There is growing evidence that spammers are using information from some of our Twitter, Blog, and Fair Park related web site addresses shown in the right margin of our Blog. The pace of this activity has increased over the past month or so and the spam emails I have received are looking very authentic. The only way to stop the Blog from being used by spammers is to remove the external links from the Blog. I have done that effective today. However, you need to stay alert because any spammer who already has these links can still use them.
If you get an email from anyone, even a classmate, that asks you to click on one or more links to other sites to get certain information, don’t automatically do that unless you were expecting the information. Several of our classmates have had their email address and their email address book “hijacked” and used by spammers/hackers to send out emails that looked very authentic. If you weren’t expecting an email from a classmate, or if something about the email just doesn’t look right to you, contact that classmate if you have an alternate email address for them and ask if they sent it to you. Even if they did send it, don’t go to the links unless you are willing to accept the risk involved.
Also, its a good idea to be very careful which “info or joke email” you forward to others. If you forward some of those type emails it will copy and forward your email address on to a web site set up to collect that info. I personally found one such email about a year ago. When you forwarded the email it would also send your email address to a web site at AOL that had apparently been set up to accept that info. I tried to open the AOL web site but it was protected and I couldn’t get in.
Internet security concerns are certainly frustrating for all of us to deal with. But to ignore the potential impact and suffer the consequences can be even more frustrating.
