IT Bulletin - My Company

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

I wrote the 5th IT Bulletin for my company today. This is useful information for everyone:

I.T Security Advisory
Valentine’s Day Spam and Malware Alert!

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, hackers are hard at work figuring out how to trick you into clicking that email link that will install malware on your machine. The I.T Team is hard at work keeping our spam filters and anti-malware services updated and stopping such emails from coming through but you are the ultimate protection, especially with your personal email accounts.
Security experts have determined that the most used subject lines for these types of attacks include “Short and Sweet”, “Me and You”, “In Your Arms”, and “With All My Love”. Be particularly aware of emails coming from people you do not know, have links to other sites, and ask you to download and install anything. For more on this threat read the PC World Article

With that said, the I.T department wishes you a Happy Valentine’s Day!

Flash Phishing

Not to be confused with fly fishing, Flash Phishing is a new method hackers are using to trick you into putting valuable information into a site that looks valid. The objective of the hacker is to make a web site look like a real site, say www.bankofamerica.com, and trick you into logging in. The new Internet Explorer that I.T has provided you with will block most of these sites. However when these sites are made with Flash (same software used to view animated websites and some video) the detection is not so accurate. Like other phishing attacks they can be avoided by looking in the address bar and making sure you are in the correct website. Once again, I.T tries as hard was possible to keep your computer secure but you, the user, are the ultimate defense. To read more about Flash Phishing visit this Symantec Page

As always, thanks for reading.
Jorge Orchilles

Comments

One response to “IT Bulletin - My Company”
Post a Comment | Post Comments (Atom)

Educating the user is always the best course of action against these types of threats.

Despite our company being heavily virtualized, we still educate our users on similar threats.

For instance, Antivirus 2009 is quite possibly the worst malware I've ever encountered. Because it looks so similar to Windows XP, people do not think twice clicking OK to make it go away.

To remedy this, we sent out a similar bulletin with screenshots of the popups so the users could see examples, rather than have to make a decision on their own. It worked quite well.de

February 4, 2009 at 2:42 PM