Protect Yourself with a Porn Filter

The harmful affects of pornography use and addiction are well documented by science. As with most things in life, prevention is the most effective way to avoid ever having a problem with pornography. The internet is a wonderful place to access information, read updated news, and connect with people from all over the globe. Unfortunately, pornography on the internet is everywhere, and it isn’t always easy to avoid. Even people taking responsible measures to keep porn off of their computer screens can stumble across it sometimes. The tips found in this article will help you protect yourself and your family online from inappropriate pictures and text. Take measures to filter spam. Spammers can make money if only one person of the thousands of people they send sexually explicit emails to clicks on their ad and pays for their service. Do everything you can to keep those emails from ever reaching your inbox. If you have allowed your children to have their own email accounts, filtering spam is the best way to ensure inappropriate images never become accessible to them through email. A quick list of things you can do to eliminate spam includes: • Only give your email address out to people you know and trust. Do not put your personal email address down for every mailing list or website that asks for it. Many free email services exist now – set up a free account with one of them and use that to sign up for mailing lists. • Never click on any links in spam and if at all possible, avoid ever opening the email. Both of these actions confirms to spammers that you actively use your email account and you will likely start to receive more spam. • Purchase and use a spam filter. Many come packaged with a porn filter as well as other features that will help keep inappropriate content off of your computer screen. Be careful what you download. This should be a universal precaution you take by now each and every time you download something off the internet. Viruses, spyware, and pornography can very easily be hidden in the files that you download – prevention in this case is much easier than fixing the problem after the files have already made their way onto your hard drive. Only download files from sources that you trust, and if you ever have a question as to whether something contains a virus or pornography, do NOT download it. Use a search engine to find websites. Pornographers use domain names that are similar to popular websites or brands in hopes that people will type in the address incorrectly and end up at their pornography site. I knew a child that wanted to look up codes for his favorite video game, so he typed in the name of the game and “.com.” He had the presence of mind to close the browser and tell his parents, but was still exposed to the material. One of the best ways to avoid this is searching for the address in Google. Then you can preview the results in a text-only format before clicking on the link to go to the page. Many of the popular search engines have a built-in porn filter that you can adjust to control the type of content you don’t want to appear in the search results. Others even offer “for kids” versions of their search engines that only return pages deemed appropriate for children. Use filtering software that includes a porn filter. No matter how careful you are about the sites you visit, chances are good that someday you will accidentally come across a porn site. A porn filter will help ensure that inappropriate material is blocked when you or someone in your family stumbles across a pornographic website. The parents of the boy who stumbled across pornography while looking for his favorite Nintendo game quickly installed a porn filter to make sure their son was protected in the future. Avoid pornography offline. Porn was around long before the internet. Carry around your own internal porn filter and avoid places that you know will have inappropriate images, movies, or books displayed. If your children are with you, be extra cautious of where they are in the store. If you think there is a chance that they may be able to access inappropriate material while you are shopping, let the store manager know of your concerns. Likely, you are not the only one who is worried about the issue, and real changes can come about from one person simply speaking up. Take the appropriate precautions now to avoid pornography. If you or someone you know has a problem with pornography use or addiction, seek professional help. Pornography problems not only affect the individual viewing the picture but everyone who interacts with that person.

Why Your ISP Takes Bribes From Spammers

The lifeblood of the spammer is email. They need to be able to send lots of it on an ongoing basis to stay in "business". High profile spammers can send 80 million pieces of junk email every single day. Yes one single person. ISPs all over the online world have vowed to stop spammers sending such vast amounts of email through their mail servers. Do they really keep their word? All the end user sees is that the spam keeps coming. There must be a loophole there somewhere. There is. In the soft white underbelly of the internet there exists something known as a pink contract. The term pink contract comes from the color of the famous tinned meat that junk email gets its name from. A pink contract is simply a business agreement between the ISP and the spammer. The spammer agrees to pay the ISP to turn a blind eye to the junk email passing through their mail servers. Surely this is bad business for the ISP? Well the answer to that is both Yes and No. Yes it's bad news for the people who receive the junk email and No it's good news for the ISPs bank balance. A monthly pink contract can pay the ISP amounts from $10,000 upwards. Bearing in mind that the average work-at-home spammer averages $100,000 net per year the above figure is small change fo the bigger junk email vendors (the guys who earn $200,000 - $400,000 per month.) But..... the CanSpam Act 2003... surely that's going to make a difference? Of course. Any ISP in the United States can get in serious, serious trouble for signing pink contracts. Problem is that there's a whole big world wide web out there and the vast majority of pink contracts are signed with overseas ISPs where US authorities have no jurisdiction - China and Russia being perfect examples. There's no moral to this story. Spam is a huge problem that's finally being taken seriously by Governmental bodies. However until they start imposing prison sentences or seizure orders on those individuals and companies in the pink contract business the problem can only continue.

