We appreciate all of you who check with us before
giving up personal information to phishing scams or opening malicious
attachments. We spend an enormous amount of crew time and
professional staff time cleaning up infected computers and comforting
the afflicted. You will save yourself and Computing
Services a lot of headaches if you follow these simple guidelines.
- No legitimate service will ever ask you to send them
your password or go to a web page to "confirm" it. Systems
administrators have access to your information and do not need you to
supply it. Delete these messages.
- If you get a message that appears to
be from your bank or credit card company do not follow the link in their
e-mail. Log into their
site yourself or call the toll-free number on your credit
card to verify.
- Any attachment sent to you that ends with ".exe"
should be avoided like the plague. Did you really get a postcard or did
you get postcard.exe? Trash it before it trashes your
computer. Links may attempt to hide the type of file, so verify the
link before downloading anything.
- Do not unzip and run a zipped file without verifying
what it is. Ever.
- If you are using Zimbra's web mail client you can
scan the first line of a message before you open it. If it looks like
nonsense then it is probably spam at best. At worst it has a link to
malware (software's evil cousin) or a phishing site.
- If the email was sent to "undisclosed recipients" that may be an indicator of spam depending on the context.
- Another tell-tale sign of spam or scam is extremely
poor grammar in the message.
Also, while not directly affecting your computer, 99.99% of the virus
warning messages you get from friends and family via e-mail are hoaxes.
Surefire indicators of hoax material are if they say it was verified by
Microsoft, CNN, or McAfee and that you should forward it to everybody
in your address book. When in doubt about the veracity of anything you
receive in e-mail whether it is a virus warning or information about [fill in the name of any politician here] check a site such as snopes.com before
forwarding it along. They are pretty good at vetting these things.
If you are at all unsure of anything you receive in your inbox and it
isn't covered above call us at extension 3094 or e-mail us at helpdesk@warren-wilson.edu
to ask about it. Thanks, and safe computing everybody.
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