Twitter DM Spam: "Hello Somebody Is Saying Horrible Things About You"

Over the years, there have been so many Internet hoaxes that it has made the act of spreading helpful and cautionary advice to fellow users quite difficult.  However, when it comes to Twitter direct message “spam”, this is something that can be acted on.

Twitter is great for being in the “now”, and keeping up to date with the odd bit of humour in a hundred and forty characters or less – but it’s also commonly targeted by the bad guys who like to test out phishing scams and new malicious links.

Phishing attacks have afflicted regular Twitter users since its inception, spreading mostly through the use of direct messages (DMs) that are sent from already compromised Twitter accounts.

You might receive a direct message from someone you follow that says something like “Hello somebody is saying horrible things about you…” or “There is a rumour going around about you…” – and in each case, these will be accompanied with a malicious URL just waiting to be clicked on.

If you happen to click on the malicious URL, you may well end up at what looks like the official Twitter website, telling you that your login has “timed out” and that you must provide your Twitter username and password. Once these details are entered into the fake site, they are sent directly to the bad guys!

As each new person unsuspectingly responds and is tricked into providing their Twitter username and password, their account is then used to send more direct messages to the next set of victims, and so forth. This is how the direct message spam spreads.

So, how can you help protect your fellow Tweeps from direct message spam?

• If you receive a suspicious direct message from a person on Twitter that you follow, you should absolutely let them know! In some cases the person may not follow you back, so just make a public reply to advise them of the message you have received, and recommend they change their account password.
• If this happens to you, and someone advises they have received direct message spam from you, check your direct messages to confirm this is the case. If it is, change your Twitter password immediately.

While you’re at it, also make sure you review application permissions that you might have previously allowed in your Twitter settings. This will go a long way in protecting your online privacy even further.

Until next time, stay safe out there!

For some reason, I found the idea that the era of the stereotypically techno-challenged mum might have passed to be particularly disconcerting. Who would have thought a few decades ago that kids would be online social media adults by the age of 13, and that Mum would be T-Hubbing through the web in the bath?? My generation helped kick-start the Information Age, and now we’re getting lost in it.

So, in order to make ourselves feel better, a colleague and I went around the AVG (AU/NZ) office asking staff what Digital Type their mums fall into, and whether they could share any funny, heartwarming or embarrassing stories with us to help us in our denial. The response was overwhelming:

Mum Type 1 – The Facebook Cowgirl

The Facebook Cowgirl is a creature of irresponsible whimsy, who signs up to Facebook just for kicks and proceeds to blithely post personal messages on her kids’ walls for the whole world to see. A recent AVG study found that 44% of mums and dads think poking through their teenagers’ facebook profiles is a justified parenting technique, but we think the tables should be turned. Mum, pre-pubescent nudity might be acceptable on Polaroid in the family photo-album, but making my 2 year old buttocks your Facebook profile picture is just plain wrong. We believe that our CTO Kevin Yank’s mother-in-law may qualify:

Mum Type 2 – The Gadget Queen

The Gadget Queen has a weakness for bright lights and technological wizardry. Active and inquisitive by nature, she is particularly receptive to all types of change and engages online communities with vigour and technical aplomb. The Gadget Queen is a stereotype buster – she blogs, tweets, and participates heavily in social media. Controversially (and possibly driven by jealously), some of the Gadget Queen’s contemporaries believe that her mastery of new technologies is born of having more time and money than good sense. Our Commercial Manager Shayne Tilley’s mum has a veritable cornucopia of gadgets:

• Laptop
• Desktop
• iPad
• iPod
• Kindle
• T-Box
• Foxtel
• Playstation
• Nintendo DS

An impressive collection in anyone’s book (or Kindle title).

Mum Type 3 – The iPhone Auto-Correct Poster Mum

This mum is probably the most adorable of all our digital mums. In order to stay up to date with her loved ones, family members and Gadget Queen friends, the iPhone Auto-Correct Poster Mum is prepared (often at great personal cost to herself) to blaze such a trial of technological incompetence across the touchscreen device universe that not even iPhone’s infamous auto-correct system is able to intervene. Our Email Marketing Specialist Lexi has let us into her world:

1. My mum only learned how to text a couple of years ago. She got off to a bit of a shaky start…	2. It turned out that question marks weren’t her only problem. The delete key proved elusive…
3. Numbers also turned out to be an issue, which got awkward when discussing my interstate travel arrangements…	4. Mum’s gotten a lot better… but she’ll still sometimes let her fingers run away from her. Especially if the cricket is on…

[Ed. - Lexi's mum is spot on, Phil Hughes is only good for catching practice. Sorry Phil.]

