Despite the multiple protection systems that we have today, computer viruses (as well as their variants, such as Malware, Trojans, etc.) continue to be a problem in modern computing, and you should know that the source of infection Number one is email . So, if you receive an email with an attached file, in this article we are going to help you know if the sender is legitimate and if it is safe to open what they have sent you or not.
It really sucks if your PC gets infected with some kind of virus, and not only because you might be forced to format your PC to get rid of it, but also because you might lose your files and documents, and you might even spread the virus . to other PCs on the network and to other devices. For this reason, it is always a very good idea to take some precautions to avoid getting infected rather than relying solely on any antivirus software you may have.
Attachment Precautions
Let’s deal with those suspicious emails that include attachments first. The vast majority of email clients (including webmail) have their own protection systems, such as the one that the most popular of them has: GMail . If you already see a yellow or red warning that is telling you that there may be problems… pay attention to it.
However, these protection systems are not infallible (just like the antivirus software that you may have installed on your own, not even Windows Defender (and more so if you do not keep Windows updated), so there are a series of precautions that you must take, and the most important of them is that you have common sense These are our recommendations:
- Check the name and email address : do you know the sender? Were you waiting for an email from him? If not, start with mistrust. There are many malicious emails that pass themselves off as “official” accounts, and for example you could receive an email that appears to be from the Post Office or the Civil Guard, but when you look at the email address it has an @outlook.com domain, or a unintelligible name that, of course, seems unofficial.
- Check spelling and grammar – Many malicious emails have been literally translated using Google Translate. This means that the text that will reach you will not be quite right, with errors in grammar and maybe even spelling, and that they seem to have been written by a machine or by a foreign person using a translator, and not by a native person. Bad business.
- Recover your password? Most malicious emails aim to steal your credentials, so if you get a supposed email that urges you to recover your password but you didn’t ask for it, it’s probably malicious.
As you can see, basically our tips to know if an email is safe are related to having common sense, and not getting involved in opening attached files or clicking on links without first making sure that everything is in order.
Having no attachments does not mean the email is secure.
We wanted to leave a specific section for this, because in fact today most fraudulent emails do not have attachments, but instead hide links and want you to click on them. These links could take you to phishing sites, virus downloads or pages that emulate password recovery websites and, when you enter your credentials, they will steal them.
NEVER click on a link in an email without first checking if it’s safe, and for that the best thing you can do is just hover your mouse over it and see where it goes. Take a look at this example:
As you can see, the link supposedly takes us to an MP3 audio file, but when we put the mouse over it, in the bar below we get an address that has little to do with it, and in fact it takes us to a web page that, in all likelihood, it will be malicious.