We’ve just been alerted by the Government that there are 2 new scams going around that may affect you right now.

1) ACMA warns against Ebola-themed scam emails
Emails sent from companies claiming to be from a medical or health organisation warn that there is currently a national medical crisis to Ebola. In the email is an attachment where they allege has a list of preventative measures against Ebola. However once the email attachment has been downloaded, it actually includes malware which may be used to manipulate and even intercept online banking transactions.

2) Jim’s Building Inspections
Part of the Jim’s Group franchise operation (think Jim’s Mowing), customer are advised to be wary of emails about inspections from Jim’s Building Inspections. The ABC recently reported that there was a security breach. Since then, current and former customers of Jim’s Building Inspections are receiving invoices that appear to come from the company’s legitimate email address. However once the invoice is downloaded onto your computer, ransomware is downloaded to their computer.

Ransomware is when people are locked out from their computer files and a ransom demand is issued in order to regain access to them. You can read more about it here.

In other news:

3) Facebook and LinkedIn login exploited
Be careful how you log into Facebook and LinkedIn at the moment. According to this article, cyber security researchers claim that attackers have successfully discovered a vulnerability in both social networks’ code. Attackers have embedded a malicious code into an image file which now has been successfully uploaded to these websites. The user is then forced to download the infected image which infects the computing device as soon as the downloaded file is clicked. Once this occurs, Locky ransomware is installed onto the user’s computer.