Articles Tagged ‘anti-spam’

The Truth About Spam

Spam is any piece of unwanted or unsolicited email that is sent out to thousands of email recipients at one time. Spam will attempt to convince you to buy a product or participate in a scheme to steal information or money from online sources. Spam can be broken into several basic categories:

• Financial scams – are get-rich-quick schemes and lotteries. These scams use elaborate and confusing descriptions to mislead you into investing in a financial scheme. A well known scam is the “Nigerian Fraud Scam” where someone tells you that their uncle, who is the rightful, but currently deposed, ruler of a country, can restore democracy, but only with your monetary support.
• Phishing schemes – are attempts to impersonate a legitimate company with the goal of convincing you to give up your security credentials or release personal data.
• Financial offers – are usually, but not always, legitimate advertisements for mortgages, debt consolidation, credit cards or other financial programs.
• Stock offers – emails will offer “insider” knowledge to artificially raise the value of low performing stocks.
• Consumer product offers – these advertisements range from fairly benign ads for health aides and designer knockoff hand bags, to more offensive adult content add that offer online dating services and access to adult sites.

Spam Can Hurt Your Company

According to the “spam-o-meter” (http://www.junk-o-meter.com/stats/24hours.php) almost 90% of all email being sent is spam. Dealing with spam will cost your company money:

• When you sort through spam you waste time that could be used to run your business. But, if you ignore the accumulating spam, it will take up storage space on your servers forcing you to spend money to add more storage to your IT network.
• The more spam you get, the harder your email and security systems must work to defend your IT network. Also consider that most malware is delivered through spam—many malware applications will infect your computer and turn it into a “spam server” which can be very expensive to fix.

Say “No” to Spam

Ultimately, spam will affect your company’s bottom line. However, there a few easy steps to help you avoid spam:

• Never click on a link or reply to a spam message. This includes clicking the “unsubscribe” link.
• Always look at the subject line of your email. If it looks like spam, delete it.
• Disguise your email address on your web page so web crawlers can’t identify it. Consider substituting an image for the “@” symbol in your email address.
• Don’t use your email addresses when you register for services or content on the internet. Instead, use a free email address from Yahoo or Hotmail.
• Before you give out your email to a service provider, make sure the site won’t sell your address.
• Use a spam filter. All Covered recommends business class filters from Postini or Barracuda. For more information about how to protect your business’s productivity and bottom line from spam, please contact All Covered.

Chances are that you will, no matter how careful you are, end up with the occasional piece of spam. To learn more about how to protect your IT systems contact All Covered.

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If it’s not one thing, it’s another, the saying goes. Computers on the Internet are continually bombarded with viruses and other malware, so users employ antivirus software to protect themselves. Email inboxes are constantly flooded with pathetically useless spam, so users employ anti-spam programs and techniques to protect themselves. As soon as you think you have things under control you find out your system has a myriad of spyware and adware programs silently running in the background monitoring and reporting on your computer activity.

The more benign spyware and adware simply monitors and tracks the sites you visit on the web so that companies can determine the web-surfing habits of their users and try to pinpoint their marketing efforts. However, many forms of spyware go beyond simple tracking and actually monitor keystrokes and capture passwords and other functions which cross the line and pose a definite security risk.

How can you protect yourself from these insidious little programs? Ironically, many users unwittingly agree to install these programs. In fact, removing some spyware and adware might render some freeware or shareware programs useless. Below are 5 easy steps you can follow to try to avoid and, if not avoid, at least detect and remove these programs from your computer system:

