Avoiding Viruses & Unknown Email attachments

What to do with an Attachment in an Email and Browsing the Internet
 
If the attachment to an email is a ZIP file or you are unsure who or why it was sent, delete the email. If it was important it may get sent again or they will ring you. If it was someone you know who sent the email, RING them and ask whether they sent the email.
 
If you are still too curious to do the above and you open the zip attachment you may see the contents has an icon of a Word document, a PDF, a JPG or a SCR screen saver. Look at the suffix (the last three letters after the dot in the filename) within the zip file. If it is an .EXE, .COM, .JS, .SCR or anything that is not a .DOC .XLS or .PDF then it WILL be a virus. If you open this file you WILL be infected.
 
Lately, there have been examples of emails being sent that have a virus embedded in other attachment suffixes - including .DOC attachments. These attachments also contain the virus, and WILL destroy your business. If you don't recognise the name of the sender, or there is no reasonable explanation of the contents of the attachment then it will most likely be a virus.
 
Do NOT get sucked in by free vouchers, Australia Post, Fedex, DHL deliveries, Tax Office refunds, Bank emails, refunds, invoices, credit notes, or ANYTHING you were not expecting. These criminals rely on your inquisitiveness to see what is inside. The virus attachment (the ZIP) is not necessarily the virus, it is the file inside the ZIP.
 
You are not alone with this problem of virus attachments, it is happening everywhere and you CANNOT rely on your anti-virus software to pick up all viruses. If it is a brand new virus, the criminals would have ensured that no anti-virus product could pick it up.
 
This is called a day ZERO virus and will take all anti-virus products a couple of days to recognise the virus (through its updates) and be able to detect and delete it.
 
The same can also be true of unsolicited emails that have no attachments but have WEBSITE LINKS you can click on for more information. If you click on these links you WILL also be infected by the website you are directed to. When you are infected, you will NOT know it has happened. The last thing a virus maker wants to do is to alert you that you are infected.
 
Please be EXTRA vigilant about email attachments, links and browsing the Internet in general. The word is that 1 in 1000 websites (even some legitimate ones) is infected and just by you visiting the site you could become infected.
 
You are not alone with this problem of virus attachments and DO NOT trust your anti-virus program to safeguard you 100% of the time. The anti-virus companies have to know about a brand new virus, find a detection mechanism for it and release a fix.
 
To give you an example of what can happen, I have one company that was infected with the CRYPTO virus (also known as ransomware) that not only infected a single computer but every file on their network server. It went through every document, spreadsheet, picture, pdf file, drawing and any other editable file and scrambled them with an algorithm that only the criminals know how to de-scramble. It infected 500,000 files. There is NO way we can fix this encryption to retrieve the files. They are LOST forever unless you have a backup. The criminals leave you a note to request $5,000-$10,000 to reverse some documents but then continue on forever requesting more and more money to decrypt a few more files. It never ends.
 
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED, please be careful.