Beware 'IRS' attacks

Not really the IRS, of course – they're emails coming from phishers posing as the IRS, or PayPal, or your bank, or Wal-Mart, saying scary things like, "Your account's been compromised – click here or we'll have to close it." Or "click here to check on the status of your tax refund." These emails' numbers "skyrocketed in December," and IRS-related ones can only be expected to increase as we approach April 15, the Washington Post security blog reports. These messages are using "social engineering" to trick or scare people into clicking on links that take them to Web sites that automatically send software code to family computers – code like Trojan horse programs that give control of the computer to the phishers or keylogger software that captures personal information like passwords and bank account numbers. This kind of social engineering is aimed more at adults, obviously, but there's plenty employed on the instant-messaging services, trying to trick young IM-ers to check out a cool video clip or tune. Our kids probably know better than we do to be on the alert to messages like that, but a family discussion about social engineering might be interesting to all family members.