Warning to folks with online businesses.

This is my first attempt at a diary since the days of the Deepwater Horizon, but I think it’s important. (Hope I didn’t mess anything up.)

I know many people who hang out here have online businesses. Hubby and I both have them, though I’m not active that much right now.

In the last fifteen or so minutes, he got an email “message” from what looked like the USPS. BitDefender (bless them) caught it and said, “Uh, you might want to look at this before you even THINK about complying with the request”.

It wasn’t from the USPS, even with the pilfered logo. Not even close. The message was addressed to “Dear sales” and said a package we had shipped via USPS was lost, and he should download a form to correct that. Had a “tracking number” and everything.

Having been doing online sales for YEARS, he knows what a genuine USPS tracking number looks like. This wasn’t it.

Doing the backtrack through the origination of the email, guess what we found?

A (dot) ru. Yep, it looks like it originated in Vlad-land. Downloading the “form” would likely have wreaked untold havoc.

So, all you online-shippers out there, be warned. Vlad wants to eat your computers.

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As others have pointed out, we do get the normal amount of bogus / phishing stuff, and it is handled appropriately. But this stuck out as different — the service it attached, and the origin of the link.

Hence, the notice posted.