Today, scammers can cheat you by tricking you into contacting them, and giving them all your personal information. Every day people fall for these scams, and many have no idea, until they have been hurt financially. The scammers just have to sit back and wait for us to fall for their bait. Amazing, isn't it?
How Poisoned Search Results Work
According to an article on Yahoo!Finance, the people who run these scams simply set up a fraudulent website that is similar to a legitimate one. When you accidentally end up at the phony website, they can take advantage of you in several ways. They could download malware to your computer. Or, they could pretend to be selling the product that was the object of your search. As a result, a potential buyer will cheerfully give them their name, address, phone number and credit card information. The buyer never gets the item, and the scammers have your information. Since these sites are usually run overseas, they are difficult to shut down.
How Common is it to Get Poisoned Search Results?
It is far more common than you think. Accourding to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, as many as 40% of the world's computers could be infected with malware. In addition, according to a company called Blue Coat, about 1 out of 142 searches in 2011 led the searcher to a poisoned site. Symantec, the Web Security firm, has indicated that as many as 1 in 3 seaches could lead to these dangerous sites! It makes you never want to do a Google search again, doesn't it?
How to Protect Yourself
According to a Yahoo!Finance article entitled "Poisoned Search Results: More of a Malware Threat Than You Probably Think," here are a few steps you can take to protect your computer:
Use antivirus and antimalware software.
Avoid URLs that end in the two-letter TLD's for other countries, unless you specifically want information about those other countries. For examples, URL's from Russia often end in .RU; India .IN.
Preview the site before clicking on it. You can do this on Google searches by hovering your mouse over the little button to the right.
Carefully read the site description before clicking. Does it seem legit, or does it seem random or fragmented?
Look at the domain name. Does it go with the topic of your search, or does it seem like a random name?
In addition to what the article suggested, I recommend that you try to stay with well-known sites when purchasing items. For example, you could go to Amazon.com, Sears.com, Target.com, Zales.com or similar store sites to make a purchase. When doing research, stick with domain names that end in .edu. Don't casually hop from site to site. Taking these precautions will help keep you off some of the poisoned websites, and protect you from being the unwitting victim of a scam!
You are reading from the blog: http://lies-and-liars.blogspot.com/
Photo courtesy of: http://www.photoxpress.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment