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| How Does a Spammer Get My E-mail Address? According to Comcast, a national provider of broadband internet services, there are several ways spammers can obtain your e-mail address, either directly or indirectly, from you. A spammer will often sell or trade lists of e-mail addresses, so once an e-mail address is on a list, it may be combined with others and nearly impossible to remove. Here are the most common ways spammers obtain your e-mail address from you: They harvested your e-mail address from a post to a newsgroup, bulletin board or chat room. Spammers use software programs, known as "spidering" programs, to search for e-mail addresses on public forums. Spammers have software that scans websites for e-mail addresses. If you have a personal web page or website, any e-mail addresses on those pages may be found and added to e-mail lists. You reply to spam or unwanted e-mails, asking to be removed by clicking a false "reply to unsubscribe" link. Often, this confirms that your e-mail address is valid and is then monitored. This can result in even more spam. This practice still continues, despite the passage of a federal anti-spam law called The Can Spam Act, that went into effect January 1, 2004, requiring a functioning "opt out" link or a legitimate "reply to unsubscribe" e-mail address. You've signed up for services on the Internet without checking privacy policies and terms of use; your e-mail address was then added to a mailing list. You've intentionally signed up for a mailing list without checking privacy policies. Hopefully, this will result in receiving only the e-mails you want and not spam. Someone else has provided your e-mail address to a company because you didn't let them know that you want to keep your e-mail address private. Spammers can also find your e-mail address without your help, simply by guessing it. This is a surprisingly common process, and can be quite effective. Here's how they do it: A spammer may start with a list of valid e-mail addresses, then extract the user name portion of the e-mail address, (everything before the @ sign) and try to use it with different providers, e.g., test @comcast.net, test@hotmail.com, test @yahoo.com, etc. This is a hit-or-miss approach that is often very successful. Spammers also use software programs to generate random user names from common names and words in the dictionary. |
| On your computer you should always have a firewall, antivirus, and spyware blocker/remover/scanner, and pop up stopper.. Personally I like Nortons. If you are running a legitimate copy of Windows, Microsoft has a beta anti-spyware program you can download from their website www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx |
| AVG has a free antivirus program http://www.grisoft.com/doc/40/lng/ww |
| Free pop up stopper http://www.stop-sign.com/?n=overture4&OVRAW=www.stop-sign.com&OVKEY=sign.com%20stop&OVMTC=standard |
| Spybot search and destroy is a good scanner and remover tool http://www.download.com/3000-2144-10194058.html?tag=lst-0-1 |
| Zone alarm has a free firewall http://www.download.com/3000-2144-10194058.html?tag=lst-0-1 |
| There is no reason to be on the internet without protection of some sort when there are so many free utilities out there that you can use. In 1983, Fred Cohen coined the term “computer virus”, postulating a virus was "a program that can 'infect' other programs by modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy of itself.” Mr. Cohen expanded his definition a year later in his 1984 paper, “A Computer Virus”, noting that “a virus can spread throughout a computer system or network using the authorizations of every user using it to infect their programs. Every program that gets infected may also act as a virus and thus the infection grows.” In contrast to viruses, computer worms are malicious programs that copy themselves from system to system, rather than infiltrating legitimate files. For example, a mass-mailing email worm is a worm that sends copies of itself via email. A network worm makes copies of itself throughout a network, an Internet worm sends copies of itself via vulnerable computers on the Internet, and so on. Trojans, another form of malware, are generally agreed upon as doing something other than the user expected, with that “something” defined as malicious. Most often, Trojans are associated with remote access programs that perform illicit operations such as password-stealing or which allow compromised machines to be used for targeted denial of service attacks. One of the more basic forms of a denial of service (DoS) attack involves flooding a target system with so much data, traffic, or commands that it can no longer perform its core functions. When multiple machines are gathered together to launch such an attack, it is known as a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS. |
| Always check to see if there are updates for all the products you use and install them. |
| See the following website for tips on how computers, monitors, etc should be set up, adjusted for those of us with cancer and/or lymphedema. http://66.218.69.11/search/cache?p=cancer+and+using+the+computer&sm=Yahoo%21+Search&toggle=1&ei=UTF-8&u=www.cancersupportivecare.com/computerpage2.pdf&w=cancer+using+computer&d=JIHfRG1aMNm_&icp=1&.intl=us |
| LYMPHLAND |
