PSA: Viruses have been making a Comeback

I just wanted to drop everyone a quick note to remind users about the need to be careful with files from the internet…

With the recent News and subsequent increase in the market price of Zcash we have seen a big increase in the number of users on the Forum and users on the Chat. This is great and indicates a strong and growing Zcash community.

But this has also attracted bad actors who wish to fool you into downloading a file which contains a virus.

Just in the past couple weeks the number of attempts/attacks has grown significantly and they are becoming more and more sophisticated at trying to fool you.

For example I have seen:

  • Websites claiming to be a new wallet that now supports Zcash, often a URL that looks very close to the name of a legitimate service
  • New Mining Pools that request you download their “special miner” to connect
  • Brand new Github accounts that claim to have a fork of a popular miner or ask you to join a beta of a new coin and link to a bunch of files
  • Users posting malicious links to “miner management software to make it easy to mine any coin”

One key thing that these many forms of attack have in common are the attempts to fool you into downloading a file by whatever means necessary. These files contain Trojans and Backdoors that will allow an attacker to steal from or ransom your computer.

Please be careful out there and DO NOT BLINDLY TRUST any file from the internet.

If you see anything suspicious posted on these forums please notify the Moderation team by using @moderators or @shawn or @paige or you can ping any Zcash Team Member who is around.

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Good advice and I will just add that if anyone is holding zcash with price increase it’s always safer and gives piece of mind to use a hardware wallet to store your zcash or othe currency’s for that matter,I use the Ledger Nano S but there are others available just as good and provide security a pc can’t provide,even using hardware wallet on infected pc will not compromise your funds and there cheap,with the latest ransomware attacks it’s better safe than sorry.
I have no affiliation with Ledger just giving my opinion having used Nano S since last year for zcash bitcoin Eth EthClassic dash and many more.