I had written many posts before regarding Phishing. However, all of these were related to spam mails. For a change, here's one I got on Twitter.
Now, most of us might be familiar with these kind of messages popping up while surfing the internet, especially on a song download website, in my experience. We choose to ignore them, but the fact that quite a lot of contests and sweepstakes are hosted on Twitter each day, it might get some people into believing this. Although, even when they are holding a sweepstakes, they still ask you to do something, like a 'Follow & Retweet' or redirect you to their website where they ask you to register via email. Nobody tags random people that they've won. Never. That's a total spam.
Secondly, if we look further into this particular case, the account holder has 75 followers. Also, when I did visit the link mentioned in the account, it led me to a blogger blog which had the following column in the middle.
Now, you must note that it is not advisable for you to actually visit such links as they might lead you to malicious websites. If you're very curious to know as to which website the generally shortened URL leads to, you can expand the URL at http://longurl.org/.
Coming back, I went on the link and submitted random numbers to it, which led to this website.
It asks you to download iLivid Download Manager. Now, for those who don't know of it, it's a malware in disguise of a Download Manager. You can read this article for a detailed idea.
It's quite a harmful Virus which not just slows down your PC, infects it and could even crash it but also steals your information (Usernames, Passwords etc.) by recording your keystrokes.
Ignore it whenever you encounter this 'Download Manager' for your own good.
Anyway, coming back to our main topic here, any legitimate organisation holding a sweepstakes of such an unbelievably large cash prize, not having it's own website and such few followers is just not possible.
The bottom-line is that we always need to stay cautious while surfing the web, be it spam mails or spam tweets.
You can also read my other posts on Phishing mails to learn about the typical characteristics of one.
There are ones which try to convince you into submitting money as in the case of Fake Hyundai Job Call Letter and Fake Microsoft Job Offer Letter, while a few would try to steal your identity as in the following cases-
Fake 'Abba Queens Hotel' Job Offer Mail
Fake Audi Promo Program
People claiming to make you millionaire
Your pw is 2341. @ShrutiKaushikIT You scored 1 entry to our $10,000 contest (not a joke!). Go 2 our linky to claim.
— Prize Spectacular (@TweetLotto35534) August 11, 2014
Note: The actual embedded tweet is gone because the account is now suspended. You can see the message if you click on the date. Now, most of us might be familiar with these kind of messages popping up while surfing the internet, especially on a song download website, in my experience. We choose to ignore them, but the fact that quite a lot of contests and sweepstakes are hosted on Twitter each day, it might get some people into believing this. Although, even when they are holding a sweepstakes, they still ask you to do something, like a 'Follow & Retweet' or redirect you to their website where they ask you to register via email. Nobody tags random people that they've won. Never. That's a total spam.
Secondly, if we look further into this particular case, the account holder has 75 followers. Also, when I did visit the link mentioned in the account, it led me to a blogger blog which had the following column in the middle.
Coming back, I went on the link and submitted random numbers to it, which led to this website.
It's quite a harmful Virus which not just slows down your PC, infects it and could even crash it but also steals your information (Usernames, Passwords etc.) by recording your keystrokes.
Ignore it whenever you encounter this 'Download Manager' for your own good.
Anyway, coming back to our main topic here, any legitimate organisation holding a sweepstakes of such an unbelievably large cash prize, not having it's own website and such few followers is just not possible.
The bottom-line is that we always need to stay cautious while surfing the web, be it spam mails or spam tweets.
You can also read my other posts on Phishing mails to learn about the typical characteristics of one.
There are ones which try to convince you into submitting money as in the case of Fake Hyundai Job Call Letter and Fake Microsoft Job Offer Letter, while a few would try to steal your identity as in the following cases-
Fake 'Abba Queens Hotel' Job Offer Mail
Fake Audi Promo Program
People claiming to make you millionaire
No comments:
Post a Comment