Page 8 - 11Cyber

I Was a Fool, So You
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you from clicking on the close X in the top right-hand Don't Have to Be
corner, so forcing the power off may be the only way.
Usually, the scam will not permanently infect, corrupt, By David Kretchmar, Hardware Technician
or access any of your information if you shut it off im- Sun City Summerlin Computer Club
mediately. Download the free version of Malwarebytes
from www.malwarebytes.org if you want to be sure all
traces are removed. If you let the scammer have re- I don't necessarily think of myself as a fool, but I did a
foolish thing a few
mote access to your PC, you may need to change your
accounts (credit cards and financial) and their pass- years ago. I bit on one
of Motley Fools' ubiq-
words to be safe. uitous teaser internet
ads promoting the
best new emerging
3) Email – Opening an attachment or clicking on a link technology stocks that were about to "explode." I
embedded within an email can launch any one of many paid (I think) $29 to Motley Fool to get the names of
forms of 'attacks.' the stocks. Motley Fool sent me the names of several
mostly small and pink sheet stocks. Most pink sheet
companies are highly speculative, have little or no

Prevention and best practices to avoid falling victim: earnings, and are low-priced penny stocks. For many
pink sheet stocks, a price appreciation up to one pen-
The first thing that I always do when I get an email that ny would be wildly profitable, but well over 90% of
may be suspicious is to check the sender's email ad- these stocks appeared worthless.
dress. Your email program may always show this ad-
dress, or you may need to hold the mouse over the I wonder if they are buying shares before they recom-
name to see the actual email address that was used to mend them and running the shares up and then may-
be even shorting them or just taking advantage of
send the email. Anything that doesn't look normal, such people willing to pay for their information. Their exper-
as a domain name that is not the same as the company tise seems to be selling themselves, not researching
name, or a sender ID that looks made up, such as companies.
dsae12345@ myname.com, I would delete/flag that
email as junk and report it as a phishing email. Phishing The Motley Fool's website is self-described as "A
is where the scammer tries to get you to log on to a wide-ranging investment resource that intended to
website that looks like a legitimate one but really cap- "educate, enrich, and amuse individual investors
tures your login information – common ones are banks, around the world." The site includes discussion
PayPal, and Amazon. Never open an attachment with- boards, quotes, data, and of course, stock-picking
advice. Many of the articles are voluntarily contributed
out checking the sender's email address first. Malware- by various individuals. Unfortunately, I suspect that
bytes is a good program that may be able to block many
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scam programs before they are active if you are using
the premium version.

Cyber Awareness Bulletin 8 October 2021