| New filter blocks all high-scoring spam
On Nov. 29, 2006, the UC Davis campus adopted a new spam-filtering system for weeding out unwanted messages from campus e-mail. The newer, more stringent filter should, in theory, prevent students and faculty from receiving as much spam e-mail, and as a result allow the MyUCDavis system to run faster and more smoothly. According to Information and Educational Technology department, the filter is working as planned.
"The filters are working," said Jatinder Singh, program manager for the UC Davis e-mail system. "We track the number of daily e-mail messages rejected at the border. Technically, before the change last fall, we were not blocking high-scoring spam, we were just shipping it off to a quarantine folder, and recipients could still see the spam."
The latest statistics for the filters seem to support this.
Spam mimics legit newsletters
Those ubiquitous Viagra ads have been disguising themselves as e-mail newsletters, the kind you get to find out the latest airline deals or keep up with your fantasy football team. Spammers haven't actually broken into legitimate marketers' computer systems to send out the messages. Rather, like the phishing scams that lift the code off the real Web sites of financial institutions, spammers have tweaked legitimate e-mail and sent them through normal spam channels. The technique appears aimed at bypassing human and software controls. Recipients might not immediately realize they are opening spam, and spam filters might not be able to aggressively block them for fear of blocking legitimate newsletters as well, anti-spam experts say. .
PC and Components
The speed with which an unprotected PC picks up malware from the Internet can be truly scary, hence the rise in popularity of security bundles that combine antivirus, firewall and spam protection. BitDefender's award-winning antivirus side is its strongest feature. It filters all the vectors viruses use to infect your system, checking downloads, email, peer-to-peer exchanges, network connections, CDs, ZIPs and USB keys. The program can scan files on access, on demand or on schedule - BitDefender creates a tiny desktop window called the File Zone that indicates how many files have recently been scanned. You can drag and drop things in there if you want them checked out. Email virus attachments that can't be cleaned are quarantined and one click sends them to BitDefender for analysis.
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