There's been a lot of media coverage about spam. And despite the government getting involved and the various filtering tools, I think the spammers are winning.

I sometimes happen upon sites that are clearly automatically generated. I'm guessing they've been created to attract organic search engine traffic which presumably can lead to ad revenue. This got me to wondering if my blog posts were being picked up such systems, but I didn't know how to find out such a thing. Searches for my existing content using Google, Yahoo, or MSN would bring back too many results that I don't have the time to sift through. Then it occurred to me that if I included a unique phrase or word in a post, I could easily track the travels of that phrase or word.

I recently had an opportunity to try out Webroot Spy Sweeper and discovered 3 spyware programs on my computer that AVG's and Lavasoft's anti-spyware programs had previously failed to identify. It didn't look like these spyware programs were active i.e. I just had traces of them on my computer and it is possible that Spy Sweeper was reporting false positives, but I chose to act on the information and perform a thorough sweep.

Greylisting is a technique used by some internet service providers (ISPs) to reduce spam. The process behind it is quite simple: when an e-mail is received, notify the sending mail server that the e-mail needs to be resent (i.e. temporarily rejected), and once the second copy has been received let it pass through to the user's inbox. The theory is that spammers won't bother to resend the e-mail a second time while legitimate senders will.

This post goes hand-in-hand with a previous post where I list some of my favorite Internet related tools. In the following paragraphs I briefly describe some of the spam fighting tools I use.

The Internet isn't perfect and if you're a heavy user, some of its oddities become annoying over time. Fortunately, some smart people out there have written some really useful software to help with day-to-day activities. Here's my list of favorites.

One of my clients has been hit with the new MSBlaster virus that affects Windows operating systems. From everything I've read, the virus doesn't do any damage to the user's machine. But for some reason I'm unable to launch Visual Basic. And a bunch of other common tasks like copy-and-pasting aren't working. So while there may not be any permanent damage, there certainly is something going on. Fortunately, these problems only exist on the computers managed by my client.

Back in 2003 I started to use an Outlook plug-in called SpamBayes to filter spam. For over two years this plug-in worked beautifully behind the scenes filtering most spam with next to no false positives. But recently, its performance has become less impressive.

Back in October, I wrote about how people were dealing with the many passwords they had to remember. Although several programs exist to help with password issues, it wasn't until today that I learned about a free, open source password manager program.

It is a harsh truth that there are people out there who are trying to cause damage to our computers or simply use them for their own purposes without our knowledge. Because of such people, it has become necessary to arm ourselves with a variety of programs to protect our computers from viruses, spyware, and whatever else may be created. While there are certainly many good commercial programs to choose from, it can get rather expensive once you get roped in to the yearly license fees and product upgrades that software companies use to remain profitable.

I just started using a free browser plugin from McAfee that I believe holds great promise. It's called SiteAdvisor and its purpose is to warn users of potentially unsafe web sites by marking search results with a green checkmark for safe, yellow exclamation point for dubious, and red x for unsafe. It even provides these indicators for the ads that appear on Google, MSN, and Yahoo. And while those two things alone would be impressive, the plug-in doesn't stop there. It will also give you real-time indicators of the site you're currently on should you happen to get there from a link rather than a search engine.

For a while I've been using an Outlook plug-in to filter spam. I even recommended this free spam filter. This plug-in I've been using was designed to learn, based on my input, what I considered to be spam vs. legitimate e-mail. And for quite some time it worked very well.

It seems the longer you have a particular e-mail address the more spam you will get. At the same time, the longer you have an e-mail address the more likely you'll want to keep it since you would otherwise have to get all your contacts to update their address books. Having attempted to get people to update their address books, I can confirm that this requires a lot of patience and time. The alternative is to find a way to deal with the onslaught of spam.

Phishing, the use of legitimate looking e-mails that attempt to trick people in to giving out personal information, is on the rise. It's not hard to see why. Rather than digging through mounds of data looking for credit card numbers, social security numbers, and bank account info, criminals can now just send e-mails to millions of people hoping that some will be tricked in to revealing their information. All it takes is a very small percentage to make the e-mail work worth the effort.

The music industry's efforts to stamp out music piracy are well-documented so I'm not going to go over them here. However, Sony's recent efforts to push their digital rights management (DRM) software on users seems to have crossed the line of what consumers should accept as good business practices. Sony has decided that it's OK to automatically install copy-protection software on your PC when you insert one of their music CDs. There are written, but vague, disclaimers about the copy-protection software, but it is otherwise installed without your knowledge. What's more, it is installed in such a way that you are very unlikely to detect its existence and then you'll have to jump through many hoops to uninstall it.

Data security shouldn't just be a concern for corporations. I think everyone should take steps to guard their data especially since more and more of the really important stuff exists in digital form. Even if you feel confident that your data is secure behind a firewall or maybe not accessible from the Internet, there is still the mundane, but ever present risk that your home will be burglarized. And aside from the jewelry you keep in the cookie jar, thieves are going to take your computer. If you're lucky, they'll go after the quick bucks by selling your machine. However, some may decide to see what you've got stashed on your hard drive. Social security number? Bank information? Stored logins and passwords for your favorite e-commerce sites?

If you've been diligent, you've installed a firewall and anti-virus programs on your computer. You should also be running a spyware and adware removal tool regularly. If you don't have any of these, be sure to check out my recommended list of free firewall, free spyware removal, and free anti-virus tools.

A survey of 1,700 users by RSA looked at password management and had the following disheartening, but not entirely surprising results.

It is a harsh truth that there are people out there who are trying to cause damage to our computers or simply use them for their own purposes without our knowledge. Because of such people, it has become necessary to arm ourselves with a variety of programs to protect our computers from viruses, spyware, and whatever else may be created. While there are certainly many good commercial programs to choose from, it can get rather expensive once you get roped in to the yearly license fees and product upgrades that software companies use to remain profitable.

It is a harsh truth that there are people out there who are trying to cause damage to our computers or simply use them for their own purposes without our knowledge. Because of such people, it has become necessary to arm ourselves with a variety of programs to protect our computers from viruses, spyware, and whatever else may be created. While there are certainly many good commercial programs to choose from, it can get rather expensive once you get roped in to the yearly license fees and product upgrades that software companies use to remain profitable.

I'm now advocating a switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox. I made the switch a month or so ago primarily because I was getting tired of the numerous security holes being found in Internet Explorer.