Are You Getting Viagra Spam From Your Family and Friends?

You can no longer be lazy about the passwords you use for internet logins and especially on your email accounts.

In the last few weeks I’ve received at least two or three emails per week from a friend or family or colleague trying to sell me Viagra. Of course this spam wasn’t really sent by my friends but it was sent from their email account.

I’ve also had calls from clients’ who’ve had complaints from their customers about viagra spam coming from their email address.

You can tell that someone has compromised your email account if the people in your contact list are complaining about your viagra spam.

This isn’t an email virus story. In each case, the email account has been compromised. Someone somewhere has been able to access the victim’s email account and used it to send Viagra spam to their contact list. As soon as we changed the password, the spamming stopped.

Password Guidelines

• Use a long and cryptic password. Something like this: aQBwr3Db9a$Qu8*fo8fJ)tj. I’m not kidding.
  Note the length, the use of upper and lower case, the use of numbers and odd characters. ¹
• Do not use personal information to devise your password. Not your birthdate. Not your wife’s name. Not your Mother’s maiden name. Not your kid’s name. Not your address. Not your tax file number.
• Don’t use the same password on all of your accounts. Just think about it. What if someone gets a hold of your favourite password? Where did I read a report that said 70% of identity theft is perpetrated by someone you know? That means there’s a good chance they know other stuff about you, like where you bank.
• Don’t write all your passwords in a notebook and then leave it sitting next to your computer!

How Do You Keep Track of All Those Passwords?

I know it is a royal pain to try to remember dozens (or hundreds?) of passwords especially long cryptic passwords but identity theft and internet fraud are both growing exponentially. There’s that other report I read that said there is a 1 in 4 chance of being a victim of indentity fraud. Can you afford to take the risk?

So get yourself a thumbdrive and download Roboform or Keepass. These are what I call password vaults. Once you set this up, the only password you have to remember is the password to get into the vault. Make it a good one! And don’t forget it.

These password-keeping tools can be used to generate long and strong passwords for your various accounts and to record and safely store in an encrypted format all of your login details. Roboform can be used to automate…to some extent…the logging in process at websites.

Yes! You have to spend a bit of time learning how to use these tools. They are not as user friendly as they could be but it is a worthwhile investment in today’s fraudlent world and will go a long way to preventing someone from hacking into one of your accounts because now you are using long and strong passwords!

Roboform operates on a wide variety of platforms…windows desktop, thumb drives, and various mobile phones including the iPhone. There is a free version and a paid professional version.

Keepass operates on a windows desktop or thumbdrive and is totally free. It is less complicated and a little bit easier to use than Roboform but it doesn’t offer any form of automation when it comes to logging into websites.

I have three thumb drives running Roboform. One I use daily and the other two are backups. I like to use thumbdrives because they are easy to cart around or hide or store in a safe.

Reduce your risk. Get some sort of password safe and start using long strong passwords to protect yourself.