Beware of the hackers 12 More Scams of the Holidays!

Security expert Robert Siciliano joins us live with McAfee's top 12 scams of the holidays. Robert, good morning, thanks for being with us. This is one of those things that, you know, when we heard about last year with the hacking, I wonder if people almost have a fatigue about this kind of stuff now.

Yeah, there's no question about it. Consumers are, you know, they're certainly wary. You know, they've been beaten down by these criminal hackers. They don't want to use their credit cards. They're all concerned about it. And they should be. You know, the bad guys are in full force, they're all ramped up, and they're targeting you and I every time we use our credit cards, both in person and online.

You guys have what you call the 12 Scams of the Holidays. I'm looking at some of these things like getting carded, whatnot. What are most likely to happen to someone when they're out holiday shopping, either online or in the mall?

So first and foremost, beware of phishing emails. You know, we're all aware of these emails that we get that are coming from bad guys. Scammers send us these emails that look like they're coming from legitimate entities. So all of these data breaches add up to millions and millions of email addresses being compromised. And what that means is they'll send out millions of emails that look like they're coming from these same retailers with all of these too-good-to-be-true offers. So then you get this email that has a link in it. You click that link and what might happen is when you click that link, you download malware, malicious software, there onto your machine that allows bad guys to see all the websites that you visit, the usernames and passwords you type in. It spies on your behavior. Additionally, these same links might also bring you to spoofed websites, websites that look like the retailer but are in fact fake or designed to lure you into entering your credentials, again, your usernames or your passwords or even your credit card information. So it's very It's very important that you don't actually click the links in the body of these emails because if you do, you're going to end up paying for the lifestyle or the Christmas of an identity thief.

What about the cell phone? Because everybody kind of, I think, these days knows, hey, you have your antivirus software, whatnot, on your computer, but what about your cell phone? Is there something you can do or need to do to protect the browsing on your cell phone?

Yeah, make sure that you have antivirus installed on your cell phone as well. So just like your PC needs antivirus antivirus. Your Android devices need antivirus. So to protect yourself, you want to have antivirus, anti-spyware, anti-phishing, and a firewall. And for more information, you can check us out online at McAfee.com.

All right, Robert Siciliano, thank you very much. Good information there, we appreciate it.

Thank you. All right, time now, 6:20. It might be the saddest mugshot we've ever seen. The ridiculous crime this