Mails with serious content in an official tone, final notices or seemingly technical issues are enough to unsettle most readers. Often, this is an attempt at cheating you out of your money as I described last week. How can you catch on to the scammers, where do they give themselves away? The first step is to realize that your personal information is already in the wrong hands.
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Have you heard of Major Abacha Tunde? This brave Nigerian man has been spending his life on a Russian secret space station since 1990 and can only see his beloved home from orbit. Unfortunately, he cannot come home because his country doesn't have the foreign exchange to bring him back. Tragic isn't it? But you can help him and make it rich in the process! This good man naturally cannot spend his luxurious salary (no duty free shops in space) and Amazon only delivers world-wide. For only a few thousand Euros you can help Major Abacha Tunde get back to earth - and collect a giant yield. Don't believe me? Good for you! This is just one bizarre example of a phishing mail meant to cheat you out of your money. Read on to learn what phishing is all about!
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There I was standing in the flat countryside looking at my cellphone when - dare I write it - the unthinkable happened, I was offline. No business mails, no friends to chat with on Whatsapp and the blog was suddenly far far away. With mixed feelings, I looked around, saw cows, wind turbines, the gray sky and not a soul. No vibrations would announce the arrival of a new message, no delicate ping would direct my attention to important company news. Alone, offline with only the wind in my face and some unexpected peace and quiet.
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There's one piece of news that has our staff gnarl like a pack of raging dogs. It's usually something along the lines of "Antivirus XY has detected a virus in our program YZ". If bad vibes could be turned into energy, we'd be able to power all of Germany! We know the story all too well. At the risk of ruining the punchline: I can assure you that these are always false alerts, we don't distribute malicious code. That doesn't stop antivirus software developers, malware scanners, operating systems or even browsers (!) from happily raising hell whenever one of our applications or applications from other developers are about to be run. To make it brief, there's a race going on, a race for trust - and millions of Dollars.
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I'm not a very nostalgic person and I consider "Everything was better in the good old days." utter nonsense. For one thing, everything couldn't have been better because we were offline. But lately, I find myself pondering over how the Internet is changing us if it is changing us at all.
Admittedly, cussing online has been with us since the beginning of the Internet, preferably overblown and vulgar. Online, anything's up for a heated debate and, surprisingly, I've encountered the most heated discussions when the topic was either the keeping of animals or nutrition. How the most amicable of characters can turn into animals and start a holy war when discussing the keeping of cats or the benefits of a vegan lifestyle will most likely be comprehensible to like-minded spirits only. This has the potential to turn into fanaticism and rot people's souls.
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