It appears most internet users finally figured out that you shouldn’t click on an email with the innocuous “Reply to This!” or “Hi Dear” in the subject line. Not that the world populace becoming smarter deters anybody who wants to phish for personal information on your computer.
These malware crooks are typically three steps ahead of everybody else, and it’s been more common to create a new insidious way to get your information via relevant news headlines sent to your email box. And this year, it went to an ironic level in using the story of President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize to make the next victims of online identity theft.
Of course, this leads to a quandary for the innocent who share countless email links with their online friends about major news headlines. The internet now seems like a complete minefield, with seemingly no way to determine which news headline email is safe and which isn’t.
But there are ways to defend against this, even though it requires an astute ability to weed out the real from the nefarious.
Ask friends to send you headline news stories with a personal identifier in the subject line
While a lot of work when you have hundreds of friends online, sending a mass request to please put an identifier in the email subject line when sending news links shouldn’t be considered unnecessary. However, out of courtesy, someone sending a news link should automatically place something personal in the email subject line so friends will know it’s from them and not someone about to install malware on your computer.
Unfortunately, we’ve been living in a culture where seeing a hot story headline in your email box incites an automatic click without thinking about how dangerous it might be. The above-mentioned President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize story was one of the most powerful examples of being fooled to date.
To add a new layer to someone automatically clicking, the above permeated email promised that it would download a story onto one’s computer to give details about people against the Obama Peace Prize win.