Spamming has always remained an issue for search engines in using tricks to access personal data. This has made Google investing in a dedicated team to manage these activities. With advancement in technology spammers are continuing to improve their skill to gain access to personal information, we need to equip ourselves with tricks spammers are likely to use to gain access to your inbox at any time; they will use variety of technique to have their target come through: –
Email spoofing
It is the newest and easy trick spammers to use it uses a faked email address header making the mail message come from a trusted sender other than the spammer; the message will be passed appearing to be from a trusted network prompting you to open in order to respond to the mail.
To avoid falling into this trick never respond to such unsolicited email.
Social engineering-it is usually a ploy to trick which tries to ensure a recipient opens the mail by pretending to know each other according to http://www.edzone.net states that they lure a person through use of typical subject which include “hey how are you’ ‘urgent and confidential ‘always avoid this trick by not responding or setting up a blocked address to your email program
Web beacons
-is the use of invisible images to the recipient that alerts the spammer once he or she opens showing you have gone live. To be safe never dare to open email messages that appear to be spam, they will always try to bypass spam filters by inserting random text making the spam appear unique most of the times spaces will be used. Once you notice email with such characters never to open to respond to it, the keyword stuffing will always be a trick to let you open the emails.
Proxy
Use of open proxy in hiding identity is being used to hide their identity and locations. Servers help them maintain their identity and locations, it is a trick used to forward messages claiming you get a reward for any nail forwarded to you addresses book.it is a hoax to ensure the spam is spread across a large network.
Dictionary attack-combining of common words and names to create emails address with lots of varieties through use of high profile email provides the Google and yahoo. Posting of your private email address on the webpage and public forums can prompt spammers to use automated robots.
Disadvantages of these techniques
Most people won’t read information they don’t trust It is a waste of bandwidth both for the sender and receiver
Controls have been set up to filter spam thus allowing only mails from trusted sites
Spamming can take various forms according to http://www.google.com categorizing it as :-
Pure spam
As the most common identifiable spam, sites that violate Google guidelines by use scrapping content, generation of content that is not well researched which add no value to users will always fall in this category as they end up cloaking search engines.
Cloaking Is an old technique practiced by black hat SEO for the site to rank higher for specific keywords as different pieces of content is usually presented before users and search engines.it is usually done by identifying the IP address and delivering content based.
Hacked Site
This may result due to inadequate security which is supposed to prevent hackers from accessing your site thus displaying content without webmaster’s permission, this results to three forms of hacking according to Google namely: –
• Injected content
• Added content
• Hidden content
Parked domain
t a bad user experience as a user may not find anything, but only ads on the website since it has been set to live while still under construction, if Google present such sites before user’s search. Google recommends the content should be the great with quality content that will add value to users this help in blocking search engines bots from crawling and indexing while site is still under construction.
Thin content
pages that provide little or no value to users is considered spam, Google sends messages to GWT showing it has encountered low quality pages on the site ranging from duplicate pages, doorway pages automatically generated content.
Spams free hosts-it is recommended to identify pages that contribute to spam and remove all the accounts as they are likely to face a manual penalty.
Unnatural links to a site
Links created by webmasters using spam techniques of backlink, Google will identify the patterns of inbound links to the site, and if they look unnatural messages are sent to GWT, that’s why we perform a complete audit of your site in order to locate unnatural links to remove.
Instant messenger spam
It is not prevalent as in the past it usually takes place at peak times. To be safe from such situation you need to ignore invites from unknown persons and always consider links from people you don’t know as hostile or a phishing attempt, learn to configure your configurations accordingly to avoid harvesting of your emails being hacked.
Unsolicited text messages
-It is the hardest span to filter against preventive measure is to avoid giving pout account details by filling ‘lucky draw forms’ user should be trained not to click on any preferred links since with popularity of smartphone they are a higher risk of spread in malware.
Comment spam-with blogs becoming an indispensable way of sharing and spreading new products and services spammers are using blogs to post comments in a way to target potential victims. Cloud based web services like http://www.Akismet.com can help sieve out comment spam and trackback spam .Use of captchas is also an effective way of preventing automated postings.one should think of automatically closing comment on an article for a period till it has been approved, for heavily trafficked sites consider advanced techniques like Bayesian filtering, blacklisting of IPs and commenting throttling.
How to prevent spamming
We need to equip you with spam fighting to be more safe of your information primeshub.com advises that Posting of emails address at message boards should be avoided as it is where spammer will usually mine email for email addresses always assume it is your private number which you don’t want to be shared
Avoiding responding to unsolicited emails as they usually alert the sender you are having a valid email address.
Whenever a certain page requests for your passwords, credit card number or any other personal information avoid sending this via electronic mail
Avoiding forwarding of messages without verifying the sender as it is a way of gaining more valid email address.
Always ignore delivery failures of messages that you never sent as it is a way of checking if your email address is valid
Webpages help spammers get your email address easily a recent investigation by one magazine shows that more than 90% spam is as a result of email address attached to webpages if it appears in any you are likely to receive a lot of spam. If you happen to check at Google’s database and can find your mail address be certain sure spammers have access to it already.
Installing programs that have their own spam filters are the best i.e. the Netscape or Mozilla version 26 have inbuilt spam filtering programs which will flag messages and detect any spam for you in a situation that you are experiencing a lot of spam changing your account is a better option thus you can share it with your trusted clients.
To reduce spam http://www.google.com states that one should learn how to distinguish between ‘good’ spam and ‘bad’ spam, good spam is usually a message that you receive by inadvertently asking for it i.e. when you visit http://www.disney.com/ and want to register on their site to send special D-Cards and to enter contests. During the registration process, I found there were five different items I needed to uncheck in order not to receive regular emails from Disney. It’s common to overlook these. As a result, some of the emails you are now receiving may be from respectable sites like Disney. By following the unsubscribe instructions from respectable senders (usually included within each email), some of our users have reported reducing their spam load by 90% or more. Be careful! It is not a good idea to follow the unsubscribe instructions if you aren’t completely confident that the email is a “good” spam. “Bad”
