What to do if you or your friends are victim of a botnet
Posted by: Timothy Weaver on 05/21/2015 05:51 AM
[
Comments
]
Sale Slash, marketing a wide range of bogus weight loss products, was shut down by the FTC. What makes this newsworthy is that the company was using a botnet to market their bogus products.
Jessica Rich, the Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, "Sale Slash is a fraud trifecta. The company made outlandish weight-loss claims for its diet pills using fake news sites, phony celebrity endorsements and millions of unwanted spam emails."
Sale Slash sent spam emails sent through a botnet of hacked computers.
What do you do if you think you are a victim of a botnet?
Follow the advice of Steve Weisman,a lawyer, a professor at Bentley University and one of the country's leading experts in scams and identity theft:
1. Change the password on your email account. If you have used the same password for other accounts, you should change those passwords as well and, in the future make sure that you use unique passwords for all of your accounts.
2. Change your security question. Sarah Palin's email account was hacked when the hacker answered her security question as to where she met her husband by going to Wikipedia and finding out she met him at Wasilla High School. You may think that the answer to your security question is not so readily available, but you would be surprised how much personal information is available about us all on the Internet. I suggest that you pick a nonsensical answer to your security question, so if your question is what your favorite color is, you should make the answer "seven." No one will be able to guess this and it is silly enough for you to remember.
3. Report the hacking promptly to your email provider.
4. Contact the people on your email list and tell them that you have been hacked and not to click on links in emails that appear to come from you.
5. Scan your computer thoroughly with an up to date anti-virus and anti-malware program.
6. Review the setting on your email to make sure that your email is not being forwarded to the hacker.
7. Get a free copy of your credit report. You can get your free credit reports from www.annualcreditreport.com.
8. Consider putting a credit freeze on your credit report so that a hacker cannot access your credit. You can get information about how to do this at www.scamicide.com.
Source: USAToday
Jessica Rich, the Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, "Sale Slash is a fraud trifecta. The company made outlandish weight-loss claims for its diet pills using fake news sites, phony celebrity endorsements and millions of unwanted spam emails."Sale Slash sent spam emails sent through a botnet of hacked computers.
What do you do if you think you are a victim of a botnet?
Follow the advice of Steve Weisman,a lawyer, a professor at Bentley University and one of the country's leading experts in scams and identity theft:
1. Change the password on your email account. If you have used the same password for other accounts, you should change those passwords as well and, in the future make sure that you use unique passwords for all of your accounts.
2. Change your security question. Sarah Palin's email account was hacked when the hacker answered her security question as to where she met her husband by going to Wikipedia and finding out she met him at Wasilla High School. You may think that the answer to your security question is not so readily available, but you would be surprised how much personal information is available about us all on the Internet. I suggest that you pick a nonsensical answer to your security question, so if your question is what your favorite color is, you should make the answer "seven." No one will be able to guess this and it is silly enough for you to remember.
3. Report the hacking promptly to your email provider.
4. Contact the people on your email list and tell them that you have been hacked and not to click on links in emails that appear to come from you.
5. Scan your computer thoroughly with an up to date anti-virus and anti-malware program.
6. Review the setting on your email to make sure that your email is not being forwarded to the hacker.
7. Get a free copy of your credit report. You can get your free credit reports from www.annualcreditreport.com.
8. Consider putting a credit freeze on your credit report so that a hacker cannot access your credit. You can get information about how to do this at www.scamicide.com.
Source: USAToday
Comments
