Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Old Dogs CAN Learn New Tricks

Winston supervising me learning new tricks

I got an email this morning which looked like it was sent from Apple (I'm a Mac user) notifying me that my password had been reset and that if I had not initiated that action, I should click on the link they provided to the Apple iforgot site. 

So I did what I always do when I have a computer question. I emailed my son-in-law. He shot me a reply right away that it was 100% spam. How did he know? 

He told me that, if I moved my cursor over the link -- not click on it, just move the cursor over!-- I could see the actual address. I did that and it turned out to be some Chilean website, oozing with anticipation at either uploading a virus onto my computer or hooking some vital information.

I may be the only one in the world who didn't know this trick. But just in case I'm not, I'm passing it along!

3 comments:

  1. A good reminder, Kirby. I've been getting a ton of these lately, and the spammers/phishers are getting more creative, using bank, phone, and other corporate logs. One even pretended to be the U.S. postal service alerting me to a package! Instead of clicking the link, I typed the USPS site into my browser and found an alert warning customers that clicking on the spammers link downloaded a virus. Agh!

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  2. Thanks for the heads up, Kirby!

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