Let’s talk about the greeting card scam. Everyone likes to be thought of. The easiest way was to do it with an e-greeting card. Obviously the scammers caught on and ruined our thoughtfulness fun. This too is an older scam but still works because they can make it look like it came from anyone.
Now, If you open such an email and click on the card or the links, you’ll usually end up with malicious software being downloaded and installed on your computer. A few things could happen, 1) The malware that was installed will launch all kinds of pop-ups with ads all over your screen. Infact, I still remember the day I was working at the Hewlett Packard call center back in 1999 and the morning I left for work, I got an email from my girlfriend at the time that said “hey check out these links”. I wasn’t interested so I deleted it. When I got to work, I had the same email in my inbox, So I had a few minutes before my shift and clicked on her link to find out what she wanted me to check out so badly.
Next thing I knew, all these popups from adult site started flooding my screen and I couldn’t close them down fast enough so I powered off my PC. I sat back in my chair and though PHEW !!. moments later I hear someone in the very back of the call center saying “Who’s Terry Cutler sending me porn….. Was not a good day for me, not a good day.
But fast forward to today, you’ll be lucky if you get porn popups, usually it’s ransomware which I’ll cover in a sec. Like I discussed in a previous video, if your system becomes infected with such dangerous malware, you will become one of the bots, which are part of a larger botnet network of affected computers. In this unfortunate event, your computer will start sending private data and financial information to a fraudulent server, or your PC will attack other companies because it’s now controlled by IT criminals . Make sure you keep your patches up to date and buy a good anti-virus software.
