Spam blog

Spam: What Is It? How To Manage It?

admin — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 10:31:08 +0000

The modern sense of the word “spam” references to repeat. Spammers usually focus on e-mail addresses and the terminology moved with them. Nowadays, “spam” is the common term for “unsolicited commercial email”, or “UCE”.

Why Does Bad Spam Happen to Good People?

Chances are, you have been spammed before. Somehow, and usually no one knows exactly how, your e-mail address has found it’s way into the hands of a spammer. Soon, your inbox is suffering the consequences. How does this happen? There are really several possibilities. At least one of these you would find familiar.

Backstabbing Businesses
Businesses often keep lists of email addresses their customers. This is perfectly legal and normal, and usually nothing bad comes of it. Sometimes, however, the temptation to make some quick money is too great, and these lists are sold or rented to other business, companies or advertisers. What happens then? The poor customers start receiving many unsolicited e-mail. This constitutes to a breach of trust.

Random Address Generation
There are computer programs, called random address generators, of which only task is to “guess” and “generate” email addresses. For example, more than 100 million addresses are available on the hotmail.com domain. How difficult could be to guess some of them? Unfortunately, many unsuspecting Internet users use simple email addresses, and this is really not that hard to guess. Many spammers also guess at standard email accounts, e.g. standard addresses like “support@somedomain.com”, “info@somedomain.com”, “admin@somedomain.com”, etc

Web Spiders
In today’s internet age, there is a new species of spiders. Not living creatures, but programs called web spiders. All major search engines search and scan the web extensively. This is called spidering the web. They save information about each page the spider comes across. Spammers use tools that also spider the web, but instead of saving general information, their specialised spiders save any email address it encounters. Does your personal website contain you email address in plain text? Well then, prepare to be attacked by spammers!

Chat Room Harvesting
Many ISP (Internet Service Providers) offer popular chat rooms where users are known only by their screen names (also known as handle or nicknames). Of course, spammers know that your username is the first part of your email address. Why waste time guessing email addresses when a couple of hours of lurking in a chat room can net a list of addresses in use?

The Poor Man’s Bad Marketing Idea
Some spammers retain their own friends and family email lists. Based on the addresses of other known spammers, friends who send them email, or close family relatives, these friends and family lists are still considered illegal. Why? Because only you can give someone permission to send you email.

Stop The Flood to Your Inbox

Constant attack by spam? Try to use spam filters in your email client. May clients provide a way to block spam email. Every time you receive spam, block the address of the sender. Spammers skip from address to address, and you can be on many lists by the time you receive your first spam email. At least, this method will decrease the number of spam you receive, even though by just that little.

Use more than one email address, and maintain a “clean” one. Many netizens believe that this method will reduce spam drastically. Use a single address for spam-safe activities like email to/from your friends, or signing/registering for services from reliable companies. Do not use a clean address on the web in plain text! Get a free address from one of the many free email providers to use on-line and in chat rooms.

If the situation gets very bad and there’s no saving it, consider changing screen names or opening a new email account. When you do, you start with a clean slate, free of spam. And this time, keep it clean!

Stay Off Spammed Lists in the Future

Want to surf the web without getting sucked into the spam-flood? Prevention is your best policy. Don’t use an easy-to-guess e-mail address. Keep your address clean by not using it for spam-centric activities. Don’t post it on any web pages, and don’t use it in chat rooms or newsgroups.

Before you give your email address to a specific company, check out the company. Are sections of its user agreement dedicated to anti-spam rules? Do you have a privacy policy that explains exactly what will be done with your address? Some companies also publicly publish their anti-spam policy. With this, you can be sure that you will not be getting into any nonsense.

Think You’re Not a Spammer? Be Sure.

Many first time marketers would have unknowingly spammed his audience. The first several hundred complaints and some nasty phone/email messages would usually wake him up. But by then, it would have been too late. He may be billed by his ISP for cleanup, and his reputation would have gone down the drain.

