Apple + Security & Privacy

Recent reports from an especially clueless TV station in Ohio suggested that an “iTunes virus” was circulating by e-mail. Well, there is no such thing; and the TV station (which we won’t even bother to link to; no need to get people to their site) fixed the article to explain that it is not a virus, but rather spam.

We got several of these messages; here’s what they look like:

As is often the case, these e-mails look somewhat legitimate; though you can see here a subtotal of “$050.99”, from a unit price of $180.99, which was charged for a single “Digital 45.” And the “Order Total” at the top doesn’t match any of the other numbers. Well, give them credit for getting the logo correct…

This specific spam just takes users to a web site selling bogus meds. Others may have other effects, and many e-mails of this type are phishing attempts, which try to get users to log into a fake web page and give up credentials for an account.

As always, you can hover your cursor over the links in e-mail messages to see where those links actually go. Make sure you do that to check links before clicking them; even better, don’t click links in e-mails if you’re not 100% certain that they are legitimate. If you do have an iTunes account, just log into it via iTunes; in fact, you can’t access it via the web at all.