Despite the multiple protection systems we have today, computer viruses (as well as its variants, such as malware, Trojans, etc.) continue to be a problem in modern computing, and you should know that the primary source of infection is the email. So if you receive an email with an attached file, in this article we will help you find out if the the sender is legitimate and whether it is safe to open what they sent you or not.
It really sucks if your PC is infected with some kind of virus, and not just because you might have to format your PC to get rid of it, but also because you might lose your files and documents, and you might even spread the virus to other network PCs and other devices. For this reason, it is always a very good idea take some precautions
Accessory Precautions
Let’s deal with suspicious emails containing attachments first. The vast majority of email clients (including webmail) have their own protection systems, such as the most popular of them: gmail. If you’re already seeing a yellow or red warning that tells you there may be trouble…pay attention.
However, these protection systems are not infallible (just like anti-virus software you may have installed on your own, not even Windows Defender (and even more so if you don’t keep Windows up to date), so there is a series of precautions that you must take, and the most important of them is that you have common sense. Here are our recommendations:
- Verify name and email address: do you know the sender? Were you expecting an email from him? Otherwise, start with mistrust. There are many malicious emails that pretend to be “official” accounts. For example, you might receive an email that appears to be from the Post Office or the Civil Guard, but when you look at the email address, it has an @outlook. com, or an unintelligible name which, of course, seems unofficial.
- Check spelling and grammar: Many malicious e-mails have been literally translated with Google Translate. This means that the text that will reach you will not be entirely correct, with grammatical and possibly even spelling errors, and that it seems to have been written by a machine or by a foreign person using a translator, and not by a native. Bad business.
- Recover your password? Most malicious emails aim to steal your credentials, so if you receive an email that supposedly asks you to recover your password but you didn’t ask for it, it’s probably malicious.
As you can see, our advice on whether an email is safe is mostly about common sense and not getting involved in opening attachments or clicking on links without making sure first that everything is in order.
The absence of attachments does not mean that the email is secure.
We wanted to leave a specific section for that, because in fact most scam emails today don’t have attachments, but hide links and want you to click on them. These links may take you to sites of Phishingto virus downloads or pages that emulate websites where you can recover your password and by entering your credentials they will steal them.
NEVER click on a link in an email without first checking to see if it’s safe, and for that the best thing to do is simply pass the mouse and check where it will take you. Take a look at this example:
As you can see, the link supposedly takes us to an MP3 audio file, but when we hover over it, in the bar below, we get an address that has little to do with it , and in fact this takes us to a website page which in all likelihood will be malicious.