Online Spam: The Major Things You Should Know

With spam, it\'s much like human viruses, computer viruses run the gamut from the benign to the fatally destructive to the computers they infect. And just as with human viruses, prevention is better than cure. Prevention begins by stopping them in their tracks at the portals of contact. This is where a firewall can come in handy.

Windows XP, as well as the new Vista have a personal firewall built into the operating system that is by default turned on. Because it monitors and offers popup warnings many people turn it off, and leave themselves remarkably vulnerable to attack. The Windows firewall default of \"on\" should be maintained until and unless you find another software or hardware firewall to protect your system.

Spam harm

In the early days of the Internet, spam was little more than an irritating nuisance. However, like every other aspect of the Internet, spam has evolved to become something far more nefarious in nature.

Email is the most common vehicle of choice for spreading viruses, and for hackers to get into your computer system. There is an increasing amount of this type of spam being mailed out of late. These small programs can be used in myriad harmful ways, including crashing your own system, crashing that of the parties you email or keystroke logging to gather your personal information.

A 2006 study by Consumer Reports estimated that in two years, Americans spent more than $7 billion on repairs and parts replacement resulting from viruses, malware and spyware. This does not take into account the cost to the Internet Providers who have to pay for all the bandwidth taken up by the spammers junk, or the cost in time, money and productivity to businesses that have to sort through all the spam.

The whitelists spam protection

The efficiency of whitelists comes at a price, because it produces a large number of false positives. This means that a lot of legitimate email goes undelivered. To deal with this problem, a challenge-response technique is often instituted.

The advantage of this method is that it is not worth it to spammers to wade through all the challenge-response emails and respond to them. They are more likely to remove the email address from their lists and go after other addresses that do not have such requirements. However, the inconvenience of having to register to send email to the whitelist user may discourage legitimate email senders from following through.

Article Source: http://www.thearticlenet.com

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