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It’s a pain, but security is each user’s responsibility, not just the tech’s.–Bobbi Galvin, OPLIN
One of the most common misconceptions library staff typically have about their email accounts is that nobody would want to hack them.
WRONG.
Your email account is an extremely valuable commodity, especially to a spammer. Check these stats out:
- The average PC user receives over 2,000 and counting spammed emails per year
- The average computer user receives about 10 spams per day
- About 28% of people answer spam emails
- About 90 BILLION spam mails are sent PER DAY
Spam is big business, and your email account is a potential accessory. The problem lies in that library staff tend to think hackers want the actual emails in the account, when rather what they are likely after is the account access. Spammers want to use your account to send spam.
What does this mean to me, Laura?
A few things. For instance, if your account is hacked, other problems can arise:
- Your account can be blacklisted or blocked because of spamming;
- The entire OPLIN mailserver IP can be blocked, because that’s where the spam is coming from;
- If your email account is blocked/blacklisted, your mail doesn’t get delivered;
- Your friends/families/coworkers/professional contacts start getting Viagra ads from your address. Not good.
So what should I do?
- Start by using a strong password. Try http://www.passwordmeter.com to check if it’s strong enough.
- Change your password often. Yes, it’s a pain. Do it anyway.
- Make sure that your computer is protected. This means making sure you take care (or your tech takes care) of doing Microsoft updates in a timely manner and keeping your anti-virus software updated. New viruses come out every day; is your virus software checking for new virus definitions frequently?
Email security is part of network security, and everyone is responsible for the health of the network. Time for a check up!
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Sometimes, URLs can be insanely long. For example:
http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch.com/
Or:
Yes, both real. Both annoying. And, if you try to email these, they will not display properly in some email clients. Some people won’t be able to click them at all. But, never fear…URL shortening services are here!
There are many free URL shortening services that you can easily use online. One well known one is TinyURL.com. You just copy and paste your long URL into a box and, with the click of a button, you have a new, short and valid URL. The first long URL, above, becomes:
Works exactly like the long one, without breaking anyone’s email client.
What does this mean to me, Laura?
- There are many URL shortening services. Pick the one you like best.
- If you need to send a URL via SMS, this is also very handy.
- Sometimes, your browser might refuse to display a page from a shortened URL. This is usually due to the security settings being too high on the browser.
- If you are a Firefox user, you can a handy extension to make creating tiny URLs much simpler.
(With a lot of credit to George Lenzer, blogger at alt.think!)
Here’s some facts about email’s biggest annoyance. Did you know:
- Spam is largely automated? There aren’t sweatshops full of people typing up those messages at lightning speed in some less developed nation for half a cent per day. In fact, the automation of spam is one aspect of it that makes it so difficult to combat.
- Your own PC might be a spam bot? Just as with medical conditions, I’ll leave the diagnosis of your PC being a spam bot to your chosen expert analyst, however… It’s quite easy to have your PC sending out tons of spam without you knowing it. Especially now that the typical desktop PC has 1980s super computer power ten times over and a fairly fast internet connection. You may not even notice a slowdown at all. Make sure you keep those OS updates and anti-virus/anti-malware signatures up to date. Also make sure you keep all of your networked software up to date too. That includes broswers, browser plug-ins, things like Java and Flash, IM clients, mail clients, etc…
- Spam can’t be traced back to it’s original source no matter what some movies and TV shows illustrate? In technical terms there is something of a list of routes that tells you where spam came from included in the message. This is known as a mail header and generally says, “The message arrived at your address from the address listed below. The message arrived to that address from the address listed below that. The message arrived to that address from the address listed below that”… But even if you go back to the first address in the list, it is likely that even that address was just someone’s home PC being controlled remotely by a spammer. So it’s a dead end. There is no way for an end user, or even a network administrator to track the message back to the accountable party and then file charges at them.
- Personal home computers infected with worms and viruses can generate spam on their own without a spammer controlling the system? Not necessarily spam that is useful to anyone, but the cryptic sort where you see excerpts of various mail messages spliced together. These systems also splice together the prefix and the domain of an e-mail address (the parts before and after the @ sign, respectively) in order to come up with new addresses to send to. Sometimes those messages actually hit a real person. And worst of all, these infected machines will use all of the e-mail addresses they have access to as the FROM address. This means that for all of the non-existent addresses that are created by this random patter, the unfortunate person being spoofed in the FROM field will get “scatterback” non-delivery messages. This usually makes people worry that they’ve been infected when they haven’t.
- Spammers, through the resource of these compromised “bot nets” have the ability to overload entire networks for purposes other than spam? The bot nets are used for more than just sending spam. In the past few years incidences of extortion on high profile sites have occurred. One party threatens another party who absolutely must remain online to be profitable with an attack that will knock them off the internet. That is unless they pay the requested sum of money.
Spam is a huge problem, and one that will not be easily solved. Mail administrators, like George, are constantly trying new tweaks or methodologies to lessen the amount of spam in your inbox…but the chances of them being completely successful are very low. It’s too easy for spammers to deluge mail systems with garbage, too fast. The next time you get a spam message in your email, be thankful you’re not seeing the other 95% of them that your mail admin helped to prevent. Over 100 billion spam messages are sent per day.
What does this mean to me, Laura?
- Be thankful for all of the spam you’re NOT getting.
- Keep your virus, anti-spyware and operating system up to date so that your PC does not become an infected zombie machine.
- Spam isn’t going away any time soon. It will only get worse.
- Bring your mail admin some cookies. Really.
