The Osama Bin Laden picture virus: make sure that everyone you know has the latest patches
Motivation
With the announcement that Osama Bin Laden is dead, the scammers will likely pop up with social engineering around this news item. If you are a regular reader of this blog, it is likely that you are fully patched, have an anti-virus and can deal with malware, but what about your Mom? Older Sister? Uncle (who might visit “those” sites)? Cousin who hasn’t met a clip-art she doesn’t download. Dad? Friend who is sloppy about everything? They might not be ready, so if you have a few minutes tell them the story from Snopes, and then make sure their Windows (or Apple, as we have seen Apple is one big target) is patched, anti-virus up to date.
Story about the Osama Bin Laden online social engineering
A quick check on Snopes shows that this report of link or attachments to or of Osama Bin Laden in an email may be vectors for transmission of malware. As much as you might want to view this image, please observe all cautions against social engineering. As Snopes reports this scammers have used this approach in 2004, 2005, 2006 and now with the real news they are doing it again.
What you can say to the party you want to help out
For the safety of your system do you mind if we make sure you have the latest patches to your operating system and anti-virus.
What to do:
Check that they have all of the latest Windows Update:
- Update with the latest Windows Update, and this means you need to go to the Windows Update site and manually run them in some cases
- Make sure to they have the malware and anti-virus systems with the latest up to date virus patterns, for more information go to:
- For all of the Microsoft Security products:
- Security Essentials, if you don’t have an anti-virus already, this one is from Microsoft is no cost for private users, best if you copy and paste into your browser: