Your Guide to Spyware

Email Safety
Protect your email address, like you would your phone number. This helps cut down on spam and other junk that comes through email. The same goes for your IP address, especially if it’s static.

Never open email attachments when you aren’t expecting them, and especially from people or email addresses you do not recognize. Either one can potentially contain a virus, trojan or worm. Some forms of malware can access a user’s address book and spam all the contacts with spam and malware through the user’s email account.

If you need to attach a file to an email, make sure you include a description of what the attachment is somewhere in the body of the email. For example, “I am attaching 2 pictures of Bill’s wedding” or “I am attaching a copy of my resumé in Word 2000 format.” Just make it simple, yet descriptive enough so that the email recipient knows what to expect.

There is a problem with emails that arrive in HTML format. With most legitimate sites, it’s no big deal, but with HTML spam, there can be all sorts of junk code in the background that you really wouldn’t want running. There are a few methods to stop this from happening. The first is to disable your email preview pane (found in Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla, Netscape, and a few other email clients). If you’re using outlook, go to View and uncheck “Preview Pane”. In OE, go to View > Layout and uncheck “Preview Pane”.

Another option would to go in “Offline” mode after you have finished downloading your messages. That way, if any HTML emails need to go out to the Internet for pictures or whatnot, they can’t because the mail client has gone “Offline”. The last option would be to turn off HTML all together and only accept plain text. In Outlook, go to Tools > Options > “Preferences” tab > E-mail options and check “Read all mail as plain text”. In OE, go to Tools > Options > “Read” tab and check “Read all messages in plain text.

Hidden File Extensions
By default, Windows hides all file extensions for recognized file types (jpg’s, exe’s, zip’s, etc.). This makes it easy for executable malware files to be disguised as a recognized file that doesn’t look harmful. To reveal all file extensions, open up “My Computer” > Tools > Folder Options > “View” tab and uncheck “Hide extensions for known file types.

For example, with file extensions hidden, a file could display as “destroysys.jpg”, a harmless enough looking image, but really be “destroysys.jpg.exe,” an executable that may do an untold amount of system damage. Windows allows periods in filenames, so someone could give the file a false extension, misleading a user to think that the file is something that it’s not. It’s important to know what extensions mean; you can’t just depend on what the file icons look like. Those can be changed easily enough.

FILExt is a site that contains information on file extensions, as well as a file extension database.