Don't Get Caught By Phishing Emails

Distinguishing an actual e mail from a phishing e mail is not that difficult in case you know what to look for. Let's start off by describing what a phishing e mail is. Fundamentally, they are any emails that try to trick you in to performing a specific action (suck as clicking on a link) by pretending to represent a reputable company or organization (possibly that you have an association with). Let's take a glance at a few ways to recognize a phishing or scam e mail.

The first thing to look at is the e mail address it is being sent from. Sometimes the e mail address is not even related to the company that the e mail is saying they represent. If the e mail address does not match the company name this ought to make you skeptical from the beginning.

The next thing to look at is the greeting of the e mail. Most phishing e mail greetings will be generic like "Hello Loyal Customer" as against a personal or custom-made greeting like "Dear Mr. Sampson". A generic greeting is another strong indicator that the e mail may not be legitimate.

You ought to also pay close attention to the spelling & grammar in the e mail. Lots of scam emails have poor spelling, punctuation, & grammar. Let's face it, not lots of immense companies or organizations send out emails littered with spelling mistakes.

The tone of the e mail is another important factor in determining the legitimacy of an e mail. Lots of phishing emails will be threatening or try to coerce you in to doing something. For example, a phishing e mail may threaten to cancel your account unless you click on the link below to confirm your account details. Sometimes they will even set a date that you must perform this action by. Any e mail with threatening messages like these is a powerful indicator that it is a scam e mail.

Sometimes in a phishing e mail there will be a link that they are asking you to click. Never click on any link in any e mail unless you are positive it is from a reliable source. You cannot do much harm by opening a scam e mail, but you jeopardize the safety of your personal knowledge & the security of your computer by clicking on a link in a phishing e mail. In case you are uncertain if a link is safe or not try hovering over the link (do not click on it) & look at the net site address in the status bar on your computer. Check to see if the net site address is for the company that they say they are.

A History of Anti-Virus Software

Where Virus Program Came From

Antivirus program has evolved a lot over the years. It is hard to as viruses have been getting trickier to catch & have been attacking at much faster rates. Worse than that, viruses have been designed these days to do over generate nuisances, however great, & are now able to virtually steal from computer users by spying on them. Viruses can affect any program or computer by accessing your IP online.

Way Back When:

In the beginning of the computer age there weren't any viruses to be concerned about. The idea was out there & there were definitely issues from time to time, but nothing in the way of what is being seen today was even conceived of. The truth is, the first true virus, that replicated itself successfully, was created as a joke. There was no need for antivirus program & so none existed.

The mid 80s saw things get ugly:

By the mid-1980s computer use in the house was taking off. Increasingly offices were seeing typewriters get tossed out the windows only to get replaced by full functioning computers. Suddenly there were all of these targets showing up & amateur programmers were taking it as a challenge to program viruses that much amounted to vandalism, as they destroyed knowledge & such. Suddenly antivirus program was needed & by 1987 it existed.

Few people turned to it at first:

At first there was little attention paid to warnings about viruses. Business was the first to adopt such measures but home users didn't have any need. At the time the worst a virus would do was destroy knowledge & therefore regular backing up of a hard drive appeared to be adequate. Also, viruses spread by floppy disks because the net was not in every home. In lieu of paying for protective program people tried to be cautious of cautious of where they put their disks.

The net was in all places & so were the viruses:

When the net age took off in the 90s viruses had a whole new way to travel around from place to place. They no longer needed to attach themselves to floppy disks & wait to be accidentally installed. In the early days of the net, all a virus writer had to do was place the file somewhere & fool a user in to downloading & opening it. Or work, back then viruses could only spread through executable code. Still, the necessity for antivirus program took off.

Virus writing still appeared slow & so was updates:

For a long while it was hard to update the knowledge base of an antivirus program. Things weren't as they were today where the programs check for & install their own updates. That said, there was little opportunity for updating anyway as updates came slowly. Today some program gets updated every day but even as recent as a few years ago it was as rare as every month.

& now they check for everything:

These days there is dozens of genres of threats against our computers & so antivirus program is no longer that. It now searches for malware of all kinds including adware & adware. They come with firewall applications & the ability to identify & search new drives & files on the fly with no

See Yourself In Control Of Your Slow Computer!

With the right understanding & the right tools, you can be in control of your slow computer. You can confidently say to yourself, "I can speed up my PC!" There is no reason why this ought to be an issue for you anymore. Simple solutions are available that work well.

There is an immense mystery to a slow computer condition. Like other things, there are always mysteries associated with things they don't understand. It is not only mysterious, but frustrating, trying, annoying, exasperating, irritating, & wearisome. Go ahead. Generate your own list of adjectives that you have experienced. Possibly your list will be longer than mine was. Nevertheless, I am positive you are worn out of the experience & are prepared to make a alter.

"Speed up my PC!" This is something you can ask your high school kid to do for you when you learn that this happens only because of your activity on the Net. After you learn that, there are some simple things you can do by yourself, & then you'll say to yourself, "Why didn't I do this sooner?"

Some examples of common things that you can do before you spend any funds are:

1.  Delete your browsing history. This is a simple thing & takes less than a minute of time.
2. Perform an activity called "defragmentation" for your hard drive. It is a simple procedure, but it does take time to do. In the event you schedule to do this time a year it will help your computer run better.
   For the more difficult things that plague your computer, you can buy a program tool under $50 that will take care of them. In the event you are not a computer techie, do not try to do a manual neat up of your computer. It is in your best interest to buy the program & then run it every time you notice your computer beginning to get sluggish again. You only require performing a maintenance procedure about every - days, & it only takes about minutes altogether to do each time. Of work, this relies on how much you browse on the Web, clicking here & there.

As an option, you can have a "computer nerd" you know or a computer service take care of this issue for you, but this might be, inconvenient & expensive. In the event you have already experienced a high level of frustration, then you can count on this happening again & again after you get your computer back from the service middle. Your computer is now at the point where a week's activity of clicks can trigger it back in to a semi stupor, acting like a turtle on either slow or cease. When this happens, you needn't take the computer back to the repair service. The inconvenience & cost won't make you a happy customer. In point of fact, you can expect this to happen around the 30 - 60 day time period. Again, the time interval will vary depending on your activity. In lieu, understand what causes the computer to slow down.

Why ought to taking your computer to a service middle be inconvenient? Well, it takes hard work & time to travel there & back, & you may not have the use of it for a couple of days. Then you require going, picking it up & returning. Meanwhile your computer will be open for others to view, which could be a sensitive issue for you. Is there sensitive knowledge on your computer that you don't require others to see? You may require downloading it to a thumb drive & deleting it on your computer. In the event you had to do this every 30 - 60 days, would this be an inconvenience for you?

There are several application development companies which have knowledge available on what the application tool will actually do to correct the issues. This knowledge is found as part of a free download. The huge majority of the application developers will let you download a trial version which will identify what could be issue areas within your computer. It is well worth the hard work & time to check them out. You don't must buy the product in order to check it.

Keep in mind that this issue is different from a computer virus issue which regularly times can be malicious in nature. There is other application tools designed specifically for this. It is best to buy this type of application tool & have it jogging on your computer on a regular basis. Anti-virus application has a high success rate, but it is not 100%. Because new types of viruses will invade the Net every now & then, there is not a standard solution available until after the issue is realized. The new virus issues are step ahead of a solution hitting the market shelves.

Take control of your slow computer by following these simple recommendations. There is much that you can do by yourself as method maintenance to prevent a slow computer.