Spam, Spyware and Anti-Virus
Having a website on view to the world is, on the whole, a rewarding thing. I reckon to get about 10 or so emails each week mentioning either this blog or perhaps the family tree bits and pieces I have. Almost all of them are either thanks for information I have provided, requests for more of the same or perhaps even suggestions and sources of more records that may help.
The big downside of all this activity is that I expose things like email addresses, forums and the ability to comment here, to all and sundry – and that causes real headaches. For a start, my various email addresses slowly get “harvested” and added to all kinds of mailing lists, the forums and this blog get automatically attacked by “bots” which almost constantly try to register and add their, often pornographic, details. All this means I have to install protection of some kind both for the websites and to my own email inboxes.
At the moment these schemes appear to be working by at least catching and filtering the offensive stuff.
Blog Spam
The WordPress blog here is protected by a little add-on called Akismet (top right) and that does a great job of catching any suspect comments, either listing them for me to delete or taking care of it, automatically, once a month or so.
Forum Protection
The family history forums are protected by a mod to the original phpBB code which accepts human entries but makes automatic registrations rather more difficult.
Email Spam
Email spam is handled by three lines of defence; firstly all mail is routed through custom filters hosted by Garan. It is then examined by filters installed at my ISP and the last stage is a local filter, SpamBayes, installed as an Outlook plug-in.
As I said before, all this seems to work quite well at the moment but it does leave a couple more areas of concern, namely Virii and Spyware/Malware.
Virus Protection
After many years of trying various anti-virus solutions I have settled on a solution from Grisoft, perhaps more commonly known as AVG. A free version of their application is available for home and non-commercial users but, as I use my PC for business and pleasure(?) I chose a commercial offering which combines anti-virus and a firewall.
Spyware/Malware
There are many free applications which are said to deal with these problems – but I have chosen to install Spyware Doctor from PC Tools. Why? Well, it works! and, most importantly, it has little impact on the normal day-to-day running of my PC – it just sits there, quietly, in the system tray and does its job!
Some of the free applications do work well but most involve me having to monitor what is going on and finding two or three applications in order to cover the same ground Spyware Doctor does in the one.
Conclusions
It’s not all sweetness and light with the arrangements mentioned though. Every day the spammers up the ante by improving the techniques they employ to defeat my defences. Fortunately AVG seems to have the virus part under control and Spyware Doctor gets the Spyware/Malware, the problem area is Spam. No matter what I install to rid myself of this plague, the spammers are always one, maybe two steps ahead.
Stats for the last 28 days show that a total of 1130 spam emails (average 40 per day!) have made it through the first two stages of filtering to my desktop. SpamBayes catches almost all of those but of course, being the last line, it is dealing with the most persistent and difficult to detect few.
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