Phishing is an email spam scam that is specifically used to commit identity theft. Its sole purpose is to scam you into divulging personal information, which they can use to perpetrate identity theft. This includes passwords, card numbers, birth dates, PINs and other vital personal data. The term came into use to denote the way phishers bait to lure their victims into divulging private data. Industry experts define this devious practice as a form of “social engineering.”

Typically, a phishing attack will be executed in combination with a massive spam mailing. Phishing spam is sent out to millions of recipients, often with a subject line that is exciting or upsetting. It is calculated to trigger an immediate reaction from the recipient, and get them to respond without further thought.

The phishing email will often have phrases such as:

-Dear Valued Customer.
-Click the link below to access to your account.
-If you don’t respond within 24 hours, your account shall be closed.

The phishing spam is typically a fraudulent but very official-looking e-mail. It is cleverly designed to replicate the website and email messages of a business you know and trust such as your bank or mortgage company. The email will even sport official logos and graphics of the legitimate company.

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It will instruct you to click on a link in the email to go to the company’s website, where you can “update” your personal information. The link will usually be “masked,” which means that when you click on it, it will take you to a phony web address. Clicking on the link will take you to a website that appears to be that of the real financial institution’s website. It is, however, just a copycat spoof, set up to give the spammer access to your personal and financial data. You may give your information thinking you are at the real website. Instead, any information you enter here will go directly to the identity thieves.

What are the Consequences?

If you fall prey to the scam and unwittingly divulge private information, you will be left vulnerable to identity theft, credit card fraud and other financial mishaps.

These identity thieves will either sell the information to fellow criminals, or use it for their own financial gain. This vital personal data will be used, for example, to set up fraudulent online bill pay, with payments made out to the phisher. They may use it to access funds from your bank accounts and credit cards and transfer them to their own checking accounts. They may even use a copy of your bank or credit card along with the phished PIN to withdraw cash from your accounts at any ATM.

Phishing is a numbers game for these criminal spammers. They will send out their phishing email to millions of recipients. They count on just a few falling for the scam and volunteering their information: if a mere 1% of recipients volunteer their personal information, the phishing expedition will be a hughly lucrative. It is these few who make their scam worthwhile.

There’s a lot to understand about Spam Protection. We were able to provide you with some of the facts above, but there is still plenty more to write about in subsequent articles.

About the Author
By Anders Eriksson (Click on the link to learn more about me)

When most people think of Spam Protection, what comes to mind is usually basic information that’s not particularly interesting or beneficial. But there’s a lot more to Spam Protection than just the basics.

The volume of spam that is sent out every minute of the day has reached pandemic proportions. The simple reason for this is because the cost to a spammer ranges from zero to negligible. In fact, anyone with a list of email addresses and Internet access can spam thousands, even millions of people with a single click of the mouse. The cost of spam, however, now runs in the millions.

Bandwidth

Spam takes up valuable Internet bandwidth that would otherwise be used for legitimate business and personal use. Bandwidth refers to rate at which data is transmitted; it is the amount of data that can be transmitted within a fixed amount of time. The lower the bandwidth, the slower the transmission.

When spam uses up valuable bandwidth, and clogs up the system, it causes costly delays in the transmission of important, legitimate information. It forces the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to increase bandwidth just to handle the increased volume. This costs money, and this cost is passed on to the consumer.

Viruses, Worms and Malware

It is becoming an increasingly common menace. Spammers will attach viruses to the email they send out for purely criminal or malicious purposes. Some viruses, for example, are programmed to self-install and give the spammer access to all the vital information stored on your computer. This information is often be used for identity theft purposes.

Other viruses simply do great harm to computers the world over. A Consuner Reports study estimates that the cost of repairs and replacement parts for damage done to computer systems by viruses was over 8 billion over the past two years. This does ot take into account the billions spent on anti-spam and anti-virus software.

The more authentic information about Spam Protection you know, the more likely people are to consider you a Spam Protection expert. Read on for even more Spam Protection facts that you can share.

Productivity

Spam is not only annoying, it also takes up valuable time just to go through it and figure out sort out the spam from the valid mail. For businesses that receives hundreds of emails a day, the cost in time and productivity really adds up.
The “cost of spam calculator” that is available at cmsconnect.com estimates the that spam costs almost $1000 per employee each year, with over 50 hours of lost productivity for each one.

