During the recent Michael Jackson trial, computer security firms detected a windows email virus trying to ensnare millions of victims by claiming the star had attempted suicide. The fake message contained a web link that supposedly connected to Mr Jackson’s suicide note but anyone clicking on the link had their PC invaded by a virus that gave others access to that machine.
This is SPAM at its most deadly. Costing millions of pounds to industry every year, it is a problem that affects your business now but there are measures you can take to protect your company against this which we will talk about later, first of all we will look at why SPAM has grown and how it works. The massive growth in SPAM has occurred largely because email is so cheap and easy to send. It costs almost as little to email a million people as a single one. The way it works is that Spammers find domains through search engines, such as yourcompany.co.uk and then sends thousands of emails through to common "local parts"
i.e. sales@yourcompany.co.uk info@yourcompany.co.uk or peter@yourcompany.co.uk.
For the dedicated Spammer there can be up to 20,000 variations on a single domain. With these so called "dictionary attacks" the messages are being sent out from huge networks of zombie machines which are virus/adware infected home PC’s.
You may think that it is all doom and gloom but Arkom can offer you advice to reduce the possibility of attack
- Remove your catch all email account
- If you download all email to your own mail server, make sure your ISP has a list of your valid email addresses
- Add a 'blocking' catch-all account, which informs legitimate senders the address they have sent it to is no longer valid
- Make a company email address less easy to guess
- Remove visible email addresses from your website, encourage visitors to use the contact form
If SPAM is wasting your time, why not contact Arkom on 0114 282 3444 to find out how we can help you.