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Unit 14: Taking Protected Measures

Well, the scam has morphed, and Nigerian scams are now rife on eBay. This time around they’re Notes
often pointed at sellers of items, not buyers.
Here’s how it works. You put an item up to bid. At the end of the auction, the winning bidder
gets in touch with you and asks that you ship the item to Nigeria, or somewhere else overseas.
Often, there’s a strange story attached—a common one is that the bidder lives in the U.S., but has
just adopted a child in Nigeria, and wants the item sent directly to the child there.

The winning bidder sends you what appears to be a PayPal notification, saying that the item has
been paid for. Or else he sends you an e-mail saying that as soon as you send him a confirmation
that you’ve shipped the item, he’ll pay you via PayPal. Ship the item, and you’ve been scammed.
The PayPal notification was in fact a forgery, and, of course, if you first ship it before getting
payment, you’ll never get paid.
How to protect against it? First, never ship an item until you confirm that you’ve been paid. Don’t
trust an e-mail from a bidder, or from PayPal itself, that appears to say a payment has been made.
Instead, log into your PayPal account and see if there has in fact been a payment.
Second, only sell items to people who have already bought items at other auctions. Scammers often
set up new accounts for scams, and these accounts have zero activity. If you see a high bidder on
an item of yours with zero activity, go to the Canceling bids placed on your listing page and fill
out the form for canceling a bidder.
14.1.9 Virus Scan
Sometimes, typically via email, virus are able to cross the wall and end up on your computer
anyway. A virus scanner will locate and remove them from your hard disk. A real time virus
scanner will notice them as they arrive, even before they hit the disk, but at the cost of slowing
down your machine a little. Important: because new virus are arriving every day, it’s important
to keep your virus definitions up-to-date. Be sure to enable the scanning software’s automatic-
update feature and have it do so everyday.
“It all might seem overwhelming, but it’s not nearly as overwhelming as an actual security problem
if and when it happens to you.”
14.1.10 Kill Spyware

Spyware is similar to virus in that they arrive unexpected and unannounced and proceed to do
something undesired. Normally spyware is relatively benign from a safety perspective, but it can
violate your privacy by tracking the web sites you visit, or add “features” to your system that
you didn’t ask for. The worst offenders are spyware that hijack normal functions for themselves.
For example, some like to redirect your web searches to other sites to try and sell you something.
Of course some spyware is so poorly written that it might as well be a virus, given how unstable
it can make your system. The good news is that, like virus scanners, there are spyware scanners
that will locate and remove the offending software.

14.1.11 Stay Up-To-Date
I’d wager that over 90% of virus infections don’t have to happen. Software vulnerabilities that the
viruses exploit usually already have patches available by the time the virus reaches a computer.
The problem? The user simply failed to install the latest patches and updates that would have
prevented the infection in the first place. I still see this constantly, as some of the most popular
articles here on Ask Leo! Deal with exploits that were patched nearly 2 years ago. The solution is
simple: enable automatic updates, and visit Windows Update periodically.

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