The best way to avoid this situation is to have a clear understanding of what spam is. If someone receives your mass email but did not specifically asked to hear from you, then you are spamming them. Use your senses. Do not buy a million addresses for $ 10, no matter how much the seller swears by them! If something does not cry, just say no. You can save a lot in the end, instead of ending up with a lawsuit.

Use email marketing providers that have good and strong anti-spam policies and processes. They are many email marketing providers on the internet, like Aweber, iContact and such. Doing so ensure that you too will abide by anti-spam laws.

The Final Blow

The online world is now going against spam. Eventually, people will stop sending spam because it no longer works like how it used to. Play your part: never buy from a spammer. When your company is looking for other companies to work with, only select from those with strong anti-spam approach and policies.

If you do email marketing, instead of sending emails manually, look for services from email marketing providers that have strong anti-spam policies. As part of their processes, they will help you abide by any anti-spam laws in effect.

Spam – Is All of it Created Equally?

admin — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 10:30:31 +0000

Even though e-mail has been one of the most common routes for virus infection for the past 10 years many plenty of people are still opening attachments from people they don’t now. Seconds later a virus is installed and then the trouble really begins.

If the infection that can come from some of these e-mails were to stop at your just your computer, the overall damage would be minimal but unfortunately many viruses are designed to spread over the Internet without any further action on your part and this can infect other computers, which is a much larger problem.

One of the most popular ways for Internet service providers or e-mail service providers to block certain messages is to tell the e-mail client which e-mails are spam and which are not. This is easy enough to do by clicking the “this is junk mail (or SPAM)” button on your e-mail client.

While this makes it easy for you to inform your ISP or ESP that an e-mail is spam, there also some disadvantages to this method. For example, many people use this method to try and unsubscribe from lists that they previously subscribed to. By tagging these e-mails as spam it unfairly tags the sender as a spammer, which is not accurate since you signed up for the e-mails to begin with.

It’s easy to identify about 80% of the emails that come into our email boxes. We can easily identify which are SPAM and which are real. The problem is deciding about the remaining 20% of the e-mails. Whether these emails are wanted, or whether they represent spam, is a much more difficult proposition. You might not want a particular email message, but that hardly makes it spam. You may not want to receive political cartoons from your uncle, but receiving them hardly constitutes spam and reporting these e-mails as spam would be unfair.

You can use something called “authentication” which is really nothing more than getting someone to tag the message as being from a trusted or desired source. If you know the source is not going to spam you, you’re much more likely to open the e-mail that you receive and much less likely therefore to get a virus or other infection. One method of authentication that you might have seen is ‘sender ID’. This requires that every e-mail have a sender ID attached to it so you know immediately if an email comes from a trusted source or whether it does not.

Email postage is another method of authentication. You’ve probably responded to these e-mails in the past when you’ve signed up for an e-mail list or to receive e-mails from a particular website; once you do, you immediately receive an e-mail asking you to confirm before you’re placed on their email list. This allows you to confirm that you did ask for e-mail from the site and that you will want and welcome the e-mail that you receive.

Some researchers have estimated that as many as 70% of the e-mails we receive are spam while others argue that it’s less than 50%. Regardless of what the percentage is, the reality is that most of us receive a number of e-mails every day that we don’t want, that are not desirable to us and that in some cases can be dangerous. Whatever method ends up being used most successfully in the future will hopefully be the one to decrease these unwanted e-mails.

Virus and Spyware Troubles… Beware

admin — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 10:29:56 +0000

Many of today’s computer virus and spyware issues are classified as “Rootkit” virus. These are extremely dangerous to your security of the computer and all the information it holds. Many of us do online banking, make credit card purchases, complete forms with our vital information straight from our computers.

Why having a virus on that computer is so dangerous? Consider this definition of “rootkit”;

“A program (or group of programs) designed to take fundamental control of a computer system, without authorization of the system’s owners or legitimate managers. Typically, rootkits act to hide their presence on the system by subverting or evading security systems. …”

Once that virus is planted all information you enter in your computer can be fed to the hackers that generated the virus. Once they have your information it is typically sold to any and every one.

