1. Never open attachments that
you did not expect to receive, even from people you
know. Usually, dangerous attachments come
with filename extensions (last 3 letters after the
period) of .scr, .pif, .exe.
2. Your ISP or Hosting company
will never send you any attachments over email
to update or speed up your computer.
Updates to your software or operating system
always comes as software downloads from their
websites, NOT email attachments.
3. NEVER click on links found
in spam messages. These usually just lead you
to a blank page and acts only as a lure to verify if
an email address is active.
4. Lastly, just use plain old,
low-tech, common sense. Call up your friend
to check if they really did send you an email
message with an attachment. If it's from a company
you are subscribed to for a certain service, email
their support group manually and ask them about the
email message and if possible, forward the message
to them. Do not reply to the original email.
Keep yourself up to date with
latest threats to your computer.
Visit the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team
(US-CERT) threat alert website:
http://www.us-cert.gov/