Evict the Spammers from Your Inbox

Block Spam and Other Email Threats From Entering Your Gateway Spam, commonly defined as unsolicited commercial email, is a powerful advertising channel for many products and services. As a result, spamming has become a profitable business, driven by the low cost of sending email compared to other direct marketing techniques. The high return on investment for spammers has resulted in an overwhelming volume of unwanted messages in personal and business email boxes. Consider this: Conducting a direct mail campaign costs an average of $1.39 per person, meaning that a response rate of 1 in 14 is necessary just to break even on a product with a $20 gross profit. Selling the same item via unsolicited spam email costs only $0.0004 per person, meaning that a response rate of 1 in 50,000 gets the seller back to break-even; anything above that is gravy. With profit margins like these, it’s easy to see why spammers will try anything to get past anti spam technology to deliver their messages to your inbox. Types of Spam Threats The recent onset of fraudulent spam variants such as phishing and spoofing pose an even greater risk than the spam volume clogging email servers. Spammers use techniques such as phishing and spoofing to fool users into opening messages that, at first glance, appear innocuous. Phishing Phishing is a specific type of spam message that solicits personal information from the recipient. Phishers use social engineering techniques to fool end users into believing that the message originated from a trusted sender, making these attacks especially dangerous because they often con victims into divulging social security numbers, bank account information or credit card numbers. In one six-month period from November 2003 to May 2004, phishing attacks increased in frequency by 4000%, and the trend continues upward. An example of phishing is an email that appears to come from a bank requesting that users log into their account to update or correct personal information. When the users follow a link embedded in the email, they are redirected to a site that looks and behaves like the expected bank website. However, unbeknownst to the soon-to-be identity theft victims, the site is actually controlled by the scam artists who sent the email; any and all information entered by the victim can now be used in a variety of ways, none of them good. Spoofing Spoofing is a deceptive form of spam that hides the domain of the spammer or the spam’s origination point. Spammers often hijack the domains of well-known businesses or government entities to make spam filters think the communication is coming from a legitimate source. Today’s spammers are more crafty than ever before and have begun blending elements of both phishing and spoofing into their messages, further spinning their web of deception. The toxic combination of spoofing and phishing presents a major threat that can trick most anyone into providing personal information to a stranger. Toothless Legislation On January 1, 2004, President Bush signed into law the “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003,” or “CAN-SPAM” Act. While well intentioned, CAN-SPAM has done little or nothing to curb the flow of unwanted email. In fact, an estimated 97% of all spam email sent in 2004 violated the Act, and the United States still dwarfs other nations in terms of the origin of spam, with CipherTrust research revealing that an astonishing 56.77% of all spam comes from U.S.-based IP addresses. While CAN-SPAM was designed to decrease the overall volume of spam, the exact opposite has happened: in 2004, spam accounted for approximately 77% of all email traffic, and phishing attacks continue to increase exponentially, with studies showing an increase of 4000% from November 2003 to May 2004. Anti Spam Software for the Desktop The dramatic increase in spam volume has prompted a corresponding surge in stand-alone anti spam software solutions for the desktop, all with varying levels of effectiveness. Some anti spam software uses text filtering to screen incoming messages for known characteristics of spam, while other solutions rely solely on reputation systems that monitor and categorize email senders by IP address according to their sending behavior. Still other anti spam software uses “challenge/response filters” to block unapproved mail until the sender responds (manually) to a challenge email sent to their email account to verify his or her identity. With so many different methods of filtering spam, no single software-based desktop anti spam solution is capable of effectively stopping spam before it reaches the inbox. The only way to successfully fight spam is to create an anti spam “cocktail” including reputation services, text filters, constant updates and a host of other best-of-breed spam blocking methods. Just as importantly, an effective anti spam solution should reside at the email gateway, not at the desktop. Without protection at the gateway, mail servers waste massive amounts of bandwidth and storage space processing every message, wanted or not, and end users face the unenviable task of deciding what to do with the countless spam messages that successfully reach them. Take a Consolidated Approach to Anti Spam Although it takes a person only a moment to process a message and identify it as spam, it is difficult to automate that human process because no single message characteristic consistently identifies spam. In fact, there are hundreds of different message characteristics that may indicate an email is spam, and an effective anti spam solution must be capable of employing multiple spam detection techniques. In addition to effectively identifying spam, businesses must be assured that legitimate mail is not blocked in error. Even one false positive, or incorrectly blocked email, can have a significant impact on businesses today. Accurate spam blocking requires a combination of tools to examine various message criteria combined with real-time research and intelligence data. By aggregating multiple spam detection technologies like text filtering, reputation services, traffic analysis and other best-of-breed techniques, and placing the solution at the email gateway in a hardened appliance, enterprises can retake control of the inbox.

