Hurricane Katrina's Digital Devastation

Unless you have been under a rock the last week or so, you are aware of Hurricane Katrina and the mark she left. What you may not realize or know about is even if you do not live in any of the 5 states that were hit (Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi or Alabama) that you may also be affected. Those not in a state of emergency due to the disaster area may still have food, water, shelter and electricity but they still may fall victim to the "cause and affect cycle". The cause - a natural disaster. The affect - people looking to profit from it. It's a sad and ugly thing, but it does happen and you should be aware of several of the online scams going around tied to Hurricane Katrina.

Be on the lookout for several online scams that have begun to circulate the Internet. One such scam is a malware infected e-mail posing as news on the disaster. Possible subject lines of the e-mail could be...

• "Re: g8 Tropical storm flooded New Orleans"
• "Re: g7 80 percent of our city underwater"
• "Re: q1 Katrina killed as many as 80 people"

There could be additional variants as well. In the body of the message, clicking on the "Read More.." link will take the user to a malicious website that poses as a news story. In reality, the site uses code to exploit vulnerabilities within Internet Explorer to install malware including the Troj/Cgab-A Trojan horse. From there, the attacker could remotely access the user's computer. Receiving or reading the emails themselves does not mean you are infected. In addition to that, there are several other e-mails soliciting donations through a Paypal link. There are now about 230 .com domains that contain the strings "katrina" and "hurricane". It may be difficult to tell whether the e-mail is from a legitimate organization or not so my best advice is to only make your donations directly to the "American Red Cross Hurricane Relief" fund thru their official website www.redcross.org

Now some good news. Many residents in the hardest stuck hurricane areas of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama remain without power and no reliable connection to the outside world. So T-Mobile is attempting to alleviate some of that suffering by opening up its hotspots in those three states to the public. T-Mobile said that the offer only extends to its wireless Internet services. This free offer for the states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama is for Wi-Fi service only, not T-Mobile voice services. The company offers service at Borders, FedEx/Kinko's and Starbucks among other locations.