Avoiding Common Email Security Threats
Corey Bogedain is a network technician and web developer with Tech Experts. |
Most companies today rely heavily on the use of email. Emailing is a very fast and cost effective form of communication for many different types of businesses.
Most companies use it as their main source of communication between employees. In fact, most employers do not realize the risk of using email.
Some risks range from viruses, hackers, to someone else just trying to gain a little information.
Here’s an overview of the most common email security threats in today’s Internet world.
Viruses
Viruses cause billions of dollars in damage to businesses every year.
Many corporate email systems are still quite vulnerable to viruses. In fact, in last year alone, an estimated 63 distinct email virus attacks hit the United States. These attacks come quickly and can spread quickly.
They mainly cause slowdowns across the internet. However some have been known to take down major corporation’s entire email systems.
Today’s viruses are very complex and often appear to be harmless such as personal notes, jokes, or promotions. While most viruses require recipients to download attachments in order to initiate infection and spread, some are designed to launch automatically with absolutely no user action required.
Spam
Studies have shown that 20 percent of corporate email is spam. A company that has a thousand employees could receive over two billion spam emails in a full year.
Most do not realize it until a lack of productivity ends up costing the companies billions of dollars each year.
While most spam is just annoying, some of it can be very dangerous. Most trick employees into opening malicious emails to spread faster. Also, many hackers have begun disguising viruses as spam.
Phishing
Phishing is used to trick a person into thinking the email is legit and came from a real website, usually asking the person to verify their password or to change some sort of account information.
Then, taking them to a fake website and stealing what you have typed in. This is the number one way people get their identity and personal information stolen.
Spyware
The main purpose of spyware is to install itself on the victim’s computer. It monitors all key strokes and mouse clicks so that they can later go back and collect usernames, passwords, credit card numbers and bank account numbers.
These infections can stay installed on computers for many months without an antivirus picking them up. Most are detected and removed instantly if the user keeps their antivirus up to date.
Having a great antivirus that scans files as well as emails can help prevent virus attacks, phishing and spyware.
Users should also have an up to date spam filter that prevents the infection from getting to your inbox to begin with. And most importantly never open an email attachment you didn’t specifically request.
Also, pay attention to links inside emails that appear legitimate. Many times, phishers will send you an email that looks like it came from an official source. After clicking the links, you’re redirected to a site on the hacker’s network. This is often used to collect personal information and passwords.
What is a Trojan Virus and How Does It Affect You?
Will Alston is a PC hardware technician with Tech Experts. |
We have all experienced the unfortunate virus infection on our computer; it’s not fun and most times it causes down time on the computer, cost to have it fixed, loss of data, and possible identity theft.
A trojan horse or trojan is a program that presents itself as one thing (anti-virus or a game) butactually works in the background to gain unauthorized access to information in a computer.
A trojan virus can steal all sorts of information on your computer such as credit card information, passwords, bank information and then sends the information to the virus creators who can use this information for malicious gains and identity theft.
When you are infected with a trojan infection you will also notice a substantial difference in the speed of your computer and you may even experience several pop-ups related to adult content, casinos, etc.
Don’t click on any of those pop-ups as those will only make the infection harder to remove.
The trojan infection can spread from one PC to another very quickly from e-mails and attachments sent from the infected computer.
It can even corrupt data on a hard drive which will lead to system crashes and deletions of computer files.
Trojan Win32
One of the most dangerous of all trojans is the Trojan.Win32, which is also referred to as the Win32 Trojan. This dangerous infection masquerades on your computer asa legal program, hides from the user and allows remote third parties to take partial or full control of your computer and can record keystrokes.
It can also alter the security settings of your computer to allow more malware to be delivered and installed onto the computer.
How Does it Get Into My Computer?
We have clients ask all the time, “How did my computer get infected?” Most times these infections come from freeware applications that they downloaded, free online games that were downloaded, anti-virus not being updated, firewall settings, computer security settings set too lenient, or from not performing regular updates on the operating system.
The trojan infection wraps itself inside legitimate software such as games, videos, virus and spyware programs, or any commonly downloaded file. In the end, the user ends up with a malicious piece of software that does something entirely different than what it was supposed to do.
Now that you have a general idea of what a trojan is and the most common ways that they get into your computer, what do you do if you are infected?
The first thing that you should do once you notice the infection is to shut down the computer and do not use it for anything.
If you have never dealt with virus removals before then you’ll probably want to work with a professional IT company to do the virus removal, since if not done correctly, the removal process can cause more damage than the trojan.
If you do need to get on the computer to pull some files off, disconnect it from the Internet. That way, no personal information can be sent out from thecomputer such as your credit card or banking information.
Then, you’ll want to work with your IT provider to have a virus clean-up done on the computer. The goal is to get you back online and using your computer safely.
At Technology Experts, we work with clients on virus infections on a day to day basis. Our technicians have several tools and processes to remove virus infections without damaging your system or data.