Employees Can Help Mitigate Spam Risk

Blog Swap

Today we’re happy to publish the following article as part of the blog swap sponsored by CollegeRecruiter, a leading site for college students and recent graduates who are searching for internships and entry level jobs and Recruiting.com. This post comes from the blog of Mick Wist of Insourced.com. Insourced is an online gathering place for job seekers, employers and recruiters, as well as a repository of information accumulated by both Insourced writers and the site’s visitors, with the latter free to contribute to the site via comments, blog posts and forum posts.

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An article in today’s NY Times (subscription required), Spam Doubles, Finding New Ways to Deliver Itself, makes it abundantly clear that we are losing the War on Spam. According to the article, 9 out of every 10 e-mails that are sent over the Internet are spam. That’s a staggering statistic and paints a rather hopeless picture of our future struggle with this societal scourge.

But while spam is generally nothing more than an incessant annoyance for most of us, spam can also bring unwanted viruses, spyware, and other intrusions that can be extremely disruptive and harmful. Many people in offices around the world are simply not savvy enough to recognize all spam and/or they let their guards down for a moment - and that’s all it takes. One errant click on an e-mail link or attachment and untold havoc can be unleashed on the network(s) of unsuspecting companies, shutting down e-mail servers and potentially corrupting sensitive data.

Even the most advanced and expensive spam filtering systems are regularly being beaten by today’s advanced spamming techniques, so perhaps the best prevention is education at the user level. All employees that have Internet access, especially new hires, should be given at least an informal introduction to spam - how to recognize it and how to avoid it, with an emphasis on exaggerated caution. It is far from the ideal solution, but since spam seems to be unavoidable for the foreseeable future, it is best to prepare your people to properly deal with it.

Mick Wist

http://www.insourced.com

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