Lost Messages and Data

As we try to battle the spammers by installing spam filters and blockers, these programs often weed out legitimate businesss correspondence. Lost correspondence from a client or supplier can easily cost businesses money, clients and goodwill

Identity Theft

The phenomenon of phishing has become more prevalent as spammers think up new ways to make a buck at your expense. Phishing involves the use of email that is designed to look like a legitimate company has sent it. It is sent out to millions of people in the hope of scamming them into revealing personal information that the scammer can use for identity theft. The cost of Phishing and identity theft to their victims now also runs in the billions.

The cost of spam is a financial drain on the economy. We pay a high price for the spammer to scam his victims. The spammer pays nothing.

Now that wasn’t hard at all, was it? And you’ve earned a wealth of knowledge, just from taking some time to study an expert’s word on Spam Protection.

About the Author
By Anders Eriksson (Click on the link to learn more about me)

Spam is commercial email that is sent out in bulk to millions of people without their consent. It is may contain advertising messages for regular products and services but increasingly, it is email of an inappropriate, offensive or malicious nature.

Today, many children have an email address that they use to email their friends, submit homework, etc. It is a fun, inexpensive and instant way to keep in touch. However, as the volume of spam keeps rising, the need to protect children from the dangers of spam is a growing concern.

Like all other Internet users, children are just as susceptible to receiving spam as are adults. And because spam is an equal opportunity menace, kids are just as likely to receive spam that contains adult and pornographic material. While there is really no way to totally eliminate the possibility of your kids receiving spam, there are steps you can take to minimize it. Here are a few:

Here are a few tips to help protect your kids from spam

Email Filters

Your email service comes with email filters built in. You can use these to filter your child’s email into specific folders, and filter spam into the trash folder. This involves setting up rules that your email program will follow in determining what action to take on incoming messages: to let it through to the inbox, send it to trash or to block the sender.

Your email spam filter program will apply these rules based on certain words in the subject line or body of the email. For example, if an email contains the word “viagra,” it will be sent directly to the trash and the sender blocked.

Now that we’ve covered those aspects of Spam Protection, let’s turn to some of the other factors that need to be considered.

Spam Blocker

Your email service may also come with a spam blocker. If it does not, it may be worth your while to invest in one for your child’s computer. Where-as your email filter filters incoming email into folders, the spam blocker blocks spam from going through the system. It checks your mail server every 10 minutes, where it deletes the spam and destroys any viruses it finds. Legitimate email is let on the server and downloads to the inbox when you log in.

Whitelists

Set up an email account for your child that “whitelists” only specific email addresses. A whitelist is just a list of trusted and approved email addresses. For example, you can have the addresses of your child’s grandparents, aunts and uncles whitelisted. Whenever email is received from any of the whitelisted addresses, it goes directly to your child’s inbox. All other email addresses are blocked.

Monitor, Monitor, Monitor

Be sure to log into your child’s email account on a regular basis to monitor the incoming and outgoing messages, and to ensure that the spam filter and spam block are working appropriately.
Using your email spam filter, you can set up a rule that will ensure that a copy of every email that is sent and received on your child’s account is forwarded to your own email address

It is very important to educate your children on the dangers of spam and how to handle it if they do receive any in their inbox.

Knowing enough about Spam Protection to make solid, informed choices cuts down on the fear factor. If you apply what you’ve just learned about Spam Protection, you should have nothing to worry about.

About the Author
By Anders Eriksson (Click on the link to learn more about me)

Each minute of each day, there are literally thousands upon thousands of spam email messages flooding inboxes the world over. Some of that email even goes out from what appears to be your very own email address! Where on earth do spammers get your email address? There are various ways – some are legitimate, and most are not.
Typically, spammers will “harvest” email addresses from legitimate web sites, such as USENET groups, chat rooms, message boards, AOL profile pages and special interest group postings. These are sites you have visited and requested more information from, or corporate sites where you may have placed an order.

