Recently, I’ve been receiving several email spams and it is different from the usual spam that I usually received. I usually get an email containing a description of winning a certain contest or raffle where I didn’t register nor participate. Right now, its quite different from the other spams. Usually mail programs and web mail system can easily detect a junk mail or spam mail based on the body or text of the email or on the subject area of the mail. This let them easily be filtered out of the Inbox folder of the mail program. Now, what the spammers did to bypass such security measure was put all of their soliciting content inside a document file then send it as an attachment instead of being as the body of the mail. This made the mail system to have a very hard time detecting the spam mail.
To avoid this kind of spam and be victimized by identity theft, credit card scams, and other security problems related to your accounts and computer, try to consider the following tips:
- Open only attachments from the people that is on your phonebook already.
- Do not give any confidential information to anybody via email specially if they are asking of it because you win of something that you have never registered nor participated.
- Do not post your email addresses online. Spammers usually fetch your emails from the sites where you posted your email. If it is really necessary to show your email address, use an image to show it. SpamBots usually can’t read the address on image.
- Enable the Email protection feature of your anti-virus program.
- Do not open your online banks nor online accounts via links shown on an email. Open it on the browser by typing the URL (web address) of the site directly on the address bar.