Common Sense is the best weapon against Email Scams

We were informed recently of a local computer user that was duped by a fictitious email masquerading as an email from his bank. Without going into detail it will suffice to say that the bad guys at the other end of the email obtained personal banking information from this user and proceeded to raid his bank account. This is not another urban legend”, the user is known to us at itgroove.

This serves as another reminder that the very best SPAM/Malware catcher available is common sense and a bit of thought on the part of all of us as computer users. Many of us fall into the trap of believing our software technology (in this case, antivirus software) will protect us from all of the bad things out there in much the same way as the airbags in our cars will protect us in the event of a collision. Airbags will help to reduce injury but the better thing to do is to avoid the collision by being an alert driver. The same thing holds true regarding computer use: the best defence against computer crime is an informed, thoughtful user.

So, please help us help you by spending some time to educate your user base: Banks, credit card companies, government agencies, software companies and any reputable business never send emails to users requesting personal, financial, banking or credit card information. Emails that request this type of information should just be deleted, period. When in doubt, contact itgroove and we can help you determine if an email is “real”.

There is no technology available that can filter out all of this type of garbage from email. As soon as the “good guys” (the anti-virus companies) figure out how to block the garbage the bad guys (the scammers, crooks and creeps) find another way to get it through. The anti-virus systems that we recommend for your computers and your firewalls do an excellent job of filtering out upwards of 97% of the garbage. When you consider the experts estimate approximately 98% of the email traffic that flows on the Internet every day to be spam and malware, the catch rate is pretty phenomenal. But the final catch is up to the person reading the email; when in doubt … delete.