For every social ill, we have a related effort from cybercriminals to steal our money or infect our computers. Stay vigilant and add keeping your online security efforts up, in addition to washing your hands and carrying around hand sanitizer to prevent the actual flu virus from infecting you.
Of course, we’re also seeing humorous efforts to tie our traditional antivirus products to the swine flu (now known as H1N1) outbreak. Here’s a new product box design, and I’ve seen many, many jokes about Norton protecting you from swine flu on Twitter. Joking aside, I really do wish people would take the metaphor to heart and realize how necessary it is to take precautions like we do when fearing a medical crisis to prevent harm from coming to our computers and private data. Think of your internet security products as face masks, hand washing and sanitizer for your computer!
Also a concern is the predictable scams associated with the flu outbreak. Kevin Haley from Symantec’s Security Response team has a great write-up, including an actual spam message coming in an infected pdf file. If you open that attachment in the message, you are already infected!