I just got off the phone from a cousin of mine who started to ask me about an email that she received from a friend. She wasn’t surprised to receive an email from him. But, this ones subject said that it had “family pictures”. The friend opened it when he received it. he even went online and followed the details that were in the email and it took him to a site called instant411 or something similar.
Fortunately, my cousin deleted the email without opening it. This is an old virus type email that has been making its way around for a long time. It grabs your contacts and sends the email as if coming from you to them. The idea is to either infect more and more computers and/or to get you to actually go to the site and pay for something.
Please remember some simple rules.
1) If you receive an email from someone you don’t know, especially if it has an attachment, don’t be quick to open it. You should probably just delete it.
2) If you receive an email from someone that you know, but it doesn’t make sense to receive an email with that subject, either delete it or call who it came from first. Such as, if you receive an email from a business associate that says ‘pictures of the family’. Why would you be getting pictures of their family?
By the way, the friend said that he opened the email on a Mac, not a PC. This just goes to show that Mac’s aren’t immune from viruses. All computers need good antivirus software and antispyware software. And/or to be regularly scanned by a professional.