THE INTERNET

The Internet brings the world to your desktop, no doubt. Butthat world also includes a sub-world of spyware, worms, phish-ing attacks, and more.The most common of online irritants is spam e-mail. Spam is simply unsolicited email that urge you to buy herbal concoc-tions to enlarge certain body parts, promise youthfulness via apill, say that you’ve won a Rolex watch, and so on. These mails invariably contain a link to a supposed online store that will askyou for a credit card number for an online payment.
It is diffi-cult to believe how someone can fall for a trick like this, butapparently, there are a few innocent people out there who gettricked into buying a “herbal” cure or a “collector’s watch.”Needless to say, you need to just delete these mails.The other common annoyance, which can also bring downyour PC, is spyware / adware. The source of these is most usual-ly pornographic sites or those with cracks for software. Thesesites can also be the very links you get in spam mail. Once theyget installed, they are able to send a list of the Web sites yousurf, and even your e-mail address. Based on your surfing habits,spam is sent to your email ID, advertising products or servicesthat would ostensibly be of interest to you.
An adware program will open browser windows all by itselfand direct you to Web sites selling products of the same nature.Some of them are so designed that if you close the window thatthey bring up, they will open two or more instantly!If you receive a suspicious looking file in an e-mail (some-thing like “annakournikova nude playing tennis.avi.scr”) evenfrom a known source, do not download the file. It is likely thata virus has hacked into the sender’s e-mail client (or even dis-guised the sending address as something else—yes, that’s possi-ble too) and is sending out spam or offensive mails.
The affected person may not even know that spam mails from his ID arebeing sent. You can be a good friend and call him up to let himknow of this so he can take curative measures.Some sites even make use of the fact that people occasional-ly make typographical errors! A recent example ishttp://www.ork0t.com/ (now taken down), which you could have visitedif you typed what you thought was “www.orkut.com” and madea typo. When one entered one’s user ID and password into thatsite, it would be used to hack into your account and send outspam to all your contacts! Phishing is a threat that can potentially rob you of yourmoney. It’s a means of fooling you into disclosing your logindetails of any site / service. If you are using an e-banking service,be very careful of mails that you may receive claiming to befrom your bank, asking you to fill in your login details.
As a pol-icy, most banks do not send out e-mails asking you to fill in anye-banking details. If you do receive such a mail, it is fake. Beforeyou fill out any details on a site following a link sent via e-mail,do confirm with your bank’s customer care if they have indeedsent out such a mail. Visit only your bank’s official site for alltransactions.