Costa Daily News

Don`t get fooled this Valentine’s day.

February is a busy time for email messages and hidden amongst some of those messages of love this time of year is a fair amount of spam.

We have already seen an increase in email based virus and malware attacks. An email arrives with an attachment, the email appear to come from an admirer with titles like “I Love You Because”, “Sent with Love” and many more, These are just a number ways to trick you into opening a virus or Trojan file and infect your computer. Once opened the file takes control of your computer downloading files and in the really nasty cases captures the data you enter in forms and sends it back to the criminals that are stealing identities.

Some rules to follow

Only open email attachments that come from a trusted source, make sure your virus program is scanning your emails for Virus and Spyware. If you are not sure who an email is from, delete it without opening it.
Be extremely wary of emails asking for confidential information; confirm suspicious requests before responding in email, look at the email address,

I have my email program set for reading emails in plain text, often I have received a fake email that in HTML mode looks like it was sent from eBay asking me to confirm my details, in text mode it is very obvious that eBay don't use hotmail as their email server.
Even with virus protection and spyware protection if you open a suspect attachment if could already be too late as in some cases a suspect files first job is to disable both the virus and spyware programme on your computer. Once these tools are disabled your personal information is fair game for the hacker.

Should you be having problems contact me, I'll be more than glad to help.

Russell Vaughan – Mintmicro computer repairs – 952596346