Mum Type 4 – The Cyber Banshee

The Cyber Banshee attempts to drive the family computer as she would her cream coloured Honda Civic, making her the web 2.0 equivalent of the pioneering 80s Road Rage Mum. She expects instant gratification from any technological device, and if she does not receive it (example: her PC’s mouse fails to respond to a particularly clumsy right-click attempt), that device liable to be torn from whichever rage-worn socket it was connected to and hurled across the main living area. Fortunately, the Cyber Banshee doesn’t hold a grudge and will readily accept responsibility for her short temper and apologise to the device as it if was a human being. Our Web Designer Stu Lawson recalls:

Mum Type 5 – The Laurel Rester

The Laurel Rester is so proud to have learnt a new piece of technology that she will sit on it for years, to the exclusion of all alternatives. In her opinion, it is better to spend time on perfecting a known skill than it is to waste time on new technology that might turn out to be a passing fad anyway. Our Security Advisor Michael McKinnon’s mum is a prime example:

Mum Type 6 – Curiosity Grandma

Curiosity Grandma (God bless her) is a special case. Although her advanced years present her with a vast pool of wisdom upon which to draw, she nonetheless displays all the self control of a 5 year old girl when in front of the computer (or “picture wireless”). Despite knowing full well that Johnson Emmanuel from the Nigerian Continental Banking Conglomerate is a malicious fabrication, she still feels the need to enter into unsolicited email correspondence with Mr Emmanuel with her customary good cheer and impeccable manners. Our Reseller Marketing Coordinator, Jenna has dobbed in her Grandma:

Mum Type 7 – Acronym Confusion Mum (ACM)

ACM has a left-side oriented brain. She has no problems whatsover with the technology or processes involved in its use, she just has trouble keeping up with the jargon and terminology, especially SMS acronyms. A member of our accounts team Shani Price reports that for months her mum had been answering all her texts with LOL. When Shani quite understandably began to take offense, she discovered that her mum had mistakenly thought that LOL stood for “Lots of Love”.

Mum Type 8 – Technical Support Mum

Our final Mum Type is very dear to the hearts of our Technical Support team. Technical Support Mum is the long-suffering wife or partner of Dinosaur Dad, who is unable to properly operate the family computer but refuses to admit this fact to anyone, including himself. This leads our Technical Support team to spend hours on the phone to Technical Support Mum as she bravely tries to relay orders to Dinosaur Dad, who, operating in proxy mode, is too proud or stubborn to relinquish his seat in front of the PC. A typical transcript:

Which is your favourite Mum Type? Do any of your mums fit the above? Do you have any new prototypes for us to disseminate? Are you a mum who would like to put the heat back onto your kids? Let us know on Facebook!

People are using the site to do everything from plan their wedding to collecting interesting infographics. Best of all, you don’t have to “follow” other users to see what they’re doing on Pinterest – it’s a big, happy community of amazing images from all over the world.

Unfortunately, that also means that it’s a bit of a fresh paradise for scammers. Sure, there are scams on Facebook and Twitter as well, but Facebook scams generally work by getting people to spread scam links to their friends, which more and more people are getting savvy about spotting.

As for Twitter, people generally only see tweets from whoever they’re following, so scams tend to be spread either through glaringly obvious unsolicited direct tweets to a user, or when an account gets hacked and the user’s followers are promptly spammed.

With Pinterest, however, dodgy pins can be seen – and clicked – by any Pinterest user. A good example can be found on Mashable, where they identified a “pinning” scam, offering Pinners a $500 gift card for UK clothing chain H&M.

In this case, users were encouraged to “re-pin” the image (i.e. pinning it to their own Pinterest boards, ensuring that it in turn will be seen by even more users), before being redirected to a page that claimed the H&M gift card offer was “not available” to them. To obtain a different offer, users could start doing shonky marketing quizzes – some of which are simply fronts for obtaining people’s private contact details.

So how can these Pinterest scams be avoided? As always, the first rule of staying safe online is simple: use your common sense! Don’t click on anything that sounds too good to be true, because chances are it probably is.

