Spam used to be merely an annoyance: junk email ads for meds, romance, degrees, etc. Now it has graduated from annoyance to outright danger. The links provided in spam can lead you to a poisoned website where hackers are positioned to infect your computer.
A tool of hackers
The hacker-run sites may be interactive - enticing you to click something to take further action, which infects your computer. However, in some cases just visiting the site could plague your computer with browser hijacking or a Trojan download. So, as you've heard from me and other IT pros, be very, very suspicious of each and every email you get. When in doubt, delete it!
How did the spammers find you?
You might be wondering how spammers get your email. There are several sources: chatrooms, websites, customer lists, newsgroups, and viruses which harvest users' address books to name a few. A certain class of bots, referred to as "collection bots" also sends spam to entire domains in order to identify the non-bouncing email addresses, which are then added to a commercial spam database. Nice, huh?
How do the spammers make money?
It used to be that if a small percentage of users clicked the junk mail, and then purchased the product advertised, that would suffice. The cost of business for spamming is very low, as millions of prospects can be reached by sending numerous bulk emails. Now, as mentioned above, spammers and their network affiliates can make money from hacked computers too, including using ransomware attacks.
Why can't they be caught and punished?
Spammers distance themselves from law enforcement by operating overseas and by using botnets of infected computers for spam distribution. There are millions of computers worldwide controlled by botnets. Those computers belong to people unaware their computers have been compromised.
Is yours one of them? I suggest that you thoroughly scan your computer after reading this article with at least two scanners, such as Kaspersky or Malwarebytes.
What can you do?
How can you protect yourself from this onslaught of spam? One way is to limit your exposure online. Be careful which websites you give your email to. And consider creating an anonymous-looking email address (nothing to identify you) that you can use for email not relating to work, family and close friends, or trusted financial institutions or ecommerce sites. For example, if you'd like to subscribe to news services, games sites, or social or political causes, use the anonymous email.
It's also best to use a spam filter in your email program, and set it to aggressive. Just make a habit of checking it so you don't miss any important messages. As for any undesirables that slip through the filter, just mark them as spam and they should not reappear.
Open a new email account
If you just can't seem to screen out the volume of spam you get, it's best to open a new email account, and only give it to those contacts in the spam-barraged account you care to maintain contact with. Then just check the old account once a week to see if you're missing anything. But never respond to emails from it.
It takes some effort, but you can fight back against the spam industry.
Sam
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