Tag: #virus

Hacking adventures (Story 1)

--Originally published at Computer and Information Security

Oh! Hi reader, I’m really impressed that you keep coming to read what I have to tell to the world hehehe. This time I will tell a little story as I promised on my first post.

It all begins when I was in highschool, the really young and naive Cande, the little geek who was starting to learn how to set-up a web site server. One day, Cande got an idea, he thought: “What if I set-up a CMS in my brother’s server to learn how a server works and how to manage files in there, but also to share some of my thoughts to the world?” Well that sounds really cool isn’t it? You might think, oh wow this guy has some initiative, but in that time, he also had a lot of naivety. Let me explain to you why:

  1. He downloaded a wordpress template from those sketchy sites that offer everything free to download, he thought: “Oh, I’m going to search a cool wordpress template and modify it to make it look nicer!”
  2. After he downloaded it, he made all the modifications in his machine: “Where is the style folder of this template? Oh I found it!” -2 hours later-, “Cool, I finished my master piece”.
  3. Then, he opted to upload all of his downloaded files to the server: “Ok, now I just need to upload my root folder to the server.
  4. Once his site was uploaded, he went to check it, to see if everything was ok: “Everyhting is up and running, now, I just have to enter my site address and check it out, I’m really excited” -1 minute later-, “Hell yeah, my site rocks, looks pretty cool, I’m gonna start publishing my first post”.
  5. Days passed and each day Cande logged in
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How to prevent e-mail viruses?

--Originally published at Computer and Information Security

Hello reader, today’s topic is about e-mail viruses. We all have been in the wrong position where you download a file or something sent through the mail, and never check if the sender is a real one or check if the file has a proper extension depending on the type of file you were supposed to receive (For example: a text file should end in .txt a pdf in .pdf, etc.) but many people doesn’t check about that and just double click the downloaded file, which ends in another zombie computer infected with viruses like trojans or worms, which keep reproducing and propagating through the home or any network to other devices.

So, in order to at least prevent that you get infected with any virus, you first should evaluate the mail sender, check if the mail that is sending you a mail is valid and track it. So, I recommend you to use this tool, in order to check an e-mail:

https://tools.verifyemailaddress.io/

It gives you metadata (important and detailed information) of the e-mail, that tells you from where it was sent, servers, validation of the records and a score of reputation.

For example, here is the score it gave me of some mails and data from the server of the fake account:

mail

mail2

After you check a mail validation and the score is almost trustworthy, you should Google the e-mail addres to re-validate.

And one last thing, never, ever, click links inside a mail. If your guts tell you that it might be a phising or a scam, it is probably one.

See you on the next post!!!