I had my machine cleaned so I am safe, right?

That depends, if the Tech missed any portion of the virus or spyware it will regenerate back to the full blown vulnerability. So a week or a month down the road the machine is infected again.

I have been a Technician for over 15 years and recently I have become a firm believer in using a system called “Windows Renew” to clean machine of virus and spyware infections. With this system I am 100% sure I have not missed any of the infection. Consider the steps below which make up the “Windows Renew” system.

1. Move personal data (document, pictures, music, ect.) to a backup drive. The drive is then thoughrly scanned for virus / spyware infections.
2. The Hard Drive in your computer is then completely formatted. Some do a quick format which does not give a 100% guarantee of removing the virus. We always do a full format.
3. Windows Operating System is then reloaded. We don’t reload all the “junk” programs the factory loaded on the machine originally which nobody ever really uses.
4. Load all current Drivers for the computer to run optimally.
5. Load a good Antivirus program that will protect your machine without slowing it down.
6. Load your personal data back on the clean machine.

Through this process we know your machine is 100% free of virus and or spyware infections.

As mentioned above there are cheaper solutions out but we don’t take those shortcuts! We feel your personal information is too important to take chances!

If you think you currently have an infection please disconnect the computer from the internet and get it cleaned before using it again.

Ahead of the spammers

admin — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 10:29:27 +0000

In the current economic climate every business has to keep a sharp eye on the bottom line. Not only is it essential that the business budget is used wisely but there is an increasing need to make sure that everyone works smarter so that time freed up from non-essential tasks can be put to more productive use. Over the past couple of decades the majority of businesses have become highly dependent on computers and rely heavily on emails, so virtually every member of the personnel who has access to a computer will also have a business email and need to read their emails at least daily to keep up to speed.

Computers now help us to do in seconds what once took hours and it is vital that systems are up and running in order for businesses to run smoothly. Unsolicited messages or spam can cause all sorts of problems from simply taking up time deleting trash to get to the messages that are actually relevant, through to carrying viruses that can destroy entire systems. The obvious solution is to make sure that there is some form of spam filter in place to stop these messages getting through in the first place. There is spam blocker software available but it needs to be constantly up-dated and that means that someone has to make sure that this is done.

Here at Message Stream we can monitor all your emails before they even get to your computer at a speed so fast that you won’t even know it is happening and at a cost that won’t make a dent in your profits. It makes sense to keep your systems safe and save business hours that should be spent on business. We can help you protect your systems and keep you ahead of the spammers.

Craigslist Scams and How to Avoid Them

admin — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 10:28:11 +0000

Craigslist is the most popular site on the internet that provides local classifieds and forums for jobs, housing, for sale, personals, services, local community, and events.

The popularity of Craigslist has also made it a common place for scammers to perform their fraudulent activities.

How to Recognize Craigslist scams

According to Craigslist.org, most scams involve one or more of the following:

* Inquiry from someone far away, often in another country

* Western Union, Money Gram, cashier’s check, money order, shipping, escrow service, or a “guarantee”

* Inability or refusal to meet face-to-face before consumating transaction

Types of Scams

* Someone claims that craigslist will guarantee a transaction, certify a buyer/seller, or claims that craigslist will handle or provide protection for a payment.

* Distant person offers a genuine-looking (but fake) cashier’s check

* Someone requests wire service payment via Western Union or MoneyGram:

* Distant person offers to send you a money order and then have you wire money:

* Distant seller suggests use of an online escrow service.

* Distant seller asks for a partial payment upfront, after which he will ship goods

* Foreign company offers you a job receiving payments from customers, then wiring funds

Common Scams on Craigslist

The most common scams on Craigslist are Job Scams, Craigslist Nigerian Scams, Apartmental/Rental Scams, Counterfeit Cashier’s Check, Car Scams etc..

