If you receive news alerts for various news topics, you may have seen this latest form of spam that grabs pieces from current news stories, and then mixes them with common search terms to return fraudulent results among your legitimate news feed search results.

The goal, like any scam of this nature, is to get you to click on the link giving malicious code the opportunity to infect your computer.

• A quick scan of the opening paragraph of this type of scam is generally enough to clue you in – it’s just an incoherent string of likely keywords. Unfortunately, many readers just scan the title and then open the link - a behavior these scammers are quite literally banking on.

• Another red flag with these scams is found in the sender information. Never heard of the service or site the news article is posted on? Look it up. If it is a site like Mashable.com, keep in mind that anyone can post anything to the site. The information may be entirely legitimate, or as the case in the first example, a scam. If you haven’t heard of the site like The Infogneto services blog (shown below), type the name into a search engine that identifies suspicious sites, or displays the warnings from your security service, to help you understand the likelihood of fraud or other exploitive behavior.

• Look at who created the post. The two scams in the example below show the content poster ‘names’ are just sequential letters of the alphabet ..ghij.. and ..stuv.. with random numbers or number sequences following.

Scams like these will get more sophisticated over time. Your best insurance is to keep your security software up to date and to look critically at the content for scams before you click.

Linda