High Aspirations, Inc. have been members in good standing at the Better Business Bureau (BBB) for years. Feel free to check out our BBB Business Review. Yesterday we received an email warning us of an email scam making the rounds. Since we know that a lot of our clients are also in the BBB, we thought it best to pass on the news…

The BBB has issued an urgent scam alert to businesses and consumers. Fraudulent emails are being sent that appear to come from the BBB. The emails have the subject of "Complaint from your customers," return addresses that the BBB does not use (for example: riskmanager@bbb.org), and are signed with the address of the Council of Better Business Bureaus. The email contains a link to a non-BBB web site.

If you receive an email like this, delete it immediately! If you have already clicked on a link in the email, run a full virus scan. You can also report any information received to the BBB via their Report a Scam form.

The BBB is working with law enforcement to determine its source and stop the fraudulent campaign.

Visit the BBB News Center for more information as well as a copy of an example email.

avast! Antivirus, my personal antivirus software of choice, published a blog post today entitled "A Winter Flurry of Email Scams" that I thought worthy of sharing.

avast! is warning that there are three types of holiday-related email scams making the rounds: Charity scams, UPS delivery scams, and E-card scams.

Avoid getting ripped off… read all about it.

avast! Antivirus has been my personal antivirus choice for a while now. I follow their posts on Facebook and when they posted an article entitled “Hackers flip filenames to create "safe" file extensions” I had to read on and figure out what they were talking about. It’s not good…

A new wave of malware changes the file name of an executible. So, for example, you’ve got a file named I-am-a-virus.exe. You wouldn’t double click to run that right? No way! Well, what if that same file was named I-am-a-photo-from-Mom.jpg. That would be safe to open right? Well, maybe not anymore.

All this geek can say is … YIKES! Read the entire article at Hackers flip filenames to create "safe" file extensions.

Consider this your reminder to get antivirus and antispyware software installed on your machine, keep it up to date, and trust no file before it’s scanned!