Re: [Philmont]: Dr. Bob's Report on Computer Security

At 07:43 AM 8/30/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>Last week I promised I would get back to the List when I figured out what
>was up with my spyware infestation. This is the followup report. This has
>nothing to do with Philmont, and so if you are not interested, please
>delete this message now, with my apologies. The intent is to help my
>fellow List members avoid suffering what happened to me. I intentionally
>sent this on a Holiday weekend when bandwidth use is low.

Bob, Thanks for all the effort and report. I too have recently been on a
mission to understand and address pop-ups and spam. During a recent trip
to NT, I returned to find 1600 e-mails after 10 days...............1300
were spam! I have not delved into the spyware issue and I thank you for
doing so.

I have heard that there is, and will always be, major holes in Microsoft
products which hackers will continue to find and exploit. As is evidenced
by the number of "security updates", issued by Microsoft, they are always
one step behind the hackers.

Here are some things that I am trying and am thus far pleased with.

Switched to Mozilla as a browser. This has eliminated all pop-ups so far.

Switched to Eudora as an Internet e-mail program. My understanding is that
this is more secure from virus infiltration.

I am trying a program called Mailwasher Pro. It has a 30 day trial. You
set this as you e-mail checker and it does so at the server level and
allows you to do a quick view of all e-mail and decide whether to keep or
discard. Plus you can "blacklist" spam and it will even "bounce" back a
message to spammers that your re-mail address is not valid. Each e-mail
has a number of check boxes that you can decide how you want to handle and
then "process". After processing you open your normal program and bring in
the e-mail you really want. Perhaps the best part is that I belong to
several discussion "lists" such as this Philmont list and most of this I do
a quick scan and delete. This program enables me to do this at the SERVER
level and never really clutter up my inbox or trash.

Finally, I am discovering that 98% of my spam comes from an e-mail account
listed on my website. I am thinking that the solution to this is to change
this frequently but I have not begun to do so.

Thanks again Bob!

Alan Hamm
Bethesda, MD

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Received on Tue Sep 2 06:59:10 2003