Category Archives: Security

Claim your undelivered package…hmm malware

Security, , ,

As if malicious emails promising freebies are not enough, some scamsters have hit upon using unclaimed parcels as a bait for sending malwares (viruses, worms and trojans) through emails. I received one such email stating that the parcel I sent could not be delivered and I had to collect from their department by printing the attached invoice. Coincidentally, I had indeed sent one parcel but later realised that it was through a different vendor and just for the heck of it went through the email.

As expected the email was indeed a malware carrier. Though the FROM address looked genuine, it had the patterns of a spoofed email id and this was confirmed when my email virus scanner detected the message attachment as having a virus.

The email states that:

 


 “Unfortunately we were not able to deliver the package you have sent on the 19th in time because the recipient’s address is wrong.Please print out the invoice copy attached and collect at our dept”

 

 

 

From Snapshot of the spoofed email

In this case it has spoofed the email address of one of the renowned courier company.

I am beginning to think what if the database of the courier companies was compromised and indeed these scamsters started to send such emails to the genuine users. On one hand I believe the layered defense mechanism would stop it, what if the user disabled their AV (believe me I have seem some users do that)….

Ensuring your system of the following must keep your system in good stead:

– Antivirus with latest virus definitions.

-Personal Firewall

-Up-to-date with Operating System patches*

* It doesn’t matter if you have an AV and Firewall, but if its not up-to-date with Operating System patches, that’s sufficient to get your system infected and most of the people seem to overlook this.

Use Now, Dispose Later….Your Email Addresses

Security,

Well, use and throw phenomenon seems to have hit web too. Now you can dispose of email addresses that you no longer wish to use…What? Yes, ………………….but why would I want to do that?

Simple, say you are about to buy something on the web or you found some interesting article and for that information to reach you, they normally ask you for the email address. You gave, it was good for sometime but now you are receiving unwanted emails from them, their partners, etc etc as well? The innumerable Unsubscribe requests have not yielded desired results and you are sick of those mails. What would you do?

Here is a pretty nice solution from Yahoo on countering unwanted mails. It’s called Address Guard and it provides Disposable email address.

Here is how it works:

You create a virtual alias to your existing email address. For example, if the parent email id is praxhoo@yahoo.com, you create an alias praxhoo-subsribes@yahoo.com You will continue to receive emails on this new id and it lands in the inbox of parent email account. You can assign color code to these emails and move them to pre-set folders using rules. Now, should you start receiving spam emails on this id and you no longer want mails subscribed to this id, you can just delete it off so that no mail comes to you.

To start using this in Yahoo mail, Go to Options > Mail Options > Spam > Set up Disposable address Disposable Addresses.

Create an alias and start using it for all things going to garbage later 🙂

Although it has been around from sometime I guess not many of us are aware of this. Similar solutions are being provided by other emails vendors as well but I recently tried one from Yahoo and it works like charm.

Long live the concept of use and throw.