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PDF Spam Generation and Protecting Your Kids
By: Marco Maseko
Spammers are increasingly using PDF files to bear their spam messages. This practice begun in mid-2007, primarily as a scam to fool recipients into investing their money in the stock of a particular company of their choice.
The advent and decline of the different types of spam attest to the cat-and-mouse game that goes on between the spammers and the security experts. As anti-spam technology catches up to their techniques, they continue to innovate and change tactics to deliver their spam messages.
Protecting Your Children
Like all other Internet users, children are just as susceptible to receiving spam as are adults. And because spam is an equal opportunity menace, kids are just as likely to receive spam that contains adult and pornographic material. While there is really no way to totally eliminate the possibility of your kids receiving spam, there are steps you can take to minimize it.
Whitelists - Set up an email account for your child that "whitelists" only specific email addresses. A whitelist is just a list of trusted and approved email addresses. For example, you can have the addresses of your child's grandparents, aunts and uncles whitelisted. Whenever email is received from any of the whitelisted addresses, it goes directly to your child's inbox. All other email addresses are blocked.
Web beacons: A web beacon, also called an "invisible GIF," is an image sent out with spam that is invisible to the recipient. When the email is opened, the spammer will be alerted that your email address is "live."
Using your email spam filter, you can set up a rule that will ensure that a copy of every email that is sent and received on your child's account is forwarded to your own email address
Article Source: http://www.ezarticles.info
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