Like many of us, I have been witnessing the absolute devastation that the earthquake in Haiti has caused. The pictures are shocking and point to a true struggle for those lucky enough to have survived. Obviously this imagery stirs an emotional response in us all and stimulates our desire to help.
Unfortunately, it also has an unwanted side-affect: it mobilizes crooks looking to capitalize on this human disaster.
Almost immediately after the earthquake struck, scammers were busy registering domain names and setting up fake donation web sites; ready to take your money, infect your computer with malware such as viruses, and otherwise benefit from the misery of others.
You've no doubt read, too, about the fact that Google and a number of other major companies, were infiltrated by malicious computer software. It has been widely reported that these companies were hacked by a state-sponsored operation originating in China. Not enough details are made available for this to be confirmed at the present time, but snippets of information are beginning to come to light. One such disclosure yesterday is sure to increase the Haiti Hazard for those of us looking to donate.
The code used to infect Internet Explorer in the "Operation Aurora" attacks against Google and others, was made public yesterday. This means that the scammers looking to leverage the Haiti situation for their personal gain, now have something extra to paste into their fake donation web site. They can compromise your computer just by having you visit their site, if you happen to be running Internet Explorer.
Keep in mind, too, that these crooks are busy 'gaming' the search engines to get their fake donation sites to appear in search results ahead of the legitimate ones.
So what do we have? We have fake donation sites being set-up... and we have a newly discovered mechanism to infect computers just by visiting a web site. Sounds like trouble.
Microsoft are busy working on a patch that will insulate Internet Explorer from this particular "Operation Aurora" issue. The publicly available code only works against Internet Explorer version 6... but the flaw is seemingly confirmed in all versions of Internet Explorer on all Windows platforms.
In light of all this, be extremely vigilant if you are planning on donating to the Haiti relief effort on-line. Only use well-recognized and legitimate donation sites (such as the Canadian Red Cross, etc.) And, if possible, use an alternate Web Browser, such as Mozilla Firefox... at least until Microsoft are able to release a fix for the current issue.
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