If you do click on an errant pin and end up on a page that doesn’t look quite right, get out of there straight away. Companies giving out special deals online are seeking to bring people to their own website – if you end up on some dodgy-looking page, chances are the offer that brought you there isn’t the real deal.

Also, make sure that your online security software is up to date and active on your computer, so that if you do click on a poisoned link, your system is ready to neutralise it before any damage is done to your PC.

To make sure that your AVG software is up to date, simply go to your Taskbar and click Start -> All Programs -> AVG 2012 -> AVG User Interface. Then, when the User Interface window has opened up, Click on Tools -> Update. If you need a hand updating your AVG software, don’t hesitate to contact our Technical Support Team. Of course, your software also does update automatically to ensure you are always protected from the latest online threats.

Don’t stress too much – most scams can be avoided by simply steering clear of anything that sounds a bit suspicious. If in doubt, make contact with the company offering the special deal and just double-check that it’s all above board.

Thanks for reading, and until next time, stay safe online!

If you’ve come across what you believe may be a scam on Pinterest (or any other social network), tell us about it by leaving a comment below or posting on our Facebook wall. We’d love to hear from you! 

That said, Facebook has led to some pretty dark situations for some young people out there, and it’s a good idea to know how to avoid something bad happening to you.

To help you out, here are AVG (AU/NZ)’s top three tips for safe Facebooking.

1. Keep your profile as private as possible

You wouldn’t leave your wallet lying open, showing your personal information to the world, and the same should apply to your Facebook page.

Fortunately, Facebook has good privacy settings that are easy to customise – even if not everyone knows about them. Information like your date of birth, your contact details and where you go to school should never, never be publically visible. It’s also a good idea to restrict access to your photos and posts. Leaving stuff like this public makes it too easy for someone to find you in the “real world”, and it may not always be someone trustworthy.

A good rule of thumb is to make sure that as many of your settings as possible restrict your profile to “friends only.” That means choosing options that make your personal information, “about me” stuff, photos and posts available only to your friends to see, not “everyone.” You can update your Facebook privacy settings here, and while you’re at it, you should also check out AVG (AU/NZ)’s post about Facebook apps and clean up those privacy settings too!

2. Don’t “friend” people you don’t know

It’s always flattering to get a friend request, especially if the person who wants to add you seems interesting. But adding people you don’t know means that you’re opening up big chunks of your personal information to strangers who may not be who they say they are. That especially applies to people who don’t share any “mutual friends” with you – they could literally be anyone.

If you get a request from someone with whom you have some mutual friends, ask them about the person who added you. They should be able to help you figure out if the request is legitimate.

If you get a request from someone you’re not sure you know but think you might, send them a message asking when you met them. You don’t have to be rude about it – just something along the lines of, “Hey, not sure I recognise your name. Can you remind me how we met?” will do fine. If they really do know you, they should be able to give you an answer that explains your connection. If they don’t reply, or send a response that makes no sense, you’re probably better off without their “friendship”.

3. Turn off the “Where are you?” feature when you post

Facebook are constantly adding new features, and sometimes they’re so small you don’t even notice them. For example, a little while ago, they added a location feature that says where you are at the time of posting. (This is different to the old “checking in” function on Facebook – this new feature meant that even a regular status would be tagged with the words, “Near Auckland” or similar.)

Giving people too much knowledge of your whereabouts isn’t safe – you don’t want anyone glancing at your profile to know exactly when you’re at school, home or out. Remember, even if your privacy settings are really good, you don’t know who your Facebook friends are allowing to access their profile. So, when you post a status update, just click the little “x” next to the location icon to turn off this particular setting. It’s cool to tell people what you’re up to, but maybe don’t let them know too much about where you are.

Basically, safe Facebooking is about controlling who sees your personal information online, and how much of it they can access. There’s nothing wrong with having a Facebook profile, but use it to share your life with genuine friends – not strangers and scammers.

We’re always sharing simple and useful security tips via the AVG (AU/NZ) Facebook page. Connect with us to join the conversation – we’d love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading, and stay safe online!

Would We All Be Streakers Without Privacy?

In a world without privacy surely our lives would be laid bare for all to see, and much like a naked “streaker” running across a football field, you’d have nothing to hide, right?  What a world that would be!

