Protecting Yourself Online

Monday, 24 October 2016 at 11:23

Oxford OPP are warning residents about the potential dangers of email attachments.

Oxford OPP are preaching online safety during Cyber Security Awareness Month.

This weeks tip is to protect yourself from dangerous emails. Email attachments can be very dangerous and should never open one from someone you don't know. They could be phishing for your personal information and are often a gateway to install malware, viruses, worms and trojans. Sometimes these emails are disguised as letters of reference, resumes or information requests. They target businesses that are in the hiring process. This is also known as “spearphishing campaigns and they have impacted high-value corporate and governments have been targeted through email attachments to take advantage of previously-unknown security vulnerabilities.

Police say the easiest way to identify whether a file is dangerous is by its file extension, which tells you the type of file it is. For example, a file with the “.exe” file extension is a Windows program and should not be opened. Many email services will block such attachments. Other file extensions that can run potentially harmful code include “.msi”, “.bat”, “.com”, “.cmd”, “.hta”, “.scr”, “.pif”, “.reg”, “.js”, “.vbs”, “.wsf”, “.cpl”, “.jar” and more.

In general, you should only open files with commonly-used attachments that you know are safe. For example, “.jpg” and “.png” are image files and should be safe. Document files extensions such as “.pdf”, “.docx”, “.xlsx”, and “.pptx” and should also be safe — although it’s important to have the latest security patches so malicious types of these files can’t infect systems via security holes in Adobe Reader or Microsoft Office.

Deputy OPP Commissioner Rick Barnum says you need to safeguard your inbox.

"Insecure, infected or unencrypted email attachments can risk injecting a number of information and data security threats to your home or workplace environments. Your personal information and business systems need to be safeguarded and it starts right at your inbox."