The internet is a dangerous place! Besides viruses, you must contend with email hoaxes, security exploits, and more.

Email Scams

E-mail scams are not viruses, but they can wreak havoc because they convince you to give away your private information and that can cost you lots of money and headache.

You probably have gotten a lot of the same e-mail scams that other people have, such as:

• Letters from desperate Nigerian diplomats
• Notices that someone has set you up on a blind date
• Warnings that look like they're from your bank, eBay, or PayPal telling you that your account will be terminated if you do not input your user ID, password, and credit card or bank account information

What's real and what's not? Let's make this really simple:

• Assume that everything is a scam unless proven otherwise.
• Most reputable businesses, such as banks do not send out important requests via email. They send things by postal mail or they call you.
• If you get some official-looking email from an institution you do business with, telephone them using the phone number you have on file (not the one in the email) and confirm it.
• If there's a link in an official-looking email, do not click it. Instead, manually type the known address of the company's website into your web browser. Those links in scam emails do not actually point to the website they say they do. You'll get redirected to some fake version of the website that will steal your information.

Fake Warnings

Here's how urban legends get started. One person hears a third-hand story about some horrible thing that happened to someone, and he sends an email about it to a friend. That friend forwards it to six other people, and before you know it, everyone is all in a panic.

Don't perpetuate this! If you get a warning from a friend about some dire consequence, don't forward it, and do some research to find out whether it's true. Two good places to look are ScamBusters.org and snopes.com. When you find out that it's not true, send the link to the article from ScamBusters.org or snopes.com back to the person who sent it to you, with a kindly warning to check out their stories before they forward them. Together we can stamp out mindless forwarding.

Security Exploits

Hackers are continually finding new holes in Windows XP that they can use to gain unauthorized access to systems. However, Microsoft keeps patching those holes, as you learned in Lesson 3, so as long as you use Windows Update frequently, you should be covered for security problems.

If you get an email that says it's from Microsoft, telling you that you need to install the patch attached to that email, do not do it. This is a scam, and it will infect your system.