However, the reality in society is that whether you like it or not we’re judged (or we feel judged by others). And so there becomes a notion that we should hide certain parts of ourselves from being visible – which is essentially the definition of privacy – an ability to seclude information from others.

The subsequent need for privacy from each of us tends to be very personal and extremely subjective (in both online and offline environments). Everyone provides a different view of what they think is worth hiding, and what isn’t, and this is why some people can strip off naked and run across a football ground in the middle of a game, and why the rest of us would prefer to remain fully clothed; watching it unfold as the police chase them across the field!

One thing that does unite us all when it comes to privacy, however, is the need to prevent identity theft. This is where we all share similar perceptions about what it is we’re protecting, and why.

We have posted before about the need to protect your name and other personal details by following simple tips - to avoid becoming an easy target for a criminal. It is worth reflecting on these tips to ensure you are doing everything you can to protect your identity.

Until next time, stay safe out there – and keep your clothes on!

This post has been written in support of Privacy Awareness Week 2012, which is runs from 29 April to 5 May and is about promoting awareness about privacy rights and responsibilities in the community. For more information, visit www.privacyawarenessweek.org.  

We’re not saying that adding an app to your profile is bad, as long as it’s clear what profile information the app can see and what the app might be doing with it. For example, apps like Where I’ve Been or the Washington Post Reader allow users to share news about their travels or stories they read with their friends. That’s a pretty good way to share information with your network!

As long as users note the conditions listed when consenting to the app installation (such as that the app will be allowed to post automatically to your wall), it’s an informed choice to add the app or reject it if you’re not comfortable with their terms and conditions.

What’s the harm in adding an app?

Apps that clearly state what information they can see on your profile and what they can do with that information are generally fine, as long as you’re comfortable with them.

However, there can be repercussions from adding an app to your profile. For example, an app called Lover of the Day surfaced a couple of years ago. It was one of those apps that you added, and it automatically posted to your wall a “lover of the day”, selected at random from your friends.

Sounds harmless, if a little dumb, right? Sure, until a high school student who was Facebook friends with his female teacher added the app. The teacher appeared on the student’s wall as his “lover of the day”. He was 13, she was 33. Suddenly the harmless app had the potential to end a career.

For people who installed this app, it could see a huge amount of information about them. It could see their friends; it could post automatically to their profiles; it posted information about their friends (such as names and profile pictures) without those friends’ consent.

Less scrupulous developers have even been known to sell profile information to marketing companies; other apps have been found to be vehicles for malware, installing suspicious programs on the computers of those who add them.

As you can see, adding an app isn’t always just innocent fun. And even if you’ve been vigilant about them lately, chances are there are apps attached to your Facebook and Twitter accounts that still have access to your profile information. The solution? Protect your online privacy and clean ‘em out!

Cleaning out your Facebook apps

It’s easy to manage and delete apps on Facebook once you know where to look. Just head to this link: https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy&section=apps (and log in to your account, if prompted). Once on this page, select “Edit Settings” on the right of “Ads, Apps and Websites”.

You should then see the following:

You can see your full list of apps by clicking on the “Edit Settings” button (the top button on the right-hand side of the page). You’ll see all the apps currently active on your Facebook account in a big list.

You can click on the “Edit” links to see information about the app, including what it is authorised to obtain from your profile. You can also check who can see posts and activity from the app and what kind of notifications it is authorised to send you. If the app is an old one that you don’t use any more, or you would prefer that it not have access to your profile information, you can delete it by clicking “Remove app”.

Checking up on your Twitter apps

Twitter apps aren’t quite as widespread as their Facebook counterparts, but it’s still a good idea to check which ones have access to your profile information.

You can view the applications on your Twitter account by going here: https://twitter.com/settings/applications (and signing in if prompted).

You’ll see a list of apps that can access your Twitter account.

You can delete any apps that you don’t want accessing your account by clicking their “Revoke Access” button (found on the right-hand side of the app information).

You’ll also see instructions for revoking access from apps installed on other devices, such as iOS apps, by clicking on the relevant links.

Final note

We’re certainly not suggesting that all social media apps are bad! There are plenty out there that are useful, fun or informative, and that offer clear privacy policies and use the minimum amount of your account data to function.

However, most of us have a few skeletons hanging around our closets – old, unused apps that don’t add anything to our social media experience, and instead place our profile information and online privacy at risk, should the data ever fall into unsavoury hands.