Craigslist Apartment Rental Scams

Typically, the scam/fraud starts when a fraudster pretending to be the owner of the property, posts a great deal on an apartment and a person responds. They ask you to make a deposit and/or collect some personal information to be sent via email and then disappear.

Craigslist Car Scams

Buying and selling cars on Craigslist can be a huge money-saver for both the buyer as well as the seller. Due to this, the Auto category in Craigslist’s For Sale section is very active, especially in urban areas.

Fraudulent postings are just common nowadays on craigslist. Stolen checks, counterfeit checks and bounced checks are costing people their money, cars or both.

Counterfeit Cashier’s Check Scams

An interested party located outside the United States contacts a seller. The seller is told that the buyer has an associate in the United States that owes him money. As such, he will let the associate send the seller a cashier’s check for the amount owed to the buyer. The amount of the cashier’s check will be more than the original price of the merchandise and the seller is told the excess amount will be used to pay the shipping costs associated with getting the merchandise to his location. The seller is instructed to deposit the check, and as soon as it clears, to wire the excess funds back to the buyer. Because a cashier’s check is used, a bank will release the funds as early as possible. Believing that the check has cleared, the seller wires the money as instructed.

Craigslist Job Scams

Craigslist has a huge classified listing for job seekers, some legitimate and others are scams. Fraudsters have a couple of ways to trap job seekers. One way is by using your resume and the other is personal information contained in your resume . The fraudster can use these information for any of the wrong reasons.

Craigslist Escrow Service Scams

Escrow services are the preferred transaction method when big-ticket items are being bought and sold on Craigslist as they help in protecting buyers/sellers making transactions.

First, a fraudster creates a listing on Craigslist for something valuable, often at a bargain price. Potential buyers responding to the posting will want to know how the transaction will be handled. Responders are told that the transaction will be handled by an escrow service as it is trustworthy.

The escrow service will have an official-sounding name and a professional-looking website for you to visit. You may then send them your money and the seller is never seen again. This has happened to many people purchasing expensive items on Craigslist.

How to Prevent/Avoid Craigslist Scams

1. Search and browse for product listings within your own city or state area. This will give you and the seller the chance to meet in person and avoid conflicts.

2. Avoid transactions that involves anyone from outside US. Do not entertain anyone from UK, Africa , from long distances or who would insist on having you wire funds via money order, cashier’s check, Western Union or any other carrier methods.

3. Never post your resume on Craigslist – As Craigslist is free to everyone, anyone can use your personal information for wrong things.

4. Don’t accept checks or money orders from anyone – If you plan to sell something on Craigslist, be sure to list your posting as a cash only transaction, even if the item is worth a lot of money.

5. Personal credentials such as social security numbers , credit card and bank account numbers should not be given out without confirmation. Care should be taken because this information can be used for fraudulent activities.

6. Check out for grammar used in classified listing as many scams originate from non-English speaking countries mainly from Nigeria who rarely use English as a means of communication.

7. Do not purchase items/products that have no pictures of the particular product. Ask the seller to provide some to help with your decision to buy.

8. Get familiar with different types of Craigslist scams so that you will learn to recognize scams.

How to Remove AntivirusIS Rogue Program?

admin — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 10:36:57 +0000

AntivirusIS is one more security application that was designed by cyber criminals in order to steal money from ordinary computer users. The program pretends to be a security tool and the website that promotes it attempts to prove that you need to purchase Antivirus IS as your computer system is at risk.

In reality your system can be completely clear as Antivirus IS is not able to detect or remove any of real computer infections. The pop up messages that appear on your computer and report about some infections are absolutely fake and only displayed in order to trick you into thinking your system contains lots of infections and then redirect to the official websites of Antivirus IS. The website promotes purchasing Antivirus IS as the best security tool that is able to remove all infections that already exist on your computer and protect your system from future infections. Unfortunately, that’s a lie and you shouldn’t take it for granted.

