IT Support for Small Business

Email Security

Is your email safe and secure?
Could you be a Zombie?

Email security these days is not just about viruses.  There are now so many different threats sometimes it is difficult to keep up.  And yes one of those threats is to have your computer turned into a Zombie.  Please don’t be alarmed by this, this does not mean that your computer is going to suddenly get up from the desk, groaning and trying to kill you.  What it does mean is that a hacker is using your computer without your knowledge to spam people and maybe hack other computers or data as well. 

The way that most hackers get into computers is through emails.  They send emails with hidden viruses that can give the hacker a backdoor entrance into that computer.  Those viruses can be hidden in an attachment or within the email themselves. 

The two main ways that hackers use are Trojan horse and email worms.  A Trojan horse is a program that will sit on your computer.  It would come in as an email attachment and disguise itself as a legitimate program like free virus cleaning software but really it is planting the Trojan on your computer for a hacker to use later.  The other way is the email worm.  An email worm is a computer virus that is self replicating.  This means that when you open the email it will send itself out to everyone that is in your contact list.  This means that you could receive an email from a friend or trusted source but it could contain a virus that they don’t know about.  This type of malicious software is called Malware.

Malware is very profitable for the criminals that are behind them.  Not only can they be used to hack peoples computers to steel data, but by sending out fake emails pretending to be from  your bank or other company known as spoofing they can trick you into sending them your passwords and/or your credit card details.  This form of Malware is called Phishing.

Your email is under attack every day from spam and malware.  I recently read an article from IronPort®, they are an independent business within Cisco security’s technology group.  It was saying that in 2006 spam had increased by a staggering 83% from 30 billion in 2005 to 55 billion in 2006.  It is also thought throughout the industry that this could be as high as 90 billion in 2007 although no actual figures have been released yet.

How is spam so effective?  The problem is that spammers can get round obvious and rude names because they can substitute letters with symbols, numbers and spaces so the words are still recognisable to you and I but the spam filter is not able to pick them up.  The other method that spammers use is images if the spam is image based the spam filter can’t see what the image is only that it is an image so it can’t block it.

Life is not totally hopeless though.  It may sound from the above that there is nothing that can be done but you’d be wrong.  It just means that you need to constantly thinking about your security and adapting to the current situation.  There are lots of ways that we can help you to defeat the criminals and the spammers.