How many emails do you get per day?  How many email addresses do you have?  I've got three mailboxes that I check on a daily basis and there are at least another two that I don't check all the time and I get hundreds of email messages every single day.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.   And, there's no such thing as truly free freeware.  You may not pay the author of the freeware, but you could be paying for it in other ways.  While there are some great freeware programs, there's often a catch when it comes to downloading or installing or updating.

I got a fraudulent email pretending to be from PayPal today.  Upon reading it, it was pretty clear to me that was spam - the punctuation, the grammar, the lack of personalization and that it was sent to a non-existent email account all added up to one thing:  SPAM!  I've pasted a copy of the email at the end of this post so you can see for yourself!

Upon Googling "PayPal" and "phishing" I found myself on PayPal's site and this neat little quiz.

I understand if getting an email that has any reference to taxes makes your heart stop, it's the easiest way to get my attention, that's for sure!  But, really, would a tax authority send you a notice via email?  Take a moment to look at the email below and see if you can pick out the red flags.

I found this email in my spam filter this afternoon.  (Thanks, SmarterMail!).   It's another attempt to take advantage of the fact that people are busy.  We're bombarded by incoming email - from customers, coworkers, vendors - and sometimes, we forget to think before we click.

The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) issued a recent advisory warning that cybercriminals will very likely attempt to use the Philippines Typhoon disaster as part of email scams and phishing campaigns.

Phishing attacks attempt to use high-profile events, including natural disasters in their subject line, to get victims to open an email and click on links contained in the message.

Cybercriminals pushing rogue antivirus software now have a better chance of infecting systems with malware, following detection of their use of stolen digital certificates.

Here's another example of an spam email designed to take advantage of us busy people!  We use a VoIP phone system here and when someone leaves a voicemail, or sends a fax, we get an email alert with the message attached.  So, it's not unusual to get an email like this one.

This week at Virtual Density we launched our Lunch and Learn series.  Today and Tuesday, the topic was 'Self Defense for Small Business' and one of the topics we talked about was scam emails.  No sooner did we finish up this afternoon and I returned to my desk to find this email in my spam filter.