1. They will email you virus-infested email attachments from a nonexistent email address.  They tried this on the We The People computers and infected several of them.
2. They will use security scan or special-purpose software to attack software vulnerabilities in your computer and incapacitate it.  They did this to the We The People webserver during the last two major events, rendering the main display page as garbage characters.  They did it on November 14, 2002 for the Freedom Drive and also on January 7, 2003 for the first live Liberty Hour.  The way to prevent this is to ensure that you have the latest software updates installed on your computer at all times.  Check for new updates every week and install them.
3. They will email to you a an unsolicited offer for expensive commercial software at a radical discount.  In most cases, they will sell it to you in a regular box and a disk that look authentic, but is actually no.  They tried this on us but we didn't fall for it.
4. They will attempt to crack your administrator password over the internet in order to break into your computer.   Computers that have default passwords are very vulnerable to this.  For instance, if you are running Windows 2000 and you never bothered to rename your Administrator account to another name, then they will simply try a brute force attack using random passwords.  They can try millions of passwords over a period of only a few minutes at night while you are away from your computer.

Below is an example internet email advertisement along with a snapshot of their website showing you how sneaky they are.  Look at these and tell us what you think is seriously wrong with this picture?:

EMAIL ADVERTISEMENT:

Then if you click on their advertisement, you see their single-page website.  This was downloaded from http://protect2003.helpu.to/.

Click here to view

What's wrong with this picture, folks, is that:

• The company only sells ONE product.

• The price is WAY below the manufacturer's suggested retail price, and they don't explain why.

• The person selling the product is NOT identified.  They do not provide their phone number, mailing address, or name, for instance.  They don't even give a web link where they can be identified.

• There is a pop-up in a foreign language (chinese) in this case

• The product is a computer security product.

For any one of the above reasons, you should NEVER respond to the advertisement above.  It's obviously a scam and you are the prey.  The only way to find out more about scams like this is to do a query on their internet domain name.  For this, you have to use a network security product to trace the address.  We used McAfee Visual Trace and here is what it told us:

1. The company is in Hong Kong.

2. There is no information associated with the specific user.

3. The network service provider is as follows:

Now I don't expect that many of you have the expertise to figure all this out, even if you had the tools we have.  Nevertheless, we're trying to show you how scams happen and what to look for.  The easy way to prevent being burned by scams like this is:

• Do not buy ANYTHING that was solicited to you over the internet, and especially if it was done through anonymous email and if the website selling the product has no contact information.

• Do not give your credit card information to anyone either over the internet or over the phone unless they are a major provider of goods who have been around for several years and who you personally know because you have dealt with them for several years.

• Even with trusted sources for software, order all your security software directly from the vendor who sells them and not from third parties.

• Update your computer with the latest security patches on a regular basis.  Weekly is preferred.  If you are running Windows, the Windows Update utility on the Internet Explorer menu makes this really easy.  Just select Tools->Windows Update from the menu bar and follow the directions.

• Don't ever do anything illegal with your computer.

One last warning.  If you are stupid enough to not heed this advice, here is what will happen to you:

1. You will buy the software.  They will then know your credit card account number and can go to any credit bureau and find out your social security number and your credit history.

2. When the software arrives, you will login to your computer as administrator, giving the install program full administrator rights.

3. The install program will install spyware on your computer allowing someone to remotely control your computer or install any additional software they want.

4. The government will surveil EVERYTHING you do on your computer for several weeks using the spyware that installed with the product they sold you.  They will capture all your keystrokes, passwords, and log the websites you visit and all the email you send.  They may even download your address book.  This could become legal evidence to be used against you.

5. The government will download ANY of the data you have, including your financial files, your letters, databases, and website content.

6. After a few weeks of surveillance and theft of your private information, they will install a virus on your system and nuke EVERYTHING, causing your system to bluescreen and forcing you to completely slick it an start over by reinstalling everything.

They are playing for keeps, folks.  This is WAR.  Watch out!

Copyright Family Guardian Fellowship