Anti-CIV

If you’re like most people, your inbox is completely spam infested. No need to be embarrassed, it happens to the best of us- no matter how clean we try to keep our email in-boxes! Whether you are an individual email user, or the member of a non-profit organization, or CEO of a Fortune 500 Company, chances are, your email is available on a few websites out there, which helps contribute to the amount of spam emails you receive. There are ways to reduce the amount of unwanted emails you get- including the following:

Camouflage your email address

If you have a website, or you participate in internet forums, message boards and other online communities, make sure that you never display your real email address in it’s entirety. Email addresses listed online are picked up by computer programs; harvested just like the child who pick berries and fills up her basket at grandma’s house- and then distributed to spammers around the world. When you need to give out your email in a public manner like this, try doing something like this to camouflage it a bit: youremail at yahoo dot com. People can make sense of that and know to replace “at” with @ and “dot” with . You could also create a graphic image of the “@” sign; and that will prevent the harvesting of your email address by automatic crawlers.

History indicates that we are at the forefront of an era in which criminal hackers develop tools and techniques to steal your money using your own cell phone.

Fifteen years ago, cell phones were so bulky and cumbersome, they had to be carried in bags or briefcases. Then they became chunky, heavy bricks. Calls dropped every other minute. Clearly, cell phones have evolved since then. Today’s cell phone is a lot more than a phone. It’s a computer, one that rivals many desktops and laptops being manufactured today. A cell phone can pretty much do everything a PC can do, including online shopping, banking, and merchant credit card processing.

The personal computer started out slow and stodgy, and was mainly used for things like word processing and solitaire. Today, PCs are fast, multimedia machines, capable of performing amazing tasks.

There are consequences to the rapid evolution of these technologies.

A decade ago, during the slow, dial up era, hackers (and, in the beginning, phreakers) hacked for fun and fame. Many wreaked havoc, causing problems that crippled major networks. And they did it without today’s sophisticated technology.