over your computer.
These have already started appearing and play to the scaremongering around Coronavirus.
Virus scams usually involve phishing – where the scammers try to con you into giving you passwords and personal data. You receive an email that looks as if it comes from your bank, but it doesn’t! Then it asks you to do things no reputable bank would ever ask. No not that – just handing over passwords and personal data!
The Coronavirus scams we have seen to date are similar – but different. They come in the form of an email from the World Health Organisation, the NHS or similar authoritative body. Except of course they don’t they merely look like it.
This time they do not ask for your personal details. The email will say something along the lines of – your software is out of date, or you need marcos to enable this email.
You will be thinking “I need to read this it is important.” So your mindset is more pre determined to do what it take to open the email. the scammers will thoughtfully provide a tick box that says “enable macros” or “open in new version of Windows” or some such thing.
As soon as you press the button you’ll activate a virus that will start to infect your computer and relay data (personal data and passwords etc) back to the scammers. Security firm Norton are giving out advice which is worth repeating:
Be on the lookout for phishing emails, which may appear to come from a trusted source. Remember, you can look at the sender’s details – specifically the part of the email address after the ‘@’ symbol – in the ‘From’ line to see if it looks legitimate.
Finally, to protect your devices against malware like the types that can come from a phishing attack, ensure that Norton (or similar anti virus software) protection is installed on all your devices.
If you are looking for information on the coronavirus, visit known reputable websites like the World Health Organisation
Good advice, Andrew. we have Bullguard across all our computers and it has deleted more that one email recently as it has detected phishing software in it. Anti viral programs are worth their weight in gold.