Spam: know more?

You may noticed that a folder named spam in your email account. Most of the people think that spam is only the email send by a person with another person's identity thereby hiding his own identity. Actually spam is anonymous as described above and is unsolicited bulk e-mail.
The spam is send by a person by hiding his own identity and provide the identity of another person. The receiver will think that the mail has come from the person whose identity is given by the person who created the spam. Generally the intention behind sending spam is to make money. The opening of the email will give the spammer a small amount of money for opening the mail by the recipient. Since the chance of opening the mail by the recipient is very low, spammers send the mail to more persons with fake identity. Fake identity is provided to make the recipient feel that the mail has come from the correct person or a person whom he trust. Often the legitimate mail resembles a spam. Spam message may include political messages, financial scams, etc. But the thing to be given most care is in the case of spams that carry some malwares.
Today the email traffic is dominated by the spams. Most of the spams are targeted to promote the selling of certain goods. But in most cases the selling of these goods are illegal like black market. But the user need not be aware of this illegal trade. In some cases the spams informs the recipient that he had won a cash prize and for the transfer of the amount the recipient must give the details of his bank account. If the recipient sent the details of his bank account, the spammer can empty the bank account of the recipient. In such cases the spam is called scam.
There are different types of spams today. They include: Adult Content, Health, IT, Personal Finance, Education/Training.
Care must be given in handling the e-mail to avoid the spams. The spammers use the combination of words and numbers to create a fake email id. So your e-mail must be in such a way that it must be difficult for creating by the combination of words and numbers. Another thing is that you must maintain two e-mail addresses- one for public use like registering in forums, chating etc and other for your private use. The second one does not declared public. Do not open a message if you are sure that it is a spam. The opening of such messages may help the spammers to gather more information about your e-mail. Do not respond/reply to a spam. This will help the spammers more than what we think. Use a good filtering software for filtering the spam messages.

Beware of Trojans

Trojans are the most dangerous among the malicious software. They have the capability of wide range of destruction of data and can even disable the software that are installed to defend the computer from trojans and viruses. As the internet became more sophisticated more and more types of trojans arosed. Hacker are responsible for the creation of trojans. Generally a trojan is masked by the author in some useful applications and allows the victim to download and use the software. The author may even declare that the use of product will not cause any harm to the computer. But the trojan attached to the software will do its job sincerely. It will send the data to the attackers computer. Using this data the attacker can validate several things including the browsing habit of the victim. Such trojans even send the private data to the attacker's computer. Some trojans kill the security software and make deals with several useful softwares like browsers for its action. Such trojan can take you to a fake site that looks like the original site and takes information like account number.

Most of the trojans were made for the purpose of spying. As many of you know that the trojan has two module: a server and the client. The sever is installed in the attacker's computer and the client is installed in the victim's computer. The client in the victim's machine send the data in the victim's computer to the server in the attacker's computer. Trojans have the capability to read the keystrokes from the victim's computer and send to the the attacker's computer. Some trojans even send the screen shot of the applications running in the victim's machine.
You can download several types of outdated trojans and easily detected by anti-trojan softwares from VX Heavens (http://vx.netlux.org/). This site also provide several viruses, worms, constructors, simulators, source codes of viruses and more...But keep in mind that making or promotion of malicious software is strictly illegal.
You can protect your system from trojans by installing the anti-trojan softwares. Today several anti-trojan softwares are available in the internet for downloading. It is always better to use a well updated anti-trojan in your system. You will get more information about trojan in http://www.anti-trojan.org/

Some useful links are given below:

http://www.anti-trojan-software-reviews.com/
Contains a survey of some of the top anti-trojan softwares

http://www.anti-trojan.org/
Gives you more information about trojans and related malicious softwares. The site also gives some anti-trojans for downloading.

http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Trojan-Virus-Threats-on-Your-Computer-Can-Put-Your-Financial-Information-at-Risk&id=1585959
This site contain an article about the trojan.

Disable Autoruns in XP and Vista

You may know that most of the computer viruses infects the computer through the pen drives is due to the autorun. There are several softwares available in the market that can disable or kill the autoruns. Some anti viruses block the autoruns if the drive is infected. We can disable autoruns in XP and vista in a very easy way.You will take only a little time to disable autoruns in XP and Vista.
There are several methods available for disabling the autoruns. One method which works in both XP and Vista is given below.

Open a notepad and type the following:


REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\IniFileMapping\Autorun.inf]
@="@SYS:DoesNotExist"


Save the notepad with '.reg' extension(eg:atrun.reg). While saving make sure that the type of file is set to 'All Files'.
Navigate to the saved location and open the file. Windows will display a message asking you wether you want to add these data to the registry. Click 'Yes'.