Defending Yourself from Hackers and Spammers

By Damien Fellows

Hack a Spammer - Most of us have thought about it but never could be bothered to actually teach these misfits a lesson. “Hack-backs” as the computer community names it, is a tempting response to a frustrating situation. The only issue is when you hack back your more than likely breaking the law and becoming a Hacker yourself, albeit probably indirectly as you will learn throughout this book. When cyber attacks occur - and they will—there’s little you can do except control the damage.

Not a day goes by that we don't receive 4 or more email viruses, 10-20 email spams (most of which are phishing scams), and hacker attacks on our PC's firewall. What going on???

If your semi computer literate, i.e. can turn a computer on, surf the net, check your emails and change your computer settings etc. you will be able to turn the tables on a cyber hacking thief’s by defending your computer, making them wish they never picked on us. This book was developed to help you stop the crime in the first place, protect your valuable information and ensure you will greatly reduce a hacker infiltrating your computer in the future.

Let’s be frank “Revenge is Sweet”, but illegal and time consuming. Hopefully, if we all do a little something to deter these misfits it may in the end, make them think twice about spamming us, or at least give them a migraine. If not, it will teach you to become more secure and give you some peace of mind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Damien Fellows
• Release date: Apr 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310448973

Damien Fellows

Father, Husband, Son, Brother, Giver, Receiver... My to do list is always full and never ends, only changes for the better....

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Defending Yourself from Hackers and Spammers

by Damien Fellows

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher.

Cover by Damien Fellows

ISBN: 9781310008290

Defending Yourself from Hackers and Spammers

INTRODUCTION

Hack a Spammer - Most of us have thought about it but never could be bothered to actually teach these misfits a lesson. ‘Hack-backs’ as the computer community names it, is a tempting response to a frustrating situation. The only issue is when you hack back your more than likely breaking the law and becoming a Hacker yourself, albeit probably indirectly as you will learn throughout this book. When cyber attacks occur - and they will—there’s little you can do except control the damage.

Not a day goes by that we don't receive 4 or more email viruses, 10-20 email Spams (most of which are phishing scams), and hacker attacks on our PC's firewall. What going on???

If your semi computer literate, i.e. can turn a computer on, surf the net, check your emails and change your computer settings etc. you will be able to turn the tables on a cyber hacking thief’s by defending your computer, making them wish they never picked on us. This book was developed to help you stop the crime in the first place, protect your valuable information and ensure you will greatly reduce a hacker infiltrating your computer in the future.

Let’s be frank ‘Revenge is Sweet’, but illegal and time consuming. Hopefully, if we all do a little something to deter these misfits it may in the end, make them think twice about Spamming us, or at least give them a migraine. If not, it will teach you to become more secure and give you some peace of mind.

Damien Fellows

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Spam…

Chapter 2: Malware…

Chapter 3: Phishing…

Chapter 4: Keylogging…

Chapter 5: Hackers…

Chapter 6: Actions you can take to avoid Hackers and Spammers…

Chapter 7: Protecting your Computer from Hacker and Spammer Viruses using Antivirus Programs…

Chapter 8: 10 steps to keep from getting your account hacked…

Chapter 9: Email…

Chapter 10: Using Public Computers…

Chapter 11: Passwords…

Chapter 12: Defending Your Router…

Chapter 13: Antivirus Programs…

Chapter 14: Fire Walls…

Chapter 15: Updates…

Chapter 16: Backing up your Computer…

Chapter 17: A 1, 2, 3 suggested backup plan…

Summary and Conclusion…

Spam…

Spam: What is it?

Spam in a general sense is any email you don't want to receive. There are many types of email that you may not want e.g. advertisements, newsletters, or questionnaires, however these emails are not what the computer community refers to as Spam. What the computer community is most concerned with is illegal email Spam.

Email Spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited bulk email (UBE), is a subset of electronic Spam involving nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by email. The messages may contain disguised links that appear to be for familiar websites but in fact lead to phishing web sites or sites that are hosting malware. Spam email may also include malware as scripts or other executable file attachments. Definitions of Spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk.

