There are individuals who may send email to you, asking for your account password, or asking you to login to a web site to change your password. These people are posing as technical support people in an attempt to get your account password from you. Once they have your account password, they login to webmail and use your address to send out thousands of “spam” messages across the Internet.

There are a few steps you can take to make sure your account isn’t “hijacked” to use for spamming (sending junk email). First, and most important, never give your password to anyone who is requesting it by email. Don’t login to any web site to change your password or enter your current password on the request of anyone by email. If we feel your account has been compromised we’ll change your password for you. We’ll never email to ask you to do it.

You can read more about this kind of activity, called “phishing,” by going to the following URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing

Second, please make sure your password is strong enough to prevent someone from guessing it. If your username and password are the same, you’re a potential target for account hijacking. Your password should contain upper and lower case letters, numbers and some other character(s), such as symbols or punctuation. Here are a few examples of good and bad passwords.

GOOD passwords
————–
M9ADu%3wQ! (good)
NtiL@e_D5o1sig (even better – more characters)

BAD passwords
————-
1234 (one of the most commonly used and easily guessed passwords)
spaniel (a word in the dictionary)

Please check your password here:
http://tinyurl.com/safe-passwords
If your password strength is not rated “strong” or “best,” it should be changed immediately!

If you have ANY reason to believe that someone has guessed your password, please change it immediately.

Your ConnectNC Account Manager:  https://accounts.connectnc.net/

When analyzing how much of the email that comes into web hosting accounts, we discovered that it’s 94% spam and viruses. Thanks to our mail filtering device, most of that is blocked or quarantined. I went to google to look for stats, and found that our figure agrees with what’s reported by most other ISPs. A graph from one of our mail filters shows the severity of the spam problem, which is universal.

Increases in junk mail has required us to invest in mail filtering appliances and software, which is the case for many large companies and universities. However, not all companies can afford to make this investment. We offer mail filtering for web sites whether they are hosted with us or not. For a low monthly rate, your domain’s email can be protected. Pricing starts at $13.50 per month, for up to 10 mail accounts.

Using the service is easy. A simple change is made to your DNS. No software needs to be installed on any of your systems. We do still recommend that each of your machines has an anti-virus application installed. While most viruses are email borne, there are still risks associated with simply being connected to the Internet.

For more information, or to sign up, call us at 888-290-4601, extension 22.