Hackers and phishers are taking advantage of your need for election news by using President-elect Barack Obama’s name to get you to click on links and run programs that will infect your machine with malware.

There has been a great deal of news of financial institution failures. Many banks have been swallowed up by larger institutions and mergers seem to be occurring almost on a weekly basis. Unfortunately, the troubled banking situation has opened up a door for Internet scams and phishing attacks.

A computer virus has been circulating as an email attachment. The “From” address indicates that the email came from a UPS representative. The virus is a zip file attachment with the names of “ups_invoice.zip” or “ups_tracking.zip”, or some variance thereof. The email is usually found to have the title of “UPS Tracking Number xxxxx” and states that a package you sent was not able to be delivered and that you are required …

A friend recently asked me a question about email messages. He wanted to know why he was receiving notifications that his email was “undeliverable” to person “xyz” when he doesn’t even know “xyz” and insists he never sent the message. So what happened? Did his computer get hacked? Did he get a virus? Probably not. This is a symptom of a clever trick used by spammers.

We’ve all gotten them. That email that a co-worker or friend forwards to us about about a sick child who wants to break a world record for receiving the most postcards, or perhaps you’ve seen the email urging you to quickly put your mobile phone number on the “Do not call” registry or else you will start receiving telemarketing calls on your cell.

If you like to be mobile with your computer, then you probably have used public Wi-Fi or perhaps even a pay-per-use Wi-Fi hotspot. If so, then you should be careful about how you read email while connected to one of these public access points. Most public Wi-Fi providers do not require you to make a secure connection to their wireless router. This leaves your transmissions easily readable by eavesdroppers. You can protect yourself with a very simple change to your web browsing behavior.

We get spam because it works. The reason spam works is really just a numbers game. A spam email campaign that targets 10 million email addresses, can lead to 100,000 to 500,000 or so clicks.