Basically, we think it’s a good idea to delete any applications that you no longer use. There’s no point giving someone access to your information if you’re not monitoring the situation or getting anything out of it in return. Instead of “growing” your online crops, we suggest doing a bit of app-pruning instead.

This post has been written in support of Privacy Awareness Week 2012, which is runs from 29 April to 5 May and is about promoting awareness about privacy rights and responsibilities in the community. For more information, visit www.privacyawarenessweek.org.    

The infected version has been found to contain a Trojan, detected as “Andr/KongFu-L”.

While the imitation appears to be fully functional, it is actually manipulating what is known as the “GingerBreak” exploit to install malware onto the unsuspecting victim’s device.

What does the Trojan do?

Once installed, the malware will endeavour to download and install additional malware onto the compromised Android™ device.

After being successfully downloaded and installed (without the user’s knowledge), the device effectively becomes part of a botnet, under the control of malicious hackers. They can therefore proceed to download further code to the device at will, or even send the browser to specific URLs.

How to stay safe

There are a number of ways you can keep your Android™  device safe, but here are our top 5 tips:

1. Avoid installing any applications that are not downloaded from the official Android™ Marketplace. If you don’t know who made it, it is not wise to trust it.

2. Don’t install anything that sounds too good to be true! Examples may include “free ring tones” or “free wallpaper”. Always be sure that what you are downloading is legitimate.

3. Think twice before “rooting” or “jailbreaking” your device to allow a lower level of protection than the standard Android™ OS release.

4. Always keep your phone updated with the latest operating system. This will ensure your device is as safe as possible. We advise checking for system updates once a month.

5. Install an anti-virus app on your device, and ensure you check all the settings; be aware of what data you receive (i.e. web surfing, text messaging and real-time scanner). We also suggest scanning the device regularly, but most importantly, keeping it up to date!

AVG Mobilation is one of the most popular anti-virus apps for Android™ devices, and it is available as both a commercial and free solution. Give it a try!

Seen below, the scam is similar to previous examples we’ve observed to be popping up over the last year or so.

However, in a more recent sample sent to us from a member of the AVG (AU/NZ) community, we also noted an attached “HTML” file called Apple_Discount_Form.html - which can be opened in a web browser.

When the attached file is opened (which I’m about to tell you NOT to do!), a form appears asking the recipient to fill out their personal and credit card information, before clicking a button to submit and receive a “100 AU$ Apple Discount Card” (this will not happen by the way).

At a glance, savvy users might recognise the form as a scam – by identifying some of the details a form of this nature should NEVER ask for. These include:

• Date of birth
• Driver’s license number
• Mother’s maiden name

Why ask for your mother’s maiden name?

In the hands of an identity thief posing as you, this information could be used to answer one of the most commonly used “security questions” on the Internet.

The most common phishing scams usually ask for your password – yet here, it is a clear case of the scammers attempting to use a more subtle approach; that is, if they can trick you into providing some of your personal information, perhaps they can recover and reset your password instead!

But they don’t ask for your email address, you say?

Well, this is where it gets very sneaky…

Embedded in the attached form there is a hidden field that already has your email address encoded in it. In our sample, it looked like this (the email address is encrypted in the gibberish value):

Importantly, the thing to understand here is that this phishing scam was specifically crafted with a uniquely attached form created for each email address it was sent to.

The danger with opening an attachment such as a HTML file, is that just like a real web page, it can contain script and other code that if allowed to run, can give cybercriminals access to all sorts of data about you. For example:

• Your email address (in this case, it is already embedded in the form)
• The IP address of the computer or Internet connection you are using
• Information about your web browser, and which version you have
• A point of reference about the date and time you’ve opened the email
• …Plus a long list of other items, but I suspect you get the picture!

Even by opening what you might consider a “harmless” or “safe” file, this example highlights that it is important to realise the ramifications of what can potentially happen.

Therefore, for all emails you view as suspicious or spam, we suggest simply deleting them. It is also very wise to use an anti-spam solution, such as the one included in AVG Internet Security. This will prevent you from seeing such phishing emails in the first place!

For further tips on protecting yourself from phishing scams, check out another of our recent posts here.

If you’ve come across any other phishing emails you would like to share with the AVG (AU/NZ) community, post the details on our Facebook wall. We’d love to hear from you, and work together to keep everyone safe!    

