I’ve always said don’t blindly click on links from anyone, even friends. It doesn’t always pay off. One thing you have to weigh in on is if what they’ve sent you is par for their personality. If you start getting links from me offering knitting tips, dude, don’t open it. I tend to write something personal with joke emails to identify it as something from me. Of course I can’t stand most emails with jokes and my humor emails may tally up to 5 a year, if that.
So why should you not trust emails from trusted friends?
Some years ago I was introduced to the way of the malicious virus when my grandmother sent me an email that said (I forget what it actually said because of the trauma that was instilled upon me) and just click this link that “she” sent me. >click< Instead of a web page opening, my hard drive started to churn away pretty hard. In fact, for the lack of nothing that was popping up on my screen, any disk activity was not good disk activity. I’ve seen this before and knew I was in deep muck. I ripped the power cord out of the wall and that stopped the disaster and I was able to recover. Not everyone is as astute to their options or to the funny sounds that a computer makes when “it” starts to act up.
Case in point of late is a friend of mine recently received a Facebook link from a known friend. She clicked on the link. Subsequently, her account started spamming her own wall and contacting all the contacts in her friends list. It was a mess. We all got an email, then another, then another…. her list of friends were besieged by the crap that came from that link.
Eventually, sometime several hours later the account owner discovered the mishap and she contacted tech support and took care of it. Meanwhile, we all experienced several hours of “fun” emails from her. Hopefully no one else clicked on anything in the emails they got. But it is bound to happen because you trust the source.
You really need a keen eye towards your in-box, and maybe you won’t get tagged like my friend did!
Oh, and speaking of stupid links, watch yourself when you come across FaceBook fan pages or the like. Sometimes you’ll see a fan page offer something up and loads of people are posting comments. Or on Twitter you might search for a specific term. Then amongst the legitimate posts are insidious little links saying you can get a gift card for this that or the other thing for free… hello, $100 is never free. Don’t fall for it! Don’t. Fall. For. It!
Not you know!
About Bruce Simmons
I've been writing newsletters since 1999. Of late, I've been focusing on the entertainment consumer angle on mostly the sci-fi, fantasy and action genres of TV, movies and books.
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