Imagination can be a funny thing.  It can play tricks on your mind and make you see things that really don’t exist.  Or it can make you think things happened that really didn’t.  Or it can make you see threats to you and your loved ones lurking around every corner, or in every report on the evening news.  In many ways, your imagination can cause you to stop and think twice, trying to make sure of yourself.

And if you’re asking at this point, “What exactly does this have to do with the Internet or my computer?” read on.  Because in a rather prominent case involving your Internet access, your imagination of recent has not been playing tricks on you at all.  You have indeed been seeing a much larger quantity of spam, junk mail, and virus-infested e-mail messages trying to worm their way (pun not intended) into your inbox.

The company providing HunTel.net with our spam blocking and mail filtering services, Postini, had this to say about this recent phenomenon in its September newsletter:

“We are experiencing the largest virus attack in the last two years! August proved to be the most volatile of the year for virus volumes. Both spam and virus volumes are far above historical norms, a trend that began in early July. The average virus volume in July and August was 15 times bigger than the average for January - June of this year! The Nuwar/Storm virus mutated with increasing speed over the month.

“Spam attacks included pdf, zip, and xls attachments, with embedded penny stock promotions. Some spam had content in Microsoft Excel^® files within password protected zip files to look more legitimate.

“In 2006, spam size increased at a dramatic rate caused by an increase in image spam. By February of 2007, spam size peaked at over 400% of what it had been in January of 2006. After the February 2007 peak, a decline in image spam caused a decline in the spam size growth. However, the summer has reversed that trend with an increase of spam with pdf and xls attachments. During the three days between August 6-8, 2007, we experienced another upsurge in total spam size, up 67% (in the peak of the three day period) from August 1. This was primarily due to a massive pump and dump scam that used a pdf file attachment.

“The peak spam size of the month was 70% bigger than the month average. It peaked on August 12 at 11.5KB. Spam messages account for over 90% of messages that Postini receives. Many companies with appliance or software solutions were significantly impacted by this sudden jump in size because their solutions did not have adequate storage capacity.

“Virus volumes continued a path of record numbers in August. The peak was August 22 with over 57 million viruses blocked by Postini. Not only did we have high volumes but we also had high volatility.  Over a five day period beginning August 18, we experienced a 220% increase in virus volume.

“Many of the spam emails seen this summer are electronic greeting card blended attacks. They work by inviting a recipient to click on a URL in a mail that takes them to a website and downloads a virus onto their personal computer. The goal of these attacks is to infect individual computers as bots within a bot-net and send spam out to other machines undetected. The spam storms then follow such as the ones we saw in August.”

So what can you do in the face of all these threats to your computer?  Here’s some good tips to cut down on the amount of spam/virus messages you and your loved ones receive.

-Do not post your e-mail address online unless you are doing so with a reputable company for legitimate reasons.  Many Web sites that ask you to post your e-mail address will turn around and sell all the addresses they harvest to spammers.  It’s always a good idea to check the privacy policy of the company whose site you are accessing before giving out your address.

-Be selective in the e-mails you forward and the people to whom you forward them.  Messages forwarded to large groups of people are inviting targets for spammers, because they intercept those messages and strip out all the content except for e-mail addresses to build their lists.

-If you forward e-mails to groups of people, use the blind carbon copy feature of your mail software.  Messages sent to people as BCCs will not show their e-mail addresses—and therefore spammers can’t put your loved ones on their lists.

-Consider a mail filtering service or software add-on to filter your e-mail, such as eShield from HunTel.net.  For an additional $2 per month, we will filter all your incoming e-mails and block those containing spam and/or viruses.  Many of our customers have this service and have told us how much they appreciate it.  Call us for more information.

-If you get a message from an unfamiliar sender, be cautious about opening it.  You’re usually safer opening such a message in a browser-based interface such as our Webmail service.  If you’re not absolutely sure you can trust the message, delete it.

-Don’t use the “unsubscribe” links found in spam messages to try to get off those lists.  Spammers are notorious for a serious lack of ethics, and for most of them, a request to unsubscribe means that their message got through to a good address, and they’re free to bombard that address with spam.

-If you use HunTel.net’s Webmail and set up a filter, don’t select the “Reject” option for the action to take.  That will cause a mail message loop which merely sends a message back to the sender, thus confirming to a spammer that your address is valid—and ensuring that you’ll get much more spam.

-When in doubt, just delete.  If you’re unsure about a message, or about what would happen if you replied to it, you can always delete it.  It won’t be able from there to infect your computer and the spammer won’t know your address is valid.  A win-win situation for you.

If you have any questions at all about spam and what you can do to combat it, our trained technicians at HunTel.net® are available and are happy to assist you.  You can contact us by phone at 402-533-5777 (Washington County and Omaha) or 1-888-491-9115 (toll free throughout our service area); by E-mail at techsupport@huntel.net; or through our live support chat service at http://www.huntel.net.  Normal support hours are 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., Central time, 7 days a week.

Thank you for using HunTel.net!