In today’s newsletter, komando.com is talking about potential scams that arrive in the mail that look like Microsoft packaging with USB drives.
These potential drives come with a message to call a toll-free number. When you do,, they will ask you to download a program to “fix the problem.” Some companies do this, but these guys may mess you up, and then collect money after they “fixed the problem.”
Then they transfer you to a department who signs you up for a subscription. In the scam, they’re transferring you to the “office 365 subscription department” where they’ll ask for your details again.
Microsoft and Sky News blew this off, and it seems to be coming back. How do we protect ourselves from this? That’s probably easy. You know what you’re receiving in the mail in most parts, especially when you order things. This, you’ll want to watch because you know you didn’t order anything and you should never plug in a drive you’re not expecting.
For complete details on this, please read Malware in the mail: Scammers are sending out fake Microsoft software by Komando staff.
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Hmmm well if you were not expecting the drives in the mail then you wouldn’t bother with them.
If there was a way I’d probably boot my system get off the net, power the drive then reformat the thing then I’d get a free drive assuming of course thats what it was.
But yeah its a bit hard.
A security company a year or so tried this and were able to hack into several business systems because you would be curious.
This was from drives on the ground.
In fact in universities drives get lost all the time and in fact you can get malware from drives which is why a lot of stuff is blocked.
When my cousin went to university it was all cloud based.
In fact now he works both him and my brother work in the same company.
And as part of their contracts to stop security issues with usb sticks the company gives everyone 100gb of personal space with shared team access.
the company space is used for backup of things like email profiles and other secured documents but the personal space is yours even after you leave.
Its getting a lot cheaper to buy usbs though for 20 dollars I can buy a 120gb usb 3.2 backwards compatable drive and I can buy 32gb for 7.
16 gb for round 5 or so and 8gb for about between 2 and 4 dollars.
So yeah its easy to buy drives.
I mean the cheap stuff is cheap but the entry models of sandisk, kingston and hp are pritty low you can even buy ones with space to be hooked on to keyrings or have tags stuck on them so it wouldn’t be a push to have a message on a drive and they can be small to.
I think we will have to treat it as anything.
If you get a message with attachment or something even if it looks like it comes from a trusted person, if it looks wrong you delete it.
The same with drives.
If you were not expecting it, then throw it away.
Of course thats a problem if its actually something you expect and throw so its not foolproof.