One of main ways your systems and networks get infected by malware is ending up on a web site that you *think* is legitimate, but is actually a click-bait trap for you to inadvertently allow bad guys to have access to your system (and therefore your data, which they could then encrypt and then demand a ransom to unlock).
Landing on these web sites happens to all of us – myself included. In fact it’s happened twice to me in the past 2 weeks – once where I fat-fingered a web site address and just today where I typed in an address that *used* to be legitimate, but the domain was allowed to expire by the owner.
Specifically, today, I typed in ‘myrogers DOT com’, which used to be the landing page for Rogers’ customers to access their account information. Rogers decided to move the page to http://www.rogers.com/web/link/signin, and in their infinite wisdom decided to let the easy-to-remember ‘myrogers DOT com’ domain registration expire. Someone from Hong Kong saw this happen, registered the domain, so Rogers has lost control of it, and now anyone going to this address – either from an old bookmark, an old link from another web site, or just by typing it in (because it was easy to remember) – ends up on a ‘phishing’ site promising a prize if you take a survey:
The previous attempt 2 weeks ago, was a similar message that had me more fooled (I’ll admit – I was tired), as it addressed me as a customer of my ISP (the name for which it automatically populated based on the IP address I was coming from).
In both cases, I immediately stopped and closed the web browser windows without clicking further.
There is no ‘free lunch’ or a million dollars from Bill Gates or a ‘free cruise’ or any of the other scams if you follow these links. Only a lot of pain if you get hooked, and possibly a catastrophic loss of your data, and even money (if they get your banking login information, for example).
For Rogers, this looks bad, and puts any of their clients at risk because of a poor decision by their IT department. If Rogers was properly managing their domain names, they would never have let this domain expire.
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