Posts Tagged ‘spam’
Protecting Yourself from Email Web Beacons
Tuesday, July 7th, 2020
Web Beacons (a.k.a Tracking Pixels) are images in HTML-formatted email messages that, when viewed, tell the sender of the message that you read it. This mechanism of obtaining essentially covert confirmation that (a) your email address is valid, (b) the email got past your filters, and (c) you actually read the message, is pervasively used by Spammers to identify what addresses are reading their messages. It is also used by email marketers to hep them measure the success of their email campaigns.
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Save Yourself From “Yourself”: Stop Spam From Your Own Address
Friday, September 22nd, 2017I just got junk email … from me!
It is surprisingly common for users to receive Spam email messages that appear to come from their own address (i.e. “joe@domain.com” gets a Spam email addressed so it appears to be from “joe@domain.com”). We discussed this issue tangentially in a previous posting: Bounce Back & BackScatter Spam – “Who Stole My Email Address”? However, many users wonder how this is even possible, while others are concerned if their Spam filters are not catching these messages.
How can Spammers use your email address to send Spam?
The way that email works at a fundamental level, there is very little validation performed on the apparent identity of the “Sender” of an email. Just as you could mail a letter at the post office and write any return address on it, a Spammer can compose and send an email address with any “From” email address and name. This is in fact extremely easy to do, and Spammers use this facility with almost every message that they send.
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Infographic: Steps to Avoiding Forged Email
Friday, February 12th, 2016Forged emails are extremely common. Most of the time forged emails are merely a nuisance.However, if you accidentally share information with or click on a link from someone who sent a forged email, the results can devastate your goal or even your site, or if it’s really evil, an entire computer. Here’s some information about how to recognize and stop forged emails.
How to Avoid Forged Email: Forged Email Facts & SPF Significance
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8 Ways to Protect yourself from Forged/Fake Email
Monday, January 26th, 2015The Internet is rife with fake and forged email. Typically these are email messages that appear to be from a friend, relative, business acquaintance, or vendor that ask you to do something. If you trust that the message is really from this person, you are much more likely to take whatever action is requested — often to your detriment.
These are forms of social engineering — the “bad guys” trying to establish a trusted context so that you will give them information or perform actions that you otherwise would not or should not do.
Here we address some of the actions you can take to protect yourself from these attacks as best as possible. We’ll present these in the order of increasing complexity / technical difficulty.
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