OT The Other Virus

psychology...

David Weaver

..I'd imagine more fraud emails and old wives tales are being spread by people who are "being cautious".

I wouldn't be surprised if some of the larger spam networks employ a psychologist or 5 to determine what will be successful and when.

the psychologists..

David Weaver

..I know my comment about psychologists may sound funny, but it's important to remember that a lot of the spam and phishing and false repair sites operate in call centers in india and other places that do both legitimate and illegitimate work from the same building and business.

We're not talking about American and Russian teens who are having fun with amazon gift cards.

Re: OT The Other Virus

Mark Nowicki

Email filters are working fine (gmail), however, on my Facebook had a post from

a "Corvirus Relief Fund" claiming that Facebook would match my contribution.

Noticed some Russian names, thankfully,I have taught from early age that nothing good comes out from the East.

Different

Mark Mandell - Gone Round In New Jersey

I'm not talking about common spam and the lame-o phishing stuff, David. What's being sent is viruses, malware, ransomware, etc. Truly damaging stuff.

Fortunately, I employ a 2-stage email practice. I review all email by webmail on Earthlink's server, where I delete everything that I don't want to keep for some reason. Then, once a month or so, I download the saves into my Outlook on the desktop.

Ahh...i'm not on facebook..

David Weaver

...I listened to a couple of guys on youtube once calling the big call centers in delhi. They screwed around with the scammers for a while and built rapport and then asked them which scams they were running that day.

I get what you're saying, they want to put a virus on your PC, but the delhi houses do the same thing sometimes - they get you to put something on your PC that directs you to them. My dad got one, but they met their match because he has nothing on his PC (afraid of scams) and when they gave him a price for service, he dickered with them until it was too low and they hung up. haha.

Re: Ahh...i'm not on facebook..

Mark Mandell - Gone Round In New Jersey

Neither am I

(nor twitter or other "social media")

I haven't seen it directly...

John in NM

But my email provider is running slower lately. They are kinda kludgy anyway so I didn't think much of it until you mentioned this.

Price gougers don't bother me much, but spammers, fishers, and virus purveyors really do.

Makes Sense

David Yoho

With so many people across the country now working from home due to recent events or kids out of school that are accessing school work online or playing online, there's far more traffic on local Internet provider's networks. Seems like a good opportunity for hackers to try to "cash in" on people's less secure home networks and poor email practices.

Re: Different

Stuart Johnson

I'm confused (nothing new) if an email is opened by going to the provider online in my case Spectrum and it contains a virus am I protected? It sounds like I should never open it with my Thunderbird account.

Re: Different

Mark Mandell - Gone Round In New Jersey

Here's the thing, I keep all messages "at arms length" until they pass both Earthlink's analysis and my browser's scan for malicious sites.

So far, I've stayed clean. Except, of course, for the 50 bucks I sent to that Nigerian prince . . . .