As soon as you make a payment for Antivirus IS you can forget about the money you paid for it and unfortunately you will not receive any program for it. You must remove Antivirus IS from your computer as soon as you notice its activity on your computer. Do not pay for this malicious program under any circumstances. If it already happened for you to pay for AntivirusIS rogue program, immediately contact your credit card company and dispute the charges. Otherwise you will only voluntarily pay for cyber criminals and get nothing in return.

How to Remove General Anti-Virus the Easy Way

admin — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 10:36:10 +0000

General Anti-virus is a fake anti-spyware applications that is spreading quickly among PC users. It floods your computer with fake alerts about the presence of numerous malicious items on your computer. The rogue virus performs a fake scan and posts false results. The intention is to trap users into purchasing the full version of this rogue program. If infected I recommend you remove General Anti-virus immediately.

General Anti-virus gets installed on your computer clandestinely without your knowledge. You may get this malware if you have security holes on your computer or your system came in contact with a Trojan while browsing Internet.

The virus deceives users by using a logo and alerts that are quite similar to Microsoft. The worst thing about General Anti-virus is that it hijacks your browser and redirects it to insecure websites. It downloads malicious code that may steal the personal information from your computer and potentially cause identity theft. Therefore it is very important to get rid of this malware as soon as possible.

How to Quickly Perform a General Anti-virus Removal

The virus can be removed both manually and by using an automatic General Anti-virus removal tool. To manually remove this malware from your computer, you need to:

1. Block the associated web sites.

2. Search for malicious processes: GenAvir.exe, file.exe, GeneralAntivirus.exe, services.exe, iv.exe, and unins000.exe using Task Manager and kill them.

3. Unregister General Anti-virus .lnk files:
Purchase License.lnk
settings.ini
uill.ini

4. Delete associated files in directories:
%common files%
%ApplicationData%
%Documents and Settings%
%UserProfile%

5. Delete the malicious registry entries from the following registry folders:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
HKEY_CURRENT_USER

The manual removal of General Anti-virus from your computer is not recommended for non computer experts. This process requires removing highly sensitive registry files which can cause damage if erroneously altered. For folks who aren’t experts ,I recommend using software to remove the virus.

Socialize With Care? Try Anonymous Surfing And Proxy IP

admin — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 10:35:29 +0000

Social networking is becoming a huge market, and social media is engaging more and more people every day. However, people must always be aware of the things they make available online and make sure that they use anonymous surfing software as much as they can.

These days, everyone is on Facebook. Because of social networking, the internet is becoming less “for kids” than it used to be. My grandmother, my first grade teacher and even old Aunt Lily who lives in a farm 2 hours away from the city are on Facebook, liking and commenting on my status message. You only need to see the increasing number of social networking sites to know that this is truly the era of social media. With the number of people now using social networking sites, relatively few people actually care about privacy. Fewer people engage in anonymous surfing or use an anonymizer to protect their personal information. Do you know that you can hide IP addresses? Do you use a proxy IP yourself?

As social networking grows, its capabilities also change and become more diversified. There are more and more ways to connect with other people now than ever before. Unfortunately, this feature also allows other people to gather information about users without them knowing about it, which is why anonymous surfing is a good idea when browsing social networking sites. A Facebook employee tells a story about an account that they investigated recently. A guy created his own personal account and added some people he didn’t know personally but went to the same school with. Seeing the school connection, they added the guy. He then created accounts using their names and pictures. He didn’t really use the accounts to make money, but to post comments on his real account. He used all of those to communicate with himself. It’s not as scary as credit card fraud, but it’s still bizarre and is a great example of how people can abuse the information you put online.

What a lot of people don’t know is how privacy and security are violated whenever someone visits a social networking site. A user’s privacy can be violated simply by surfing with an exposed IP address. If users hide IP addresses from webhosts, then they are making their personal information secure because the webhost can’t record the real IP address that the user is using. It will only record the proxy IP address.

You don’t have to mask IP addresses if you know that you are browsing a secure site. If you are researching something and you accidentally land on an unsecure site, an exposed IP address is an invitation for hackers to steal private information like usernames, passwords or even more sensitive data, such as credit card numbers. A hacker can remotely access your computer and infect it with different viruses, so it is a wise choice to do anonymous surfing during these situations.

