Over the past 20 years since the Internet has grown and developed, crackers and hackers have gone about employing various ways to try to get inside your computer and possibly stealing valuable data from you for various reasons. From sending compelling fake emails that look like something that your bank would send with attachments usually installs a software on your computer that gives them full access to your information to creating fake pop-up ads on the internet to have you convinced that 20,000 virus or errors are currently on your computer and you will need to click the ad to “clean it up” even though your computer has been for the most part working fine, everyone surfing the Internet today has to be extra careful about not clicking on these things.
But what I have found in recent months is that these folks have a new tactic that is even more dangerous and effective to try to accomplish their goals. In most cases, they are abandoning previous strategies of sending you fake emails and creating fake pop-up ads but they are now leveraging social media ads and posts with very compelling “News Stories” to get you to click on them and cause havoc. What they are doing is creating a sticky title that will appeal to a targeted demographic and because you can purchase ads on most social media websites for very cheap and not only that, laser-focus the ads to show to that demographic, then they can cause more harm faster and cheaper than they did in the past. With more and more people getting onto Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or any other social media account in the past few years, I see the problem getting only worse unless people educate themselves about this, which is why I am writing this article.
You will see these ads popping up all over different websites, including legitimate news sites. I have posted below an example of such type of ads that will show up. They will contain extremely catchy titles, but the best way to not possibly download a virus is to exercise a bit of caution in not clicking on these links. The best way to verify that the story is true is to go to google and actually search for the article. Also, if you click on anything and a screen immediately comes up asking you to install something on your computer, it is best to pause for a moment and not to do it. As more and more people start coming online, I see this issue only getting larger. It is better to be safe than sorry.