The amount of spam mail being received by people all over the world is still on the increase, according to IT security specialists. There are thousands of variations – offers of seemingly lucrative investment opportunities, financially rewarding employment, and dates with beautiful women being some of the more common – but they all share a common purpose: to persuade the recipient to click on a link. Clicking on a link in an email that was sent from somebody you do not know is always a bad idea because once you do so, you are no longer in control of what happens to your PC. Websites can contain malicious code that is downloaded to your computer as soon as you visit them, or requests for personal information that is subsequently used to obtain money by various means.
Why Is Junk Mail on the Increase?
You would have thought that the number of people willing to click on links in junk emails would be very small these days, owing to the amount of publicity that electronic spam has received. Unfortunately, this is simply not the case. Judging by the results of tests carried out recently by IT security firms, a significant percentage of recipients are still careless enough to click on links included in the spam mails they receive. While the rewards are still there, those responsible for sending junk emails will continue to ply their trade. In the majority of cases, they receive a commission from the owners of the websites to which they direct new traffic: commissions which can add up to a very significant amount of money over time.
How Did They Get My Address
Knowing that email spam is on the increase is one thing but just how did they get hold of your email address and why are they targeting you in particular? The answer to these questions is often quite simple. By subscribing to a newsletter, purchasing a product from an ecommerce site, or joining an online forum, you demonstrated your interest in a certain area. Your email address, which you supplied at the time, was stored in a database along with thousands of others, by the owners of the site or sites in question.
While many commercial website operators are quite clear about their policies with regard to what they do with the email addresses and other personal information they receive, others are less scrupulous and may sell lists of email addresses to anybody willing to pay the asking price, without the consent of those who provided them. The recent spike in the volume of spam being sent would appear to suggest that a large list of this type has recently been acquired by a group that specialises in the sending of unwanted emails.
Stopping the Rot
Companies that wish to protect their employees from junk mail can invest in an anti-spam gateway and install it at a network level. Personal users may find that one of the free filters available online helps to protect their inbox.