How Spammers Fool Rule-based and Signature-Based Spam Filters

Effectively stopping spam over the long-term requires much more than blocking individual IP addresses and creating rules based on keywords that spammers typically use. The increasing sophistication of spam tools coupled with the increasing number of spammers in the wild has created a hyper-evolution in the variety and volume of spam. The old ways of blocking the bad guys just don’t work anymore. Examining spam and spam-blocking technology can illuminate how this evolution is taking place and what can be done to combat spam and reclaim e-mail as the efficient, effective communication tool it was intended to be. Heuristics (Rule-based Filtering) One method used to combat spam is Rule-based, or Heuristic Filtering. Rule-based filters scan email content for predetermined words or phrases that may indicate a message is spam. For example, if an email administrator includes the word "sex" on a company’s rule-based list, any email containing this word will be filtered. The major drawback of this approach is the difficulty in identifying keywords that are consistently indicative of spam. While spammers may frequently use the words “sex” and ‘Viagra” in spam emails, these words are also used in legitimate business correspondence, particularly in the healthcare industry. Additionally, spammers have learned to obfuscate suspect words by using spellings such as "S*E*X", or "VI a a GRR A". It is impossible to develop dictionaries that identify every possible misspelling of "spammy" keywords. Additionally, because filtering for certain keywords produces large numbers of false positives, many organizations have found they cannot afford to rely solely on rule-based filters to identify spam. Signature-Based Spam Filters Another method used to combat spam is Signature-based Filtering. Signature-based filters examine the contents of known spam, usually derived from honey pots, or dummy email addresses set up specifically to collect spam. Once a honey pot receives a spam message, the content is examined and given a unique identifier. The unique identifier is obtained by assigning a value to each character in the email. Once all characters have been assigned a value, the values are totaled, creating the spam’s signature. The signature is added to a signature database and sent as a regular update to the email service’s subscribers. The signature is compared to every email coming in to the network and all matching messages are discarded as spam. The benefit of signature-based filters is that they rarely produce false-positives, or legitimate email incorrectly identified as spam. The drawback of signature-based filters is that they are very easy to defeat. Because they are backward-looking, they only deal with spam that has already been sent. By the time the honey pot receives a spam message, the system assigns a signature, and the update is sent and installed on the subscribers’ network, the spammer has already sent millions of emails. A slight modification of the email message will render the existing signature useless. Furthermore, spammers can easily evade signature-based filters by using special email software that adds random strings of content to the subject line and body of the email. Because the variable content alters the signature of each email sent by the spammer, signature-based spam filters are unable to match the email to known pieces of spam. Developers of signature-based spam filters have learned to identify the tell-tale signs of automated random character generation. But as is often the case, spammers remain a step ahead and have developed more sophisticated methods for inserting random content. As a result, most spam continues to fool signature-based filters. The Solution When used individually, each anti-spam technique has been systematically overcome by spammers. Grandiose plans to rid the world of spam, such as charging a penny for each e-mail received or forcing servers to solve mathematical problems before delivering e-mail, have been proposed with few results. These schemes are not realistic and would require a large percentage of the population to adopt the same anti-spam method in order to be effective. You can learn more about the fight against spam by visiting our website at www.ciphertrust.com and downloading our whitepapers.

The Hidden Dangers of HTML Email

As a veteran Internet user, I can honestly say I remember a time when HTML email was not possible. Back then RTF wasn't available either and for that matter, email programs did not even wrap lines for you or allow file attachments. Today however, I receive a steady and annoying stream of email in all shapes, colors and sizes. Almost all promotional advertisements and many newsletters come in Html format. Now, Spam is annoying, Spam in droves even more so, but Spam with "twirlygigs" is intolerable -- and dangerous. HTML is for websites. I visit them all the time and enjoy their various amusements. Email however, is a tool. A communications method used for getting work done. I get plenty of regular email, hundreds of pieces a day usually, due to the support, consulting and writing services I provide. If all of those emails are in HTML format then I'm stuck looking at potentially hundreds of web pages and thousands of graphics. HTML email takes extra time to download, and for me it takes extra time to read. You see I don't trust HTML email. I've coded many websites in my day and I know that scripts can be hidden in the pages. Now when you couple that fact with the daily news about viruses and worms being sent, well that's just downright scary, so I do not allow my email program to automatically open HTML formatted email. Now I rarely use Outlook and Express (sorry Microsoft but they feel just a bit too dangerous to me now days) however I'd rather be safe than sorry no matter which email program I use. So, I have my email software configured to show all HTML messages as attachments. Having the email converted to an attachment allows me to immediately see if there are any other files included with the message. And let me tell you, this has saved my butt time after time! I've lost count of how many times I've gotten email with the HTML attached, and malicious code, worms and viruses attached right next to it. If my email program was configured to "conveniently" display HTML as a web page, then a lot of those attached files would have opened on their own and done who knows what to my system. So, if you receive a lot of email yourself, be careful what you allow to come in. If you run a newsletter or Email update service of any kind, please be courteous and at least ASK before sending HTML formatted email. And when you do have permission to send HTML email, don't include heavy graphics, scripts or other file attachments. Text may not be as glamorous, but it's a heck of a lot safer and much easier for your readers to glance through.