If you’ve got a weird-looking email from Australia Post sitting in your inbox telling you you’ve got a package to pick up, maybe ignore that bad boy + chuck it straight in the bin. If you’ve already clicked it, abort! Abort!
Online crims are using some old-school email phishing techniques to get people to download ransomware – a particularly tricky piece of software that locks computer files, allowing the distributor to demand money to unlock them.
The Australia Post one is particularly devious: it sends you a confirmation email for package delivery, complete with personal details ripped from your social media, inviting you to download and print it. Once you do, it runs a JavaScript code that infects your computer with the virus.
Ideally you would be aware that you hadn’t ordered anything, but we’ve all been there.
The Institute For Critical Infrastructure, an American nonprofit dedicated to research to protect national infrastructure from failure and attacks, reckons that ransomware is gonna be a reasonably big problem in 2016. These doomsaying tech predictions often are a bit overexaggerated, but you gotta be sure with this shit.
Australia Post have made it pretty clear that they’ll leave you one of those little letterbox cards if they miss you for a package – they’re the most frustrating things in the world, but it’s better than an email.
Also, general rule: don’t download weird shit from unknown or odd-looking emails ya dingus, or this will be your computer:
Source: Sydney Morning Herald / IFCI.
Image: Getty Images / Peter Parks.
