Cybersecurity Awareness Tip 18: Don't open suspicious attachments

Dangerous Attachments (It's Not a Lifetime Movie)

No matter what the King of a tiny foreign country promises in the attached instructions, what "Amazon" says you ordered in the attached shipping document, or FedEx charged you for shipping in the attached invoice, just don't open that attachment.

CISO Magazine identified the how to detect suspicious email attachments during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Any Way You Want It, Just the Way You Don't Need It

Attachments may look like they were sent by some from Amaz0n.com or another legitimate looking website.  They might be described as containing some salacious or otherwise must-know-right-now information.  Definitely don't open something compressed (.zip, .7z, .arc, .rar, etc.) or with an executable (.exe, .com, .iso, .dmg).

If it looks legitimate (i.e. it comes from a possibly valid source and has a common extension (.pdf, .docx, .pptx, .xlsx - but not .docm, .pptm, .xlsm), download the file on a home computer (not a mobile device) instead of opening from the email. Your system's antivirus or other anti-malware tool may identify issues, but to be safe, upload it to an online virus scanner like VirusTotal, which scans the file with almost every available anti-malware scanner for quick and fairly complete detection.

Petya is a family of encrypting malware first discovered in 2016 which propagated via infected email attachments.

Resources

• Forbes: Don't Click on These 5 Dangerous Email Attachments
• Bleeping Computer: The Most Common Malicious Email Attachments Affecting Windows
• MalwareFox: Best Online Virus Scanner