Hello this is your friendly neighborhood IT guy Arthur again for the monthly newsletter. As many of you may know I was down for quite a few weeks with infectious Mono. I blame my girlfriend, she had Mono several years ago and probably gave it to me but in reality I could have gotten it anywhere. She doesn’t like it when I tell people I could have gotten it “anywhere” after all Mono is the kissing disease . Since it seems that everyone around me has been sick recently I thought I would talk a little bit about computer viruses and how they work and how to avoid them.
First what is a computer virus? A computer virus is a program written with the intent to do harm to you or your computer. In the early days of computers viruses were often written as pranks by huge nerds, like me. For instance when I was in the 8th grade I wrote a virus that whenever a computer would boot up it would display a huge smiley face and display the text, “don’t you think life is better without computers?” and then shutdown the computer. I put it on the computers in the school computer lab and got in a ton of trouble, my punishment was to fix all the computers in the lab.
These days computer viruses are a lot more dangerous. Most of the time they are created by the mafia or other criminal organizations often based out of countries like Russia, Ukraine, and Nigeria. Identity theft is often their main goal and it’s a profitable business for them. The way most computer viruses work is they infect your computer via a dangerous web page or a spam email message. Then they infect files on your computer and try and use your computer as what’s called a “zombie” mindlessly sending out spam and other malicious messages to try and infect other computers. Also there are viruses called Trojans named after the Trojan horse. These viruses are after you usernames and logins for popular sites and credit card number and bank routing numbers. The mobsters then use this information to charge up large amounts of money in your name.
What can you do to avoid viruses? Well first of all follow the steps I outlined in the last newletter about how to not get your account hacked. Also most of all don’t be stupid, It seems like simple advice but most of these scams are easy to see through. The prince of Nigeria is never going to give you any money and Bill Gates does not have email tracking software. You would be surprised how stupid people can be, a computer security expert once posted an ad as a test that read, “Is your PC virus-free? Get it infected here!” hundreds of people clicked on the link. These people were stupid don’t be like them.
A quick word about spam as well. I know many people have complained about spam in the department lately. Here’s a couple of really easy ways to avoid spam emails:
1. Don’t give out your main email address to just any website that asks for it. It seems like every website has a free signup that requires your email but often what happens is these sorts of sites just use the emails they harvest this way and sell them advertisers…for Viagra.
2. If you need to sign up for a bunch of stuff online get a free gmail account that you can use for this. When they ask for your email just give them the free gmail account instead of your main email, then if that email account starts getting too much spam you can just close it and make a new one.
3. Pay attention when you are filling out online forms, often there is a button that needs to be checked or unchecked to not receive the “newsletter” or “promotional material” that they want to send you. This will save you a lot of junk in your email box.
4. I know I’ve said this before but avoid going to Pornographic sites, because when you use your email to sign up for their “free trial” you basically asking for a ton of spam about Viagra, bigger boobs, and male enhancements. I mean if you put yourself in that sort of category you will receive those sorts of emails for the rest of your life.
5. Don’t pass on email forwards that you receive. I know the email with the video of the dancing monkeys is really really funny but please do not pass it on. Why? Because what spammers do is they often start emails like this to harvest email addresses. If you notice each time you forward the email a list of all the people that got it appears at the top of the email. This process repeats itself each time it gets forwarded until you have to scroll through 5 pages of email addresses just to get to the message. Then a spammer just waits for this message to get back to him and presto a whole bunch of emails for him to use. If you get forwards all the time from certain people, just email them and ask them to not include you in mass emails. It’s better for everyone.
Just these simple 5 steps can help you avoid getting spam and in the end help you avoid getting your computer infected with a virus and your identity stolen.
