Never believe anything in emails

You should never believe anything that is written in an email. The reason is that it is so easy for someone to create a fake message that appears to be from someone else that you simply can't trust them. What you think is a message from your bank, MySpace, Facebook or wherever, could in fact be from a malicious person that is out to steal your username, passwords and anything else they can get you to reveal.


For example, there have been a couple of messages going around the internet recently that appear to be from MySpace and Facebook. The Facebook message says "Because of the measures taken to provide safety to our clients, your password has been changed. You can find your new password in attached document." You can be that the attached document is a virus or something that directs you to a website that infects your PC with a virus or asks for your login details. Don't open it. Just delete the email.

It's obviously fake, even though the sender looks like it is facebook.com. For a start, the greeting is "Hey mail," instead of referring to me by name. Spam and phishing messages never contain your name and the best they can do is to include the first part of your email address before the @. No first name and no last name.

The MySpace message says "Dear MySpace user! Please be informed that you are required to update your MySpace account. Please update your MySpace account by clicking here: http://accounts.myspace.com.iuuuujek.co.uk/msp/index.php?fuseacti..." Dear MySpace User is a dead giveaway, but the URL you have to click on is obviously wrong too. People read from left to right and the URL starts off OK and might look fine, but computers read URLs backwards from right to left and if you do this you will see that it's definitely not MySpace. It's not how URLs start that's important, it's how they end.

So when you get these emails, just delete them. And do the same with any other emails of a similar nature.