Email Spam has steadily grown since the early 1990s. Botnets, networks of virus-infected computers, are used to send about 80% of Spam. Since the expense of the Spam is borne mostly by the recipient, it is effectively postage due advertising.

Spammers collect email addresses from chatrooms, websites, customer lists, newsgroups, and viruses which harvest users' address books, and are sold to other Spammers. They also use a practice known as ‘email appending’ or ‘epending’ in which they use known information about their target (such as a postal address) to search for the target's email address. Much of Spam is sent to invalid email addresses.

Spamming the Spammers…

One common idea is to take incoming Spam email and reply to it with thousands of messages in return.

There are so many problems with this idea that it’s hard to know where to begin. The biggest one is simply that the Spammers don’t pay attention to the email that gets returned. Either the ‘From’ address is forged and you’re actually Spamming an innocent bystander, or the ‘From’ address is completely fake, in which case you might just find yourself the recipient of thousands upon thousands of bounce messages.

In either case, what’s happened here is that you have become a Spammer, or perhaps this third party service you used for this has.

The fact is Spam is Spam, whether or it comes from a Spammer, or from you, or from a service. You are causing thousands of unsolicited email messages to be sent, which makes you a Spammer.

Depending on how things are set up, you actually run the risk of losing your email account, or your email provider being placed on blacklists, and your legitimate email not being able to make it out. You even run the risk of running into trouble with the law since what you would be doing is quite illegal.

So it’s illegal, it’s ineffective, and the person you don’t want to impact is yourself, which will happen by your actions.

What makes Spamming Illegal?

Governments around the world are taking legal steps to combat Spam, although so far these efforts are more prevalent in western and developed countries. This might be because those countries faced the Spam threat earlier.

Countries that have adopted legislation regarding Spam also have defined what they consider to be Spam. These countries have made Spam illegal, provided consumer education on how to manage Spam, and in some cases, enacted and used enforcement measures to deter Spammers. The result has been a noticeable drop of domestic Spam, as confirmed in the Netherlands in 2010.

After the Dutch government enacted an Anti Spam law, users in the country experienced an 85 percent decrease in domestic Spam. However, Spammers might have moved to countries without Anti Spam laws. In addition to individual national legislation, there exists an international Spam enforcement community known as the London Action Plan (LAP), which works to collaborate on cross-border Spam enforcement and related issues.

Using the Spam’s content to Spam or annoy someone…

The other approach, of course is to take the link in the Spam email and somehow Spam it.

Well, first of all, you can’t send email to a link. A link goes to a page on a website which is quite different than an email address. In a Spam message the two actually can be completely unrelated and often are. Even though you might know the domain that the link goes to (the ‘whatever.com’), you simply can’t know the email address at that domain at which to target your attack.

But it gets much worse. Once again, the link in the Spam is rarely the actual website of the Spammer. These links actually fall into two buckets:

Hidden pages on websites that have been hacked; and,

and temporary websites on temporary domains

The first one is little understood and actually so very common that it’s worth explaining.

What Spammers like to do is this: they actually hack a legitimate site. In a folder on the hacked site they then place their own malicious code. Perhaps simple HTML, perhaps JavaScript, perhaps a redirect, perhaps something else entirely.

The Spam emails then contain a link to that page on the hacked site. So for example, it might be something very random Spam-content/uploads/something-or-other. Ideally (for the Spammer) something that the site owner might never even notice, or at least not notice for a long time.

Since it’s a link going to a legitimate site, the email is not flagged by Spam filters. When you click on that link, the malicious code that has been placed there by a hacker does something to redirect you to some other site that then has the real content, or perhaps even some other intermediary site, to further obscure the final destination.

Fighting Spam…

Fighting Spam just isn’t that simple. Yes, authorities often do follow the complex trail of obfuscated and hacked email addresses and links, and they often do manage to stop Spammers and their networks. Or at they at least slow them down. But it’s not nearly as simple as some