Source Jockey

My mother just forwarded an email telling me not to open emails with the word “Hallmark” in the title.  Apparently, the email will come to my house, pick the lock, steal my computer and fill it with nasty pictures of donkeys having sex with camels doggie-style.  Or something like that.

I wrote an email to her (and all the people she copied) responding to her email, and explaining that, if you’ve got all your security updates, and you don’t open strange attachments, you’ll be ok.  She actually uses Yahoo mail, and therefore doesn’t need to worry so much about security updates as much as she needs to worry about opening weird attachments; even then, she doesn’t have administrative access to her computer anyway.  So she can’t REALLY do that much harm to her computer as it is.  She keeps asking me to give her admin privileges so she can upload photos to Costco or something…  Each time I consider it, I remember that she clicks “yes” to everything.

If you’ve gotten this far, and you consider yourself computer illiterate, here’s the ONLY rule you need to know about email-based viruses:  If you get an email from ANYONE, whether you know them or not, don’t open any attachments unless you have been expecting them.

Examples:

1. Uncle Jim sends you a Powerpoint of slides from his vacation–but Uncle Jim’s been dead since 1992:  DON’T OPEN IT.
2. Your buddy sends you a program to get a free Coca-Cola drink holder: DON’T OPEN IT.
3. Your favorite bank sends you their special, all-new banking software: DON’T OPEN IT.
4. You get a greeting card from someone for no good reason: DON’T OPEN IT.
5. You see an attachment that looks interesting: DON’T OPEN IT.

This is all pretty self-explanatory, right?

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 4:03 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.