The spammers collect these addresses using automated programs called spambots. Spambots are designed to harvest the email addresses from these web sites. They scan every page on the site, collecting any text containing the symbol “@” they find. The email addresses they collect are compiled into a database, loaded into a bulk-emailing program and out goes the spam. Often, these harvested email addresses are also sold to other spammers ; once you email address makes it to a spammer’s mailing list, it will make it onto their fellow spammer’s lists.

Some websites require you to register before you can place an order or access certain parts of the site. Not all these websites will be as protective of your email address as you may wish. Newsgroups are particularly notorious for exposing their users’ email addresses to the spam gatherers. Most newsgroups do not take a great deal of care to hide the email of their users, and each and every email member email address is exposed and up for grabs by spammers. Some of the wbsites that aask you to register may also sell to spammers.

So far, we’ve uncovered some interesting facts about Spam Protection. You may decide that the following information is even more interesting.

Another method commonly used by the spammers is to target a domain. They simply guess or make up every possible variation of email address based on the domain name, for example @yourDomain.com . They create a mailing list of these addresses and then spam them. Corporate emails are especially vulnerable, as their emails have a distinct format such as @BusinessName.com.

While most of the spam will bounce, it really does not bother the spammers because they can and do send out millions of this type of junk mail a day. A small proportion of the emails will actually be legitimate and will receive the spam – that is good enough for the spammer. This method of gathering email addresses is called a brute force spam attack.

One way to defend against this is to make it more difficult for the spider to harvest your email. When you place your email address on a web site, remove the @ symbol and replace it with the word “at.” This makes it far more difficult for the spam harvester to gather your address, because it cannot be gathered mechanically; it can only by read by a human who is actually reading the site. Alternatively, you should display your email address as an image rather than as text.

About the Author
By Anders Eriksson (Click on the link to learn more about me)

It has become increasingly common for spam to contain malicious programs or software that can be harmful to both your computer. The purpose of these small, malicious is to perform unauthorized, usually harmful, actions, when they self-install into your computer system, and infect your programs and files. They are commonly spread by e-mail, in the form of cleverly disguised attachments that trick you into clicking on them.

The most common of these programs are: Viruses, Trojan Horses, Malware and Adware. Knowing what they are and how they work will help you better protect yourself from malicious spam.

Viruses

A is a computer program that is specifically created to replicate itself and to infect a computer system without permission or even knowledge of the user. Viruses come in several varieties including:

The Boot Sector Virus

This virus will infect the root-most part of your computer hard drive, called the boot sector. This is what is used to start up your computer.

This type virus can prevent your computer from starting and may even force a hard drive format, causing you to lose all of the information on your computer in one fell swoop.

The Program Virus

This is an executable file. It becomes active when the program it has infected is run. When it is activated, it will infect other programs on your hard drive, disabling them.

The Macro Virus

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The third type of virus specifically targets documents such as Microsoft word. It is activated when the infected document it has infected is run. One action it may perform, for example, is to erase dates in your documents as well as other areas of the computer.

Malware

The term “malware” is short for malicious software. It is a type of program that propagates on your hard drive and can create untold problems when it does so. Malware may install a program that you did not want, or ask for. When it does so, it will use up many of your computer’s system resources, effectively slowing it to a near standstill.

Trojan Horse

Much like its Greek namesake, the Trojan horse program is a seemingly harmless and innocuous application or file, but it contains harmful, malicious code and, when installed, can wreak havoc on your computer system. This program often runs undetected, giving the hacker access to your computer system and, for example, your personal information such as saved passwords and bank account numbers. The hacker is also able to display messages on your computer screen.

Adware

While not necessarily malware, but adware can be used for malicious purposes. Adware goes above and beyond what is reasonable advertising. It is adware, in fact what has given a bad name to some otherwise incredible free software that may actually be very beneficial to you.

It generates popups or other annoying advertising that can in fact freeze or lock your computer. In many cases, the adware is difficult if not impossible for the regular user to remove, disable or even detect.

In addition to displaying ads for the original advertiser, adware may log your whereabouts on the internet and send user information back to the spammy ad company about your computer use without asking for your permission to do so.

Spam is not always the most harmful thing you will find in your inbox; it is the attachments that come with spam that can really devastate your computer system. It is crucial that you do not open attachments in unsolicited email.

This article’s coverage of the information is as complete as it can be today. But you should always leave open the possibility that future research could uncover new facts.