A user must wisely choose the proxy IP server because all the information they enter may be logged by the proxy owner. If it is a shady proxy server
, you may be hiding your IP from the webhost but you are allowing the proxy owner to use your information. If you are serious about your online privacy, you can purchase paid accounts. These accounts are more secure than free anonymous surfing services, helping you protect your personal information.

How and where does Windows store its passwords

admin — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 10:34:35 +0000

Before reading the article,think of these problems.

1. How does Windows store its passwords?

2. Where Does Windows Store Its Passwords ?

With these questions,I will begin my topic.When you forget computer password,you may wonder,do system administrators tell me my password?Indeed,no one knows what the password is.

Actually,when we set a password,the Computer converts your password to a number,usually via a standard code called ASCII(American Standard Code for Information Interchange).Each character of your password correspnds to a number:An uppercacs A is 65,a lowercase a is 97,the numberal 1 is 49,and so no.The choices are arbitrary and set by historical convention.Atotal of 158 characters are represented by a number.

When you make up a password, the computer turns the number to which it corresponds — call it P — into another number — call it N — according to some rule. The rule should be such that knowing N won’t give away what P is. For example, the rule might say to multiply P by itself a certain number of times and then grab some digits out of the middle of the resulting product. This number and not the password itself is what’s stored in the computer.

Where does Windows store these passwords?Take Windows Xp for example,passwords stroed in the SAM file which located in “C:\WINDOWS\system32\config\SAM”

When you type your password, the computer doesn’t check the password, just that it gets transformed into N. It doesn’t know your password, so your password can’t be stolen.

That means the administrator can’t know the password either. The only way to get back in is for the administrator to make a new password P for you.

Download Folder Lock 6.4.2 FREE

admin — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 10:34:28 +0000

Folder Lock is a fast file encryption software that can also password protect folders, lock files and protect USB Drives and lock CD/DVDs. Folder Lock
creates encrypted storages called ‘Lockers’. You can keep as many of your private files and folders in your Locker and password protect it with a single click. You can transfer, secure and backup these Lockers. Lockers are portable, you can keep them in USB Drives, CD/DVD, and notebooks or transfer them via email or upload. These Lockers are undeletable on the computer where Folder Lock is installed. You can create as many Lockers as you want. Different users can create different Lockers with different passwords as well. With Folder Lock, you can choose either to encrypt using 256-bit AES on-the-fly encryption or lock files, folders and drives anywhere on your computer. Each Locker can contain your encrypted files as well as your personal list of locked items. Furthermore, Folder Lock’s options like hack monitoring, stealth mode, data shredding, history cleaning, auto protection, portable USB autoplay feature and virtual keyboard can enhance file locking and encryption beyond anything ever achieved. In addition, a locker’s delete, move and rename are password protected to prevent data loss.

Snoopers can’t find or access the files you hide using Folder Lock, even in DOS or under other operating systems. This application provides two levels of protection: you can merely lock files and folders, or you can encrypt them using the 256-bit Blowfish algorithm. When you boot up the program, it’ll ask you for a master password. Hitting the Browse link locates and lock folders anywhere on your computer, or you can simply secure them via the context menu. Encryption is limited in the free version to 25 MB.

Although the too-cute-for-words interface doesn’t make them easy to find, Folder Lock does have a treasure trove of Advanced features, accessible after you hit the Options button. You can set files to be shredded, force the computer to shut down after failed entry attempts, erase document history, the clipboard and more, and enter into Stealth mode, which hides the app’s presence on your computer.

The interface, which includes simple animations for no reason other than to “entertain” you, would be better served by a more standard layout that makes options readily and easily available. No doubt to excite your inner lock-breaking child, the octagonal purplish blue layout is supplemented with three more skins when you purchase the full version.

In our tests, the program demonstrated good speed, even when securing large folders. If you share a PC and need to keep certain files to yourself, you should definitely give Folder Lock a try.