Yesterday, I received an email coming from my email address. Yes! I didn’t send email to my own but I received an email coming from me. Here’s the content of this email:
Best Way To Shop Online (note: these keywords is linked to an online store)
These are our lowest prices of the year — but they won’t last long. So take advantage of these incredible savings now and stock up on all your favorite products.
SAVE BIG on holiday gifts too with gift subscriptions for everyone on your list — family, friends and co-workers.
At just $5 these are terrific as main gifts or stocking stuffers. Click here to start shopping now and don’t forget to pass this offer along and let everyone know what a great deal you’ve found. Happy saving!
Limited-time offer…Act now!
Well, it’s a spam-email. Spammers use my email address as the sender of this spam-email. But why? Am I really popular for them to use my email to fool the people that I am endorsing their poor company?
If you received similar email using my email address, FYI, I am not the real sender of it. I’m sorry but spammers love my email address.
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I receive an email from customerdata_service@yahoo.com asking me to verify my email account or else it will be terminated.
Dear Account User,
This Email is from Yahoo! Customer Care and we are sending it to every Yahoo! Email User Accounts Owner for safety. we are having congestions due to the anonymous registration of Yahoo! accounts so we are shutting down some Yahoo! accounts and your account was among those to be deleted.We are sending you this email to so that you can verify and let us know if you still want to use this account. If you are still interested please confirm your account by filling the space below. Your User name,Password,Date Of Birth (DOB) and your Country information would be needed to verify your account.
Due to the congestion in all Yahoo! users and removal of all unused Yahoo! Accounts, Yahoo! would be shutting down all unused Accounts, You will have to confirm your E-mail by filling out your Login Information below after clicking the reply button, or your account will be suspended within 24 hours for security reasons.
* User name: …………………………
* Password: …………………………..
* Date of Birth: ……………………….
* Country Or Territory: …………….
After following the instructions in the sheet, your account will not be interrupted and will continue as normal. Thanks for your attention to this request. We apologize for any inconveniences.
Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his/her account after two weeks of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.
Of course it looks like legitimate email especially if the email user who receive this email will consider the email address where this email is coming from. If you’ll read the last part of it, it says, “Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his/her account after two weeks of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently” it seems that the email users will get nervous and will immediately reply it by sending their personal information.
Now, if you already had replied this, then you’ll definitely loss your precious email account.
Why?
It’s because, it is another email scam. Just look at the information they’re asking you: “username, password, date of birth and teritory.” If you freely give your username and password, then scammers can easily access your account and own them.
Now what will happen next?
First, scammers will scan the entire content of your email to find ways on how to utilize them. They can use this in black-mailing you… for extortion… to access your personal financial accounts… and a lot of things. Now, what if your email is the one used in your paypal account. Once they have your email account, then your paypal will be next.
For your information, my Pasugo-Online.NET website was hacked in 2004 because the hackers successfully hacked my email account (selaplana@yahoo.com) which is connected to that website. And not only that, I also lost my personal website which I started building since 1999 (geocities.com/selaplana).
My other posts related to this:
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The latest version of the PC Security Shield has already been released and they called it, “PC Security Shield 2008.”
What is PC Securit Shield 2008? To answer this question, I will copy what the manufacturer has said about their product.
Protect your data and privacy when you email, download music, bank or shop online. Security Shield 2008 combines automated virus and spyware discovery and removal, with daily, automatically updated, virus protection from F-Secure’s world-renowned virus research laboratory. An integrated personal firewall stops hackers from breaking into your computer and lets you keep your private data to yourself. The enhanced Parental Control with Child Time lock function enables parents to control and monitor their childrens’ Internet usage.
Security Shield 2008 provides essential virus protection from viruses, hackers, and privacy threats. Powerful yet easy to use, protect yourself, your family, and your PC online with Security Shield 2008. When a virus breaks out, Security Shield 2008 will provide a patch within 2-3 hours and a fix for the virus within 5 hours. You can set your computer to update viruses weekly and run a complete virus scan. Virus protection is a must and no one with internet access should surf without it.
Security Shield 2008 for $39.99 after $20 Mail In Rebate Offer - now you can get one full year of total internet security for one low price or if you prefer, pay month from just $4.99 per month. As always, you get superior, free technical support from PCSecurityShield.
Anti-spyware and Anti-virus Working Together
Security Shield 2008 introduces a further level of protection by combining award-winning, real-time anti-virus software (F-Secure Anti-Virus) with an award-winning, realtime anti-spyware scanner (based on Lavasoft’s award winning Ad-Aware technology)
Enhanced Parental Control with Child Time Lock
Parental Control blocks access to Internet sites with inappropriate content. The software can be configured to block Internet pages that reference weapons, drugs, gambling and pornography. This is also an option to completely disable access to certain sites. With the new Child Time Lock feature parents can also define at what time of the day their children are permitted to surf the Internet.
Enhanced Anti-Spam with Real-time Blackhole List Support (RBL)
Anti-Spam filters unsolicited email based on a Bayesian filter and the use of blacklists. The software can also detect phishing attacks if they originate from a known spam site. (only available for Outlook and Outlook Express Users).
I might be charged of plagiarism with this. I’m sorry but I just feel lazy writing a review of it.
Anyway, so far based on my experience using it, it’s as good as other PC security softwares but I think, is cheaper compared to the others. If you’re interested to buy it to protect your computers just click the image above.
Thank you so much.
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Hackademix reported that the United Nation’s official website was hacked and defaced. The hacker gained access to the said highly profiled website by simply using the technique called, “SQL injection”.
What is SQL injection?
According to the wikipedia, “SQL injection is a security vulnerability that occurs in the database layer of an application. Its source is the incorrect escaping of variables embedded in SQL statements. It is in fact an instance of a more general class of vulnerabilities that can occur whenever one programming or scripting language is embedded inside another”. E-Government has the clearer definition of it which means, that it is the “name for a general class of attacks that can allow nefarious users to retrieve data, alter server settings, or even take over your server if you’re not careful. SQL injection is not a SQL Server problem, but a problem with improperly written applications”.
It’s a kind of attack which my Ka Webspy’s Guestbook experienced last June 2005 and similar attacked used to hack the Pinoy Bloggers Directory on December 2005.
The United Nation website’s Hacker
According to the BBC, the said attack was called “cyberprotest” and hackers using this name are said to be coming from Turkey and called themselves, “Turkish Defacer”.
As of writing this post, these hackers have attacked many websites already.
What’s the lesson?
Well. This simply tells us that we need to be vigilant. Since most of us bloggers are using the Wordpress blogging engine in running our blogs, so we must upgrade immediately our Wordpress installation soon as the new version is released in order to avoid such attack.
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Is your notebook computer made by Toshiba? If so, this is to inform you that Toshiba recalls notebook battery that are made of lithium-ion that contain Sony cells. The manufacturer of this battery is the Sony Energy Devices Corp. of Japan. These batteries are said to be prone to overheat posing fire hazard to users. For more details visit this page.
But I think, this will also serve as warning to all users of cellphones that use similar battery. Remember that there was a report via the ABS-CBN that the battery of an N95 phone exploded.
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