There's a phishing virus making the rounds by email and I've received it from two sources in the railroad preservation industry.

If you receive a drop box link don't open and call the supposed sender to both confirm is bad and to let them know they may have been compromised.

we now return you to your regular programing...

I've been getting odd amounts of spam mail recently would this be related to it?

I haven't seen an increase in the spam baseline so I don't know. What I received was a very legit looking email that I didn't have any reason to be receiving, so I called the supposed sender who confirmed it was a ruse. The only reason I posted is both emails i received were from people that are in the tourist RR industry.

Be save out there

According to my office/system manager our spam has stayed fairly level. We use (or at least try to use) all of the 'common sense' safety and security measures and I pay for a top shelf IT management firm to keep the office systems both up to date and secure.

One of the decisions we made several years ago was to pay for everybody to have an up-to-date laptop with its own connection at home in addition to what ever they had in the office so there would never be any reason to to be handling work over the same system which their teenagers were surfing the net with. We also discourage having company email accounts on personal cell phones.

Another of the decisions was to rely on our own server(s) rather than a cloud service for file sharing and backup. While we do use Dropbox and Microsoft's One Drive, the preference is that confidential files are encrypted and/or move on a thumb drive. God help the poor associate who accesses the server over a public network, i.e.: Starbucks, Amtrak, et cetera, especially when I'm paying for the comparatively secure cell connection.

Despite all that we have had a few breaches including an attempt to change some employee payroll accounts, password change requests for voice mail, and so forth. These have mostly been the result of a bot which was phishing along with a simple, reasonable error in judgement in opening an email which turned out to be bogus.

How secure your computer and your communications are is as much a function of how you utilize them as it is a function of anything else. The things that you need to remember are that: 1) Anything invented by a human can be broken by another human; 2) There is no such place as 'The Cloud'. It is a marketing term for 'Somebody Else's Computer': and, 3) No matter how good your system and protocols are they work no better than a crossing signal - If you do not take it seriously you will get smashed by a train.

GME