Storm Worm Spam Attack
Did you recently get a mysterious pop up ad urging you to invest in some penny stocks? If so I have bad news. You’ve got the Storm worm. Over 250,000 people received the ad, and it’s likely many of them never even knew they were infected. The worm turned the computers it infected into zombies-that is, it silently took control of the system. Groups of zombie computers are called botnets and they can inflict everything from floods of spam to attacks on websites called Denial of Service Attacks without the computers owner ever knowing. Unfortunately getting rid of the worm is a job itself as it’s cleverly designed to mutate to avoid detection. Check out this site for help if you think you’ve got this worm. http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/small_dam.shtml
If you don’t, count your blessings-then update your anti-virus and internet security software and remember to never ever open an attachment ending in .exe or .pif, and to never open an attachment of any kind from someone you don’t know! Be careful about websites you visit as well. Don’t blindly click on links in emails. Let your mouse pointer hover over them for a moment first and look at bar at the bottom of the screen, where the REAL addresss will be revealed. Don’t be surprised if Paypal.com turns out to really be “scammersite.this is a scam.com/paypal”. Spammers and scammers are getting increasingly good at producing fake webpages that look just like the real thing, but they still can’t foil the simple mouse over the link trick!
spam, spammers, storm worm, pop up ads, computer virus, phishing
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