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The contents of this month’s issue come from a recent presentation given to the Houston East End Chamber of Commerce. If you would like for your group to learn more about cleaning up your Inbox, please call us at (713) 861-4183. We can speak to your group with anything from a short 15-minute presentation to a two-hour training class. E-Mail:
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly Did you know that over 30 billion e-mails are transmitted around the world every day? And that figure is expected to double within the next 3-4 years. Spam and virus e-mails now comprise over 50% of the mail being transmitted today, and the percentage is increasing. The e-mail infrastructure was not built to anticipate unsolicited and/or malicious messages. This article will discuss viruses, spyware and spam – what they are, what you can do about them now, and future technological solutions. Symantec Corp. defines a virus as “A self-replicating program intentionally written to alter the way your computer operates without your permission or knowledge.” How many viruses are out there? There are 67,581 virus definitions in the current version of Norton Anti-Virus. These viruses can spread through e-mails, or they can transmit themselves directly from computer to computer. So you don’t even have to have your e-mail program running for your computer to get infected. The most common way to spread through e-mails is to send itself to everyone in your address list. So the idea “I don’t open any e-mails from people I don’t know” doesn’t work because infected e-mails frequently come from people you do know. Another myth is “I immediately delete any e-mails I think may be infected.” This doesn’t work either because many e-mail programs such as Outlook or Outlook Express have a preview feature turned on by default. That preview feature “opens” the e-mail, thereby allowing the virus to infect the computer. Even turning off that preview feature doesn’t guarantee that the virus won’t infect your computer. If you get an infected e-mail that has your friend’s e-mail address on it, it may not have come from your friend at all. Another technique that viruses use is e-mail “spoofing,” where they originate from one location, then put another person’s name from the address list in the “From:” field before sending it. So you don’t know where they came from. Therefore, there is no other solution to the problem of viruses other than continually purchasing an anti-virus program. Just think of it as a cost of using the Internet. We recommend either Norton Anti-Virus 2004 or Trend Micro PC-Cillin 2004. They have been tested by PC Magazine and others and have shown to provide the greatest amount of protection. All commercial anti-virus programs are activated with subscriptions, usually one year in length. When the subscription expires, the program will still protect your computer against existing viruses, but it will not be updated to protect against new viruses. New computers frequently come with an anti-virus program installed. But those programs need to be configured and the subscription service started; do not assume that just because your new computer came with an AV program installed that your computer is fully protected. We recommend that you alternate between upgrading your anti-virus program and renewing the subscription. For example, if you purchased Norton Anti-Virus in 2004, we recommend that you renew the subscription when it expires in 2005. Then we recommend that you upgrade to NAV 2006 when that subscription expires. Please call us at (713) 861-4183 if you have any questions about how to best protect your computer. Remember – you must have an anti-virus program with a current subscription when using the Internet!
What is
spyware? Symantec says “Spyware
programs are applications that send information via the Internet to the creator
of the spyware, or the publisher.” Like
viruses, they are programs that infect your computer.
But unlike viruses, spyware programs aren’t designed to mess up your
computer; they track where you go, what you see and what you type so they can
send you spam or pop-ups or steal your credit card number. Programs
which contain spyware have two components – core functionality and
information-gathering functionality. These
programs start as something you want; their core functionality makes them
desirable to download. Examples
are: Gator remembers your passwords for you, WeatherBug reports current weather
conditions, and Date Manager is a handy calendar program.
This is the core functionality. The
legal fine-print that most people skip when installing the program sometimes
describe how these programs may track and report certain information.
That’s how they get your consent to install the other component, the
information-gathering functionality. The
information they gather may be demographic: where you are accessing the Internet
from, your operating system, your Internet Service Provider, etc.
They also may keep track of where you are surfing.
They may also keep track of what you type:
for example, if you type “Pontiac”, it may pop-up an ad for Caddilac.
These keystroke loggers can also remember when you type your credit card
numbers, thereby contributing to identity theft. What’s
the solution to this growing problem? There
are anti-spyware programs, just like anti-virus programs.
The best programs are Spy Sweeper and Spybot.
Spy Sweeper is a commercial program you can purchase and download from
their web site at www.webroot.com.
You can download the program and update it once for free, but further
updates require the purchase of a subscription.
Spybot is “donation-ware”; you can download it for free from numerous
locations such as www.shareware.com.
If you like it, the program will show you how you can send a donation to
the developers. Spy Sweeper is more
automatic and does a slightly better job of removing spyware.
With Spybot you need to manually update it whenever you use it. You can
also use a pop-up blocking program to stop the pop-ups resulting from spyware.
Just beware that certain web sites (like banks and other financial
institutions) may use pop-ups to log in, so you would need to learn how to turn
off the pop-up blocker for specific web sites. The
important thing to remember when preventing spyware is to be careful of what you
download. If a program is free,
then that means that it may have spyware in it.
Secondly, it’s a good idea to run an anti-spyware program once a month.
Please call us at (713) 861-4183 if you think your computer is infected
with spyware.
Spam is
hard to define. One definition is
“Commercial bulk e-mail that s unsolicited and unwanted.”
Other people think it’s any e-mail that they don’t want.
Any way you look at it, spam is a big problem that takes lots of your
time. Spammers
will do anything to get you to look at their message.
They will put in false subject lines or change the routing information.
By law, they are supposed to provide an opt-out link where you can remove
yourself from their mailing list. With
the worst spammers, not only do they not remove you from their list, but if you
click on their link, this lets them know that your e-mail address is verified.
They can then sell your name at a higher price to other spammers.
So never click on the opt-out links unless it’s from a reputable
company that you know; otherwise, you’ll probably be getting even more spam. What can
you do to block all this spam? Well,
there are anti-spam programs just like anti-virus and anti-spyware programs.
The problem with anti-spam programs is that they can’t separate spam
from e-mails you want with 100% accuracy. If
they use blacklists, then e-mails from specific e-mail addresses will be flagged
as spam. But the spammers
constantly change their e-mail addresses to combat this technique.
If the anti-spam program uses whitelists, then only specific e-mail
addresses will be allowed through. This
creates a problem when you want to receive a message from someone who isn’t on
your list. The next technique looks
at patterns such as the words and phrases used.
The problem with this method is that the spammers learn how to defeat
these techniques. All of
these problems will result in one of two situations: false positives or false
negatives. A false positive is
where a message you want is flagged as spam.
A false negative is where a message you don’t want (spam) is allowed
into your Inbox. There are
several locations where anti-spam programs reside.
The first is at your Internet Service Provider (ISP).
Several ISPs like AOL and Hotmail will filter out spam so you don’t
even see it. The second location
will be on the corporate e-mail server. The
advantage with filtering spam at these locations is that the program gets to
look at e-mails coming in to everyone, which helps it determine what is spam.
The problem is that you may never see the false positives.
In other words, you don’t know what good e-mails you’re missing. The third
location is in your personal computer. Again,
you can purchase anti-spam programs such as Norton Anti-Spam.
Microsoft Outlook 2003 also has a pretty good spam filter built-in
(previous versions of Outlook do not have this feature.)
The Norton program adds a toolbar to Outlook and Outlook Express (any
version), which enables you to quickly correct false positives and false
negatives. The program also learns
and gets better at determining what is spam and what isn’t. To
summarize, don’t click on any links on spam unless it’s from a reputable
company – you’ll just get more spam. An
anti-spam program can help separate spam from good mail, but they aren’t
perfect so you must check the Spam folder for false positives.
Please call us at (713) 861-4183 if you would like to reduce the amount
of spam in your Inbox. |