Your Best Cyber Security Efforts come to Naught
Cyber criminals are ordinarily shady distant characters in the shadows that you never get to actually see or hear from. These days though, these characters are beginning to come out from under their rocks to lend their voices to a new kind of cyber crime – one that uses Skype and other popular VoIP software.
Skype, for instance, has about half a billion subscribers; and to cyber criminals, this is a very tempting collection of people for them to take advantage of.
What they do these days is, they try to speak to potential victims and try to use their swagger and their superior technical know-how to strong-arm them into downloading the virus that they want to push. It’s turning out into a new kind of headache for cyber security experts.
But of course, once they latch onto a new idea, these people don’t let go all that quickly. You have heard of phishing scams, haven’t you? Smishing and vishing scams apparently are where all the action is today.
A smishing scam is when a criminal sends you an unsolicited text message that asks you to contact your bank right away at a certain toll-free number. Of course, that toll-free number has nothing to do with the bank – it belongs to the criminal.
Apparently potential victims are lulled into trusting the message because there’s a toll-free number attached and they believe that only legitimate people can have those. Vishing is where you get a pre-recorded call instead of a text message; but the idea is basically the same.
You don’t have to be a cyber security expert to know that you are not to trust these kinds of communications.
Once you actually respond to the toll-free number you get, you are put through to someone who pretends to be a bank employee; and they ask for all of your financial information. You just need to know that no bank ever asks you for your password or anything.
Do you think that it isn’t just people who don’t understand computers who get caught up in these scams? Think again. A while ago, students of the University of Kansas were targeted.
They received a message that said that the campus was going to close; if you were a student and you wanted to know all about it, you had to call a toll-free number and give them all kinds of personal financial information. And young Facebook-addicted tech savvy men and women fell for it.
Some scam artists actually build a bank to beat all cyber security efforts.
They rented office space, call an interior decorator to do it up to look exactly like some real bank, hire a bunch of fake customers and fake bank employees and wait for a couple of real customers to walk in and hand them all their information. There is just no end to this.
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