A Dangerous Recipe for Spam

Ultimate Fanboy Joined: 18 May 2003 Posts: 508

I'm sure many of you are tired of offers to increase sizes of body parts, consolidate your mortgage, cheap prices on prescription drugs, or steal free cable. Sure you may have some filters to try and block what you can, but what else can you do about it? For starters, secure your machine.

Many people simply do not know how dangerous an idle machine connected to a fast broadband connection can be. A good machine is capable of sending out millions of emails a day in the background, without the average owner knowing (besides just being slow). Computer owners that do not take care of their machines have successfully made comcast.net the #1 spammer in the world.

What does it take? A minimal amount of time and money.

Be sure to keep your operating system up-to-date
Install an antivirus program and keep it up to date as well
Installing a firewall package is also a bonus

With these three things, you can help to secure your computer and not be caught unknowingly sending out spam to millions of email addresses. Comcast has begun disconnecting accounts with abnormal email activity, and I hope more companies take the initiative as well.

Posted: Thu Mar 11, 2004 11:05 pm

Or, you could do the simple thing and install Linux. Wink

Well, ok, that's only valid if you know how to properly secure it, so I'll just leave that at the doorstep as an "idea cookie". On with the windows stuff.

NOTE: The following may look VERY anti-microsoft, and well, it is. Why? Because most people are running Microsoft Applications, so that's where the target is in spreading these automated spam programs/etc. So please, don't think I'm just trying to bash their products, far from, I'm just trying to say if you try one of these alternatives, you might be happier, and help out the anti-spam cause. (BTW: damn I'm getting tired of having to put disclaimers at the beginnings of my posts.)

A couple more recommendations I might give people would be the following:

Don't use Outlook or Outlook Express - 90+% of mail-based virii specifically target these 2 clients.
Don't use Internet Explorer (IE) - Due to many security flaws there are means by which software can be installed on your system without your knowledge, so even staying up on patches from Microsoft may not be enough.
Use Proper Mail Filters - Even if your client supports filters internally, a more secure, 3rd party solution will give you greater control in weeding out spam.

Some suggestions (based on the number above) for alternates:

Eudora, Calypso, and Pegasus are all excellent alternatives with many features.
Firefox, Mozilla, or Opera are all great alternative browsers, most of which offer more functionality than IE.
K9 and POPFile are EXCELLENT filtering software. They use what is known as a Bayesian filter algorythm, which allows the filters to actually LEARN what is good email, and what is spam. So you then have a much cleaner email inbox (which is how I filter things like 3-inch love tool extentions and cheetah's little "muwhaha" spam from my inbox )

Nothing is going to replace keeping your system up-to-date and a decent anti-virus software package on your system, however, these other steps that I suggested are another step you can take to help secure your system, and make sure that you are not contributing to the problem.

If you'd like more information on any of the products highlighted here, please let me know, I'm more than willing to help you thru understanding and securing down your system by use of one of these alternative programs.

Oh yeah, and if you take offense to what I've said in this post anywhere, sod off Wink

Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2004 12:34 am

Agreed Peoii.
(Well, except Linux and my pessemistic beleief that you geeks are doing it all wrong, damnit. Wink

)

Oh, and just to toss in a few more suggestions:

Mozilla Thunderbird is an excellent e-mail program IMO. Not very feature rich (yet - its only v0.5), but its fast, stable, and it works. Oh, I guess it does have one great feature... the bayesian filtering on it is great. No need for a 3rd party filter here anyways.

My choice in firewalls currently goes to Kerio. Great proggy, and it's free. If you pay for it though, you get a couple nice bonuses like popup and ad blocking too.

And the long reigning champ of my Anti-virus needs has been AVG. Best antivirus proggy evar. (:

Irix WAnnabe Joined: 22 Jun 2003 Posts: 122

A few years back a notebook with Redhat Linux was dropped on my desk at work. No one was using it, and I was curious about what Linux could do. So I setup a simple toy Apache web site on the works net just to see if I could do it. Pretty innocent... I expected I would be the only one to ever view it from home.

Next Monday morning, admin people are swarming about the place looking to the computer that's been sending Porn Emails to the World (and getting abusive emails in return). Oh Shit.

Over the weekend hackers had cracked thru a security flaw in the email server (which I didnt even realise was running) and set the machine up to Spam. My first experience with Linux and I've been wary of it ever since.

... when setting up Servers, ESPECIALLY LINUX which often has many open orifices to let in hackers, be paranoid. Shut off everything you aren't gonna use. Get you patches up to date, check you permission settings, use a condom. Umm, I mean firewall.