In this short interview, host Speaker A talks with privacy and identity‑theft expert Robert Siciliano of McAfee about common cyber‑crimes that spike during the holiday season. Siciliano outlines several typical scams – charity phishing emails that mimic the Red Cross, fake delivery‑service invoices from FedEx or UPS, social‑networking scams that use bogus friend requests, malicious holiday e‑cards, and drive‑by download attacks that steal passwords. He then offers practical protection advice: never click links in unsolicited emails, manually type URLs or use trusted bookmarks, keep antivirus software and its definitions up to date, and always use a secure wired or Wi‑Fi connection rather than public hotspots. Siciliano also promotes McAfee’s identity‑theft protection service (counteridentitytheft.com) that monitors credit, scans the web for personal data, and provides fraud‑resolution assistance. The segment ends with a plug for additional tips on the DailyBuzzNow website.
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Alright guys, 'tis the season to be jolly, but some of us are being a little too jolly and getting scammed by cyber criminals who are taking advantage of this season. To save you from the 12 scams of Christmas is privacy expert Robert Siciliano from McAfee.com. Did I pronounce your last name right?
Siciliano.
Siciliano. Siciliano. Okay, I know you've got the info on these scams. Quickly, these are some popular ones we have. Charity phishing scams. What's that?
You get an email from the bad guy. It looks like it's coming from Red Cross, but it's in fact a fake link designed to scam your credit card information.
Oh, it's the charity phishing for your information like that. Fake invoices from delivery service. Who, I mean—
So you get an email, looks like it's coming from FedEx or UPS. It's an invoice actually, you know, for products and services that you're supposed to have bought. Yeah. And they're, you know, they want to get you to pay for for something that you never actually shipped.
Okay, and people actually fall for that? Oh yeah. Okay, all right, social networking scams. A lot of people on Facebook.
You get an email from someone that looks like, you know, they want to be your friend. You don't know who they are. Once you friend them, they could scam your friends.
Okay, and I got one of these fake— or I got a holiday e-card. How do you know if it's real or fake?
So you have to be really careful. Make sure it's from somebody that you know, like, and trust. Be careful when you click on links because that could, you know, you could download a virus affecting your PC.
And then password stealing scams.
So if you go to the wrong website, you get what's called a drive-by download.
Uh-oh.
And if your antivirus isn't up to date, you can get a virus that actually allows the bad guy to steal your passwords.
Okay, so how do I protect myself? How do I protect my identity? Because I think that's what they're going after.
I'm a big fan of identity theft protection. I work with McAfee. They provide identity theft protection that monitors your credit, it scans your information on the internet, they have fraud resolution agents. You can learn more about them at counteridentitytheft.com.
I know you shouldn't click on links from people you don't know, but what about if they send it to your mom and she sent it to you? I mean—
So I never ever click links in the body of an email, ever. I'm always manually typing the address into the address bar, or I go to my favorites menu, and I don't, you know, mess around with those emails, like chain emails. I just hit delete.
Okay, check your security software, make sure it's up to date.
Make sure antivirus is up to date. A lot of people, they don't pay any attention to that stuff. By default, you should automatically download and update your virus definitions.
Okay, now what is this shop and bank on secure networks? What does that mean?
So whenever you access the internet, you want to make sure that you're accessing it from a secure wired or wireless connection from your home or your office, opposed to an internet cafe. In an internet cafe, you could giving out your credit card information and everybody around you can sniff it.
Awesome stuff. We've got some more tips on our website, dailybuzznow.com. Go there right now and click on the ReBuzz tab. That's where you can learn how to protect yourself