Ransom and extortion in the physical world is usually a big deal in Australia – from the Arnott’s Biscuits scandals in the 90s to Madeleine Pulver’s recent fake-collar-bomb ordeal, we’ve been glued to the tube.

What is far less captivating, and what most Australians aren’t aware of, is the growing number of online exploits and extortion hoaxes that we are potentially exposed to every time we sit in front of our computers.

Ransomware, as the industry calls it, is most easily found when trawling the web for its less savoury elements. If you or someone in your family are prone to scouring disreputable sites for the latest unreleased episode of Dexter, or perhaps trying to find that elusive picture of Justin Bieber in the shower, you become a prime target!

Ransomware is most often a single web page that appears suddenly and won’t go away (no matter how many times you click on the little red X button!), designed to make the victim believe they have been caught doing something naughty or illegal. The ransomware will then attempt to have the victim pay a ‘fine’ or ‘reactivation’ fee (hush money, in effect) to regain control of their PC.

The following example from the UK shows a piece of ransomware ostensibly from the “Specialist Crime Directorate” that claims the victim’s PC has been used to view pornographic material:

Pages like this can be especially alarming, as they display information unique to your browsing session such as your IP address, your browser type or your operating system type. The intimidated victim pays 100 quid, and the stern looking Bobby in the fluro jacket lets them off with a warning.

Take it from us, this would NEVER happen legitimately. Online extortion is big business – as discovered in our most recent Community Powered Threat Report. The latest rash of ransomware scams are using the infamous “Blackhole” Exploit Kit, first developed in Russia a couple of years ago and readily available to cybercriminals on the black market.

The blackhole ransomware kit is designed to take advantage of unpatched exploits on your operating system or web browser and send you to the latest compromised site (or blackhole), that the bad guys have come up with.

So, what can you do to protect yourself from online hoaxes and ransomware? Here are the dos and don’ts:

1. Do keep your operating system and online applications up to date. Exploits to applications such as Adobe Reader and Java Runtime Environment are usually patched by the manufacturer as soon as they’re found, but this won’t help you if you shut down the update request notifications because you find them annoying.

2. Do treat the Internet with respect, and don’t expect it to be able to do the impossible for you. If you aren’t able to find a freely available DVD rip of the latest Sex and the City movie before it has even hit the cinemas, it’s because it doesn’t exist!

3. Do exercise a healthy dose of worldly cynicism. If a rogue website claims to have caught you with your “pants down” so to speak, and by some unkind miracle they actually are, it’s just a lucky guess.

4. Do always run a well respected, fully featured Internet Security suite with LinkScanner technology, such as AVG Internet Security. In most cases, you won’t even see the ransomware to begin with. In just one day in February last year, AVG detected and protected almost a million blackhole exploit attacks!

If you’ve encountered any blackhole ransomware yourself in recent times, let us know on Facebook or Twitter. We’d love to hear what happened and what you were accused of doing!

So far, over 500 Twitter accounts have clocked up over 4000 tweets of this spam message, and that number continues to rise rapidly – with compromised accounts tweeting roughly eight times per second.

If a user follows one of the infected links, they are prompted to conduct a “fast scan” of their system to remove discovered infections (which don’t really exist of course). Further, it has been observed that the malware that poses as the anti-virus updates itself every 3 to 6 hours to avoid detection.

Is this a new scam?

While this particular instance of spam is new, Twitter users have fallen prey to a number of fake anti-virus scams in the past.

Why is it so effective?

Spam is often seen to be more effective on Twitter due to the shortened URLs that are seen on the platform in abundance. Due to the 140 character limit, anyone wanting to share a link or a picture will usually use a link shortener.

Shortened URLs essentially hide the true identity of a link, and people are often too trusting when following them.

How can I stay safe?

If you see any tweets that warn of your computer being infected, simply ignore them.

It is also important to make sure you trust any links you follow on social networking sites, where malicious intent is rife, due to the high trust environment. We recommend only following a link if you implicitly trust the sender and it is addressed to you specifically.

If you are still not 100% sure about a link, try using a link scanner product. These check the safety of links before you click on them. AVG has a free LinkScanner available for download, and the component is also included in AVG Anti-Virus FREE and in each commercial security solution.

Finally, stay up to date with the latest threats and scams, by following our official (and safe!) Twitter account @avgaunz.