Tips to keep yourself safe from ‘Cyber Monday’ criminals and threats

Today is ‘Cyber Monday’ and more than 100 million Americans will be using their computers and network connections to search for deals and start their holiday shopping. 

According to the National Retail Federation:

• 88.2 percent of retailers will have special promotions on Cyber Monday this year, up from 72.2 percent who did last year.
• 70.1 million people plan to shop online during their lunch hour at work at some point this holiday season.
• CyberMonday.com will feature Deal of the Hour specials on Black Friday and Cyber Monday from more than 700 participating retailers.

Unfortunately, with these great deals and savings comes the potential risk from cyber criminals looking to take advantage of online shoppers, making consumers unaware of the risk they pose to their employer and themselves.

F-Secure has provided a number of search terms cyber criminals are likely to target this Holiday period - toping the list is ”Kinect for Xbox”, followed by ”Call of Duty: Black Ops”, ”Jewelry” and “Amazon Kindle.”

PandaLabs suggests avoiding using search engines to find special deals and instead go directly to the retailer’s website. The firms also recommended not clicking on embedded links in advertisement emails as they could be a cover for a malware attack.

Additionally, PhishMe has published these safety tips to help when shopping online.

Don’t take candy from strangers. Be suspicious of unsolicited offers or emails, even if the email is personalized to you.

If it seems uncharacteristic, check with the source. Phishers are getting smarter about using known contacts or corporate brands to trick people into sharing information or clicking links. Beware.

Don’t provide your username or password in an email or over the phone. Your corporate IT department will NEVER ask you for this information through these channels.

Don’t click links you don’t understand, unless you want to lose company data or worse yet – your identity.

Confirm the source of file attachments to emails (out of band) before opening them. File attachments are one of the most reliable mechanisms of propagating malware.

The growing security needs of Smartphones

Guest post by Britney Baker 

Setting the Scene: Why Hackers Might Target Phones

For a long time, viruses and security issues have been limited to traditional computers. Although a number of other types of devices have computer chips and can even run software, they were hard or impossible for a hacker to get into, and there wasn’t much benefit to hacking them. However, as smartphones have gotten more popular recently, and have become more complex, they have begun to offer another platform for hackers to attack. Smartphones have a couple of key features that make them good for hackers to attack. For one thing, the software is complex, and there is an open application platform, so they have the ability to write malware or to exploit a phone. Secondly, the phones are all connected to the internet, so there is an easy way to attack the phones. Lastly, the phones have things of value - they may have personal information, passwords, even banking information. These factors make phones a good medium for malicious hackers to attempt to exploit.

How Viruses Get to Your Phone

There have been some issues related to security and smartphones, but to date few of them have been actual viruses. For instance, Android had a scare with a wallpaper application that got millions of downloads, and was secretly sending personal information to a site in China. RIM, maker of the BlackBerry, has been in the news recently due to conflicts with several countries who wanted access to certain BlackBerrys’ information. The ironic thing about the story is that BlackBerry was so secure that RIM literally didn’t have the private information to hand over to the governments. The compromise that they came to was to have RIM run servers in these countries, so that the governments could spy on encrypted messages.

Protecting Your Phone

The thing we should all remember with smartphones is that they possess a great deal of personal information, and should be treated with the same care or better that we would use with a computer. Beware of unknown applications, don’t go to bad websites, and protect important files. Here’s a list of some security applications that are being developed for smartphones :

·         DroidSecurity Android Antivirus

DroidSecurity has distributed over 2 million copies of their free antivirus software, and they also offer a premium version.

·         McAffe

McAffe is known to currently be working on an antivirus program for the iPhone, but it has not been released to the public yet.

·         Norton Antivirus

Norton, a very popular security company, currently makes a mobile antivirus program for Symbian and Windows Mobile Phones.

When she’s not getting excited about new gadgets, Britney Baker writes about prepaid cell phones for PrepaidCellphones.net. Her latest article took a look at the GoPhone from AT&T.