Monday, February 13, 2012

Spam (not the stuff from Hormel)

Click here to visit the folks that make the food-stuff that the email we will discuss is named after.

Have you noticed an increase in spam in your inbox? Last September Microsoft and Kaspersky managed to temporarily disable a botnet comprised of an estimated 45,000 computers. A botnet is a collection of compromised computers connected to the Internet (each compromised computer is known as a 'bot'). They could have removed the malicious software from the infected computers but apparently that is illegal. This botnet is called Kelihos.

Well, the bad guys have managed to reestablish control of Kelihos, and with 45,000 computers it sends an estimated 4 billion spam messages a day. It seems like most of it is directed to email servers I manage. You can get more details by clicking here.

So what can you do to block spam? There isn't a silver bullet, but here are some programs that can help.

SPAMfighter

MailWasher

As always, be aware of piggyback programs.

Friday, February 10, 2012

Piggyback Programs

A piggyback program is a program that you don't want that gets installed when you install another program that you want. Usually you are asked if you want to install the piggyback program and given an opportunity to skip the install. I find these programs on computers everyday. Often they are toolbars and present themselves in Internet Explorer as shown below.



These programs slow down your computer and are generally a nuisance. There is a good posting on how to avoid and remove these piggyback programs, click here.