Here’s a summary of the recent wave of malicious emails arriving in people’s inboxes. Delete any email like the following:
- An email offering a link to download a Yahoo Messenger update. It’s full of interesting words like “yahoo messenger ultimate version“. The link will download a couple of viruses.
- Olympics – there’s a lot of emails being sent promising something to do with the 2008 Beijing Olympics. As a rule of thumb whenever there’s a large event on malicious emails abound.
- CNN – there have been so many CNN themed spam emails lately. They contain subjects such as “Daily Top 10” or “My Custom Alert“. If you click on any link it asks you to install an Adobe Flash update. What it actually does is install malware.
- Brangelina’s Twins – I admit I had to look up what Brangelina means (hint, Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt). News about celebrities sent by email is almost always spam, and in this case it contains a trojan.
- e-cards or e-postcards – if an email with a link to an online postcard asks you to download “postcard.exe” then click cancel and delete it. Postcard.exe is a pretty bad trojan.
