Privacy, Security & Virus Information

You might not know this but your e-mail address can be stolen

One of the major attractions of these free e-mail addresses provide by all of the major browsers (IE, Google, Yahoo ) is that you can have as many as you want, and no questions asked. That meant that e-mail addresses for many people became a bit of a fashion statement or for small business owners, to handle mail for a project that has long since been completed.

So who bothers closing down an e-mail address once it has moved out of favour? Or who even knows how to? So millions of these e-mail addresses go to the cyberspace scrap yard in the sky, and are there gathering dust.

That is until the cyber criminals caught onto the idea of "kidnapping" these dormant e-mail addresses and using them as yet another vehicle to generate viruses and spam throughout the internet. How does the previous owner of these addresses discover that they have been used as an unwilling accomplice in a cyber-crime? When they start to get irate messages from their friends and/or business acquaintances saying that someone has tried to compromise their web security or even worse have succeeded.

Once a virus tarnished e-mail has been opened and even worse the person receiving the e-mail has innocently clinked on a link, then all of the effort that the cyber-vipers has been worth their while. Not only have they hooked another victim, but from there they have access to their latest victim's address book, and from there on the circle just grows and grows.

E-mail is a wonderful communication tool and extremely convenient. Yet such convenience comes at a price and this latest outbreak of e-mail hi-jacking only goes to show that owning an e-mail address has its responsibilities.

The first responsibility should be that if an e-mail address becomes dormant, then the owner should remove all of the contact names in the address book, making it totally non-attractive to the hacking community.

Secondly, and probably most important, is to make sure that your computer is being protected against hacker intrusion. And that can only be done by installing viable anti-virus software. And not just shareware or the cheapest that you can find online, but professional, powerful anti-virus that is being constantly updated to keep the wolves at bay. Anyone who has ever been hacked, or even worse has been used to generate viruses through their computer, will rush to tell you that the investment involved in installing such a program fades into comparison when they remember the upset and upheaval caused to them, their friends, family and business acquaintances.

 

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