The bad guys are at it again. They’ve come up with new and more devious ways to trick people into accessing their computers and networks to accomplish their nefarious goals.
Email bombing.
All of a sudden, you start receiving a bombardment of spam emails and subscriptions that you hadn’t signed up for. Hundreds and hundreds at a time. The bad guys are using those emails bombing as a diversion to distract you from the legitimate email warnings you’re receiving from your banking and other financial accounts about suspicious activities on your accounts (that they or someone else has compromised).
If you are getting email bombed, it’s a sign someone is trying to flood your email to prevent you from seeing important emails alerting you to suspicious activity. Your immediate concern is preventing fraud and identity theft.
What to do: immediately, stop everything you’re doing and go through every email to check for legitimate suspicious activity warnings from your banks, Paypal, amazon and any other place you have financial dealings.
Hijacking.
The bad guys want into your computers and network. They hope to either access your financials and sensitive data, or to hijack your computer or email accounts to conduct phishing attacks on other computers.
They get access to your computer by tricking you to download a trojan file, hitchhiking from a website you visited, or opening a trojan email (phishing).
What to do: if you see someone actively hijacking your computer by remoting in and navigating around your computer, immediately unplug it from the network (or shut the computer down).
Lonely heart scams.
The bad guys pose as a young foreign girl interested in a romantic relationship but needs money for some urgent reason. If you’re seeing profile pics of women on your computer just show up, it’s an indication that someone has hijacked your system and is running a lonely-hearts scam using your computer.
What to do: start changing passwords anywhere that may be compromised.
Botnet armies.
Botnets are armies of computers that make up robot/networks that have been infected by malware to send email spams, click-fraud campaigns and generate malicious traffic on servers (such as DDOS attacks). If your computer was hijacked, you might never know that your computer or network is part of a botnet army because they are designed to be undetected. But together these computers can do enormous damage at the will of their “bad guy” masters.
What to do?
Data security threats are not going away. In fact, they are escalating. If you haven’t already, you must close the security gaps in your network now.
Overall advice: use different passwords for different systems and turn on multi-factor authentication wherever possible.
If you’re suspicious of activity, review account activity: banking, email, e commerce, paypal, etc. And get a credit check to make sure no accounts have been opened in your name.
We can help secure your business computer network. Ask for a $299 Security Review. We’ll test your network (and users) for security holes and once we identify what, if any, security holes are exposed on your network, we’ll recommend the appropriate actions or tools to close those vulnerabilities.