Hello all!
I bring pre-Xmas good cheer to you all from the Geek at the seaside, having received my umpteenth warning about a virus/trojan/rootkit/ boy/girl genius hacker, I thought I would just slip on my anorak and send out words of comfort to all those Facebookers who have been so worried that their machines and those of their friends will be reduced to so much beige colour plastic if those evil genii get their mitts on them – then changed my mind and decided to opt for the full on rant...are you sitting comfortably, no me neither, think its these trousers...!
So if you get an email/attachment/invite/postcard/smoke signal or ethereal message from the unknown realms, 99 times out of 100 you can feel free to open it, ignore, ponder its unearthly meaning or laugh at the foolish American with no fear of crashing your hard drive, taking over your address and emailing information to all your friends about your love life or links with known terrorists groups; inviting all your mates to sign up for the 'Glen Miller appreciation page' on MySpace or causing your PC to immediately disassemble itself, pack the bits neatly and return them to the manufacturer.
Despite the assertions of various big budget films and small minded TV shows its actually quite hard to 'hack' into a PC and do any real damage - always assuming of course that you the user have decent and updated anti-virus (which of course you all have...haven't you?) and a firewall set to block all the usual ports – and the software will know which one these are.. There is, however, some danger in opening attachments from people you have never heard especially if the said attachment has a file ending with something like .exe, .scr or .bin - opening these from an unknown source is not dissimilar to covering yourself in gravy, plaiting your hair with Antelope burgers and climbing into a lions cage at feeding time.
Most warnings about how, if you let Mr X into your on-line life you will find yourself the helpless victim of his extraordinary 'hacking' prowess are complete myths, their purpose is to either get Mr X kicked off one forum or another or to simply spread the warning around the net as far as possible - big clue here, the warning always claim to be genuine and tell you to tell all your friends. They want to see their warnings spread as far as possible. Are these people idiots? In the words of Churchill, the insurance dog. 'Oh yes!'
There *are* viruses on Facebook, the 'Storm worm' is one that springs to mind, but it needs you to actually click a link which is an .exe file and takes you to an external site and no one would be silly enough to do that, would they! Hmm....seems to have gone a bit quiet out there...
So a few tips
- if you get a warning about a virus, check in out before you pass it on - www.snopes.com is an excellent site for this.
- Ignore spam email, if you click the 'take me off the list' link, you have just told the spammer this is an active email address, expect invites to buy Viagra and Rolexes soon!
- Official organisations seldom ask for personal information by email! Seldom in this sense is defined as never, if your bank or similar does - find another bank.
- Be wary of pictures and other files from unknown sources and watch for those with .exe endings
- Never give bank details or similar out on the internet, its highly unlikely that any bank would ask for these details. If you are asked, ignore the email link and go to the site by typing in the URL in the address bar, look for a URL that starts 'https:// that 's' is important it means the site is secure.
- If you are not sure what you are doing, don't do it. If in doubt ask. Lots of geeks about the place, myself included, who will be happy to help. You may have to put up with sentences which includes acronyms like SSH and TCIP and possibly even some references to operating system architecture but at least your computer will be safe.
Ron
PS: Amazingly Facebook tagged this message as possible spam and suggested I send a nice picture instead....sigh!
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