This is a Guest Post by Sanjit Chohan

Certainly, each and every one of us have email id, no doubt that email is the only service we use more than anything on internet. We all often get weird emails of winning a lottery, mega prizes, awards etc. It’s very easy for a new internet user to fall prey of such emails considering them authentic. But actually these emails are nothing but a SPAM!

Photo by shakataganai

Wikipedia define SPAM as:” Spam is the abuse of electronic message systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately.”

So how does a stranger know our email id even though we made it on our desktop computer with recently bought Internet access and best possible Antivirus in it? Nevertheless, we shared our email id to only those friends and relatives we know personally.

And secondly a fact that these SPAM keeps on growing as we keep on learning new things on Internet, making new accounts on various social networking sites, blogging sites, discussion boards, community portals, free SMS services and more.

This is all the FLAW of our carelessness and misuse of our Privacy by these Sites.

Social Network like Facebook:

Recently, Facebook was slammed by many user privacy and security issues, though being the world’s no.1 social network and top website in US. It has nearly 500 million users worldwide. That’s not an easy job to keep privacy of such a huge network of people, though facebook is dedicated to their user’s security but there is always evil people around who keep finding BUG and play with users privacy for their interest. Such people are known as spammers.

These spammers grouped with hackers and coders always try to find loopholes in the website and very possibly get extract to user’s personal information like Email ids etc.

As Facebook is a Big Network there are many people who keep bugging in with new creative BLACK HAT ideas to take advantage of security flaws in it.

………

Blogs and Discussion Boards:

As we start ‘Getting Socialized’ we explore new things on web too, we follow many interesting Blogs and Community Forums. Technically, all these blogs work on some base platform script developed by highly qualified professionals i.e. most of the blogs runs on WordPress platform and Forums runs on Vbulletin, PHPbb, IPB.

So how these script works?

Every time when we register a new account the form which we fill even includes our email id and password and are stored in a kind of Digital Register (MYSQL). Spammers with help of hackers try to target this MYSQL Database and ‘Dump’ it.

This simply gets them our every details including Email id. What about passwords? Yeah even they are stolen but they are all Encrypted (ie. MD5) so we are on a bit safer side.

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Free Services, giveaway sites (SMS Sending, EBook sites):

There are thousands of free sms service websites, did you ever thought that when they serve you free of cost then how they earn? Is there is a magic or something?

Infact, there is nothing magical. Websites, who offer free services, work on the database concept but some websites can be secure and some are not. I’ll say most of such websites are insecure because they can be simply hacked and those who claimed themselves as a secure website can quiet possibly deceive their users by selling their user database to various “Big Companies” who want to attract or target new customers for their upcoming product and services.

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The main question is how to protect ourselves from SPAM.

The answer is not simple, as SPAMMING is inevitable but there are few ways you can hopefully decrease the SPAM in your inbox.

• Get yourself a Gmail Account for emails. I tried each and every email services but finally came to the conclusion that Gmail is The Least SPAMMED email id as it has good email filters and even a trust of Google is with you.
• Using Facebook and Twitter is easy and pretty. But, beware to ‘Be Choosy’ in Adding Friends, Joining Fan Pages. ‘Be Wise’ in ‘Accepting Friendship Requests’, ‘Accepting Fan page Join requests’ and ‘Using Applications’
• Join Only Trustable Network Blogs or Sites.

Fact Files:

Do you know that official website of Roadies a reality show on MTV was hacked and details of all the people who participated in online auditions, giving their phone number and various other details were leaked.

So for being at least ‘a bit’ safe from Spammers we should follow one rule.“Be Choosy and Be Wise”

Author: Sanjit Chohan is a passionate web and graphic designer, internet marketer and blogger. You can follow sanjit on twitter @sanjitchohan

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