ARE YOU A SPAM VICTIM ?

Technologies are advancing, so as the problems with the
advanced technology. In the scenario of e-Mails when
the communication goes through within seconds, the
junk and spam mails are the unfortunate fact of
technology.
If you struggle to find important emails hiding in the
jungle of junk in your inbox, you are not alone. In 2007,
72% of all email traffic was spam.
What is a SPAM email?
A SPAM Email is an unsolicited commercial email, in other
words, an email trying to sell you something which you
haven't requested. E-mail spam, also known as bulk email
or junk e-mail is a subset of spam that involves
sending nearly identical messages to numerous
recipients by e-mail.
Spam is more than just a menace it makes your inbox a
gateway for viruses, phishing attacks and identity theft.
Where do spammers get addresses from?
Some of them are
• Dictionary attacks Some spammers use software to
randomly generate email addresses for popular email
providers, commonly called dictionary attacks the
software will guess the first part of an email address:
guessed@emailprovider.com
• Purchasing third party lists Buying email
addresses from third parties.
• Email Harvesters Some spammers use special
software called email harvesters which scan web
pages for email addresses. Common targets for email
harvesters are message boards and chat rooms.
• Some email appear from trusted sites This is
called email spoofing, in these cases the spammer's
apparent email address will be a trusted domain name,
the only way to really see where the email has come
from is by viewing the full header information of the
SPAM email.
Junk Mail trends
The various spam mails are
• Image Spam Includes Newsletter spams
• Attachment Spam Includes PDFs, zip files, etc…
Shows no sign of decline in near future
• Pump and Dump Stock Scam Spam One of the top
scam catergories, which continues to evolve even
after reporting
• New Social Engineering Includes spam related to
big events like Beijing Olympics, Saddam Hussein's
execution
Simple Tips to avoid excess junk mail
Some of them are
1. Don't advertise your email address or circulate it on
the World Wide Web, i.e. give email address to trusted
sites.
2. Have separate personal and business email addresses.
3. Choose an email address that is difficult to guess. This
would avoid dictionary attacks. Have special
characters such as underscores or numbers in email
address.
4. To avoid your email being picked up by email harvesters
software when including your email address on a
webpage (for example when you use a message board)
t r y t o o b s c u r e i t , for example, use
johnATyourprovider.com instead of using the @ symbol.
5. Check privacy policy and marketing opt-outs carefully
before giving out your mail address
6. Use junk mail filters with your email account
New Year Treat
This year introduced internet users to new dangers, like
'Peacomm Trojan' (kind of virus), where opening a
particular email had your computer download a mailware.
Your computer then becomes part of a bot network. A
bot-herder (spammer) can control these PC's remotely
and command them to send more spam.
Next on the list of spammers are social engineering sites.
It is therefore, strongly advised to the internet users; be
against giving out their email addresses on websites.
Once you are on a spam mailing list, there is nothing you
can do, except change your email address to avoid more
spam.