• Be Careful Where You Download: Unscrupulous programs often come from unscrupulous sites. If you are looking for a freeware or shareware program for a specific purpose try searching reputable sites like tucows.com or download.com.
• Read the EULA: What is an EULA you ask? End User License Agreement. It’s all of the technical and legal gibberish in that box above the radio buttons that say “No, I do not accept” or “Yes, I have read and accept these terms”. Most people consider this a nuisance and click on “yes” without having read a word. The EULA is a legal agreement you are making with the software vendor. Without reading it you may be unwittingly agreeing to install spyware or a variety of other questionable actions that may not be worth it to you. Sometimes the better answer is “No, I do not accept.”
• Read Before You Click: Sometimes when you visit a web site a text box might pop up. Like the EULA, many users simply consider these a nuisance and will just click away to make the box disappear. Users will click “yes” or “ok” without stopping to see that the box said “would you like to install our spyware program?” Ok, admittedly they don’t generally come out and say it that directly, but that is all the more reason you should stop to read those messages before you click “ok”
• Protect Your System: Antivirus software is somewhat misnamed these days. Viruses are but a small part of the malicious code these programs protect you from. Antivirus has expanded to include worms, trojans, vulnerability exploits, jokes and hoaxes and even spyware and adware. If your antivirus product doesn’t detect and block spyware you can try a product like AdAware Pro which will protect your system from spyware or adware in real time.
• Scan Your System: Even with antivirus software, firewalls and other protective measures some spyware or adware may eventually make it through to your system. While a product like AdAware Pro mentioned in step #4 will monitor your system in real time to protect it, AdAware Pro costs money. The makers of AdAware Pro, Lavasoft, also have a version available for free for personal use. AdAware will not monitor in real time, but you can manually scan your system periodically to detect and remove any spyware. Another excellent choice is Spybot Search & Destroy which is also available for free.

If you follow these five steps you can keep your system protected from spyware proactively and detect and remove any that does manage to get into your system. Good luck!

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If you use All Covered’s Email Protection Service, powered by Postini, follow these tips for your white list. Any email address on your Approved Senders list will not be quarantined for spam. An Approved Senders list helps prevent false positives, but they can also cause a vulnerability, because senders can “spoof” mail to falsify the sender address and bypass spam filtering.

Periodic reviews of the Approved Senders lists for your organization and users can help, especially if spoofed spam seems to be getting through filters more often.

End User Tip

As an end user, you can manage your Approved Senders list through the Message Center. Follow these steps:

1. Log into your Message Center.
2. Click on the Junk Email Settings link in the top left corner.
3. Scroll down to the Sender Lists area.
4. To add a sender, type in the person’s full email address or the domain (ex: domain.com) and click Save to List.
5. To remove a sender, select that sender and click Delete from List.

Note: It is recommended that you add family, friends and work colleagues to the Approved Senders list so their messages will automatically by-pass the filters.

Administrator Tips

If you have admistrative rights to your account, follow these steps:

To view and modify an organization Approved Senders list:

1. In the Administration Console, select the organization that contains your users.
2. In the Org Management, click Sender Lists to view your Approved Senders list.
3. To remove a sender, select that sender and click Remove.

To view a user’s Approved Senders list:

1. In the Administration Console, go to Users and find the user.
2. In the User Overview page, click Sender Lists to view the user’s approved sender list.
3. To remove a sender, select that sender and click Remove.

You can also use batch commands to view and modify all senders.

To view an org Approved Senders list, along with other org information, use the displayorg command:

• displayorg ORGNAME

To remove an Approved Senders from the org approved sender list, use the modifyorg command:

• modifyorg ORGNAME, approved_senders=-SENDERNAME

To view an org Approved Senders list, along with other org information, use the displayorg command:

• displayuser USERNAME

To remove an Approved Senders from the org approved sender list, use the modifyuser command:

• modifyuser USERNAME, approved_senders=-SENDERNAME

How All Covered Can Help

If this is an issue for your business, All Covered provides email anti-spam and anti-virus consulting and services for small businesses nationwide.

• Call us: For a personal consultation, call our friendly sales team at 866-446-1133
• Email us: Use our contact form and we’ll contact you within one business day.
• Free Newsletters: Use our Free IT Newsletters about IT issues facing small business
• Our services: Integrated Message Management: Email Protection Service
  
  Complete spam, virus, and phishing filtering and protection

Contact All Covered

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