Monday, December 8, 2014

Beware holiday shopping scams

It's the holiday shopping season, so don't forget that there are a lot of scammers out there:

If you receive an email this holiday season asking you to “confirm” an online e-commerce order or package shipment, please resist the urge to click the included link or attachment: Malware purveyors and spammers are blasting these missives by the millions each day in a bid to trick people into giving up control over their computers and identities.

An "order confirmation" malware email blasted out by the Asprox spam botnet recently.

An “order confirmation” malware email blasted out by the Asprox spam botnet recently.
Seasonal scams like these are a perennial scourge of the holidays, mainly because the methods they employ are reliably successful. Crooks understand that it’s easier to catch would-be victims off-guard during the holidays. This goes even for people who generally know better than to click on links and attachments in emails that spoof trusted brands and retailers, because this is a time of year when many people are intensely focused on making sure their online orders arrive before Dec. 25.
I've seen these myself.  Let's all be careful out there.

4 comments:

  1. I always fill these out with the information from the local FBI office. YMMV.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I've received one supposedly from Costco.com daily for the last week. The wording is otherwise identical to the sample you showed here.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I have seen these things purportedly from Fed-Ex or UPS or even the USPS. The payload, in a lot of cases is the "cryptolocker" worm. That one is a particularly nasty one that encrypts any data it gets access to and then holds it for ransom. So far as I know, there is no antidote for it except recovery from backup. (You do have backups - right?)

    Anytime I see one of these, I simply hit the delete key and move on.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Received one here in the UK yesterday, supposedly from Target.com, priced in dollars.......... "please click to confirm your order and local store..."

    Deleted.

    ReplyDelete

Remember your manners when you post. Anonymous comments are not allowed because of the plague of spam comments.