This is a common situation these days.  Malicious code has been developed to allow spammers to distribute their junk mail a variety of ways.

In the old days, we’d tell people just to be careful about posting their email addresses on web sites or newsgroups. Today, all it takes is an infected machine on which your email address is saved in an address book!

In order to combat spam, it’s now important for all computer users to keep their machines secured using the latest security software and by making sure operating system updates are done. Sometimes even this is not enough, since modern coders can defeat most commercially available Internet Security applications.  Why can’t they use their powers for good instead of evil?

Be careful about designating email addresses or domains as trusted.  Many spam filters, including our own, allow users to whitelist specific email addresses or entire domains.  Imagine what could happen if you whitelisted the entire hotmail.com domain? That means anyone sending you a message with a return address from hotmail.com is going to get past the spam filter. Unfortunately, you can no longer whitelist your OWN email address! Spammers are sending junk mail to you with your own return address!

What’s a person to do? Make sure your security software is up to date.  If you haven’t installed anything, please call ConnectNC to have a tech perform a security scan on your system and install your software. If everyone maintained good system security, we’d go a long way towards eliminating spam that comes from infected machines.

Last, but not least, never, ever buy from a spammer. They’re not sending you junk mail for fun.  They’re doing it to make money. About ten years ago, one spammer told me that his employer made $30,000 in one day after they sent out unsolicited commercial email to a very large number of addresses. Their hosting and email accounts were cancelled, but it was well worth it to them. So, let’s try to make spamming an unprofitable venture.  We should all agree that we’ll never buy anything that was promoted in an unsolicited message we received.

I recently received a Hallmark greeting card from a “friend” in my email in box.  The message was NOT, however, a greeting card from a friend. It was an attempted attack on my machine.  Since I use a Mac, I didn’t have to worry about this particular trojan.  The evildoers who propagated this trojan want you to install zapchast on your Windows computer by clicking on their link and use it to do bad deeds.  More information can be found here >> http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/SearchResults.aspx?query=zapchast

What can you do to protect yourself? First of all, install a reputable security application on your PC, from a company such as Symantec or McAfee and KEEP IT UPDATED!  We can do this for you as part of our Virtual IT service. I don’t open anything with attachments from people I don’t know, or anything that I haven’t asked for or know about in advance, really. In fact, I don’t open greeting cards and those types of things ever, since I have an aversion to animated stuff with what I consider to be unpleasant music. I still send greeting cards via snail mail.

If you have Internet or network security needs, please give our office a call and schedule an appointment.  Call (910) 695-7068, ext. 10.  Be careful out there!