How to Protect Yourself Against Scams?

The world is more and more complicated to live, everyone realizes it. On the Internet, we sometimes feel like we are in the middle of a battlefield and we don't know how to protect ourselves against the myriad threats. Small survival guide in several parts ...

Your beloved Panoptinet site is not immune to attacks, far from it. Protecting it against flooding attempts, malicious content in comments and keeping it in working order is an ongoing struggle. This activity leaves us too little time to enrich the content of the site. Alas.

From the moment a site obtains certain popularity, which is the case of Panoptinet with more than 7.7 million users since its creation, it becomes the target of spammers and scammers of all kinds. Make no mistake, the target is always you: the readers. The site is then one of the vectors of an attack.

We are not going to make a list of the attacks that target you but, over time, give you as many keys as possible to help you protect yourself. And yes, the bad news is that when it comes to cybersecurity, as in all areas of security, only you really have the power to protect yourself ...

To get started, let's take a look at the article comments. Over the past 12 months, this site received a total of 4,400 comments, of which 99.8% were spam. Most of them were deleted, but the moderator had to intervene several times to remove the residual spam.

Let's take a closer look at one of the more recent spam emails

This post is SPAM, so it looks like a friendly comment. Worse is a phishing attempt. What tells us about its spam character? Two things:

Two things :

• The keyword "  torrent  "
• Url

Why is a Torrent Not Good?

The problem is not related to torrent, which is also a very interesting transfer system, it is rather the relationship between the antivirus proposed in the commentary and the torrent platform. To put it simply, no antivirus vendor will provide torrent software. Free Antivirus software, can only be downloaded from the publisher's website.

What's the URL?

Its form to begin with: https, it looks good though ... But www99 already a lot less well.

To avoid confusion, serious companies such as antivirus vendors adopt simple terminology when downloading their software. 

Second clue, the most important: the domain name is  zippyshare.com … What relationship can there be between a download platform like zippyshare ? Answer: a scammer who tries to make you download a virus.

Among the classic cases, you may be tempted to click on a link bringing you to your bank's page. 

What Risks?

If you downloaded this file, you are infected with a virus, possibly a Trojan horse or worse, ransomware. You have to install a real antivirus as soon as possible.

In Summary 

Here are the most obvious clues that will help you adopt safe driving in all circumstances:

• If this is a link to download something: do not click on it.
• If you're interested in the software, do a Google search but don't click on the link.
• Always check the match between the subject of the link and the URL.
• Report a comment like this as abusive to help us eliminate it.
• Be wary of a link, look for proof of its good faith before clicking.

What Else?

There are many other risks and techniques to protect yourself and we will help you protect yourself, you will learn to recognize them.

Among other things, beware of people who supposedly work at Interpol … (Interpol is an international organization that allows the police to collaborate with each other. They do not maintain a relationship with users).

We have placed a filter which should automatically remove all comments related to Interpol, but there may still be some from the past or future, so be careful!