My mother-in-law runs a small craft shop (with lovely craft products, sold very cheaply and with good friendly advice ;) and her business relies a lot on the Internet. Queries come in via email, she has an online store and a website.
Yesterday she got sent an email telling her that due to some unsavory use of the Internet, she would be disconnected. The email had an attachment which was (pretending to be) some sort of log of her activities.
Now, the more savvy of us may think - scam. But she is not "the more savvy of us" and this email freaked her out. She imagined her Internet presence being shut down. And, of course, she was always careful about her browsing.
Fortunately for her, her ISP's antivirus recognised the attachment as being a trojan and deleted it. But she may have been stressed into opening the attachment to see what the accusations were.
I have written this post to tell people about this type of trickery and to just remind those out there that are maybe not so Internet savvy - NEVER open attachments that you are not expecting. If you are concerned about your Internet connectivity being taken away then contact your ISP directly.
And always have an up-to-date antivirus.
Showing posts with label trojan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trojan. Show all posts
Monday, March 23, 2009
Friday, October 5, 2007
Symantec - "We don't (just) sell anti-virus".
I went to a Symantec presentation today to learn about their new End Point Protection and to take a sip of their Kool-Aid.
They took great pains to make sure that the audience was aware that they do not sell anti-virus software anymore - they sell "end point protection". Which, really, is anti-virus with other stuff.
The point is that even according to Symantec's reports viruses are dying out. (By virus I mean a program that self replicates - not a trojan, spyware, rootkit or worm). Trojans and worms and rootkits are becoming easier to modify and deploy and signature lists (against which these uglies are compared and blocked) are becoming too slow.
The moral of the story - viruses are (pretty much) dead... they have been replaced with new threats. Symantec painted a picture of their protection product as the silver bullet that will protect a PC against all the new threats. It looks good but I'm not 100% sold. I'd recommend the product but I'd back it up with a lot of other Information Security goodies.
They took great pains to make sure that the audience was aware that they do not sell anti-virus software anymore - they sell "end point protection". Which, really, is anti-virus with other stuff.
The point is that even according to Symantec's reports viruses are dying out. (By virus I mean a program that self replicates - not a trojan, spyware, rootkit or worm). Trojans and worms and rootkits are becoming easier to modify and deploy and signature lists (against which these uglies are compared and blocked) are becoming too slow.
The moral of the story - viruses are (pretty much) dead... they have been replaced with new threats. Symantec painted a picture of their protection product as the silver bullet that will protect a PC against all the new threats. It looks good but I'm not 100% sold. I'd recommend the product but I'd back it up with a lot of other Information Security goodies.
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