Recently one of my customers site was spiking in traffic and blowing the bandwidth. The first day I increased the bandwidth. But it blew it the next day. Seemed a bit fishy to me. I thought I would investigate the matter and when I logged into the FTP program I saw a folder called blog that was installed a few months ago. It had about 10000 files! All spammy pages selling viagra or canadian pharmacy products.

While having a chat with my hosting support one of the things I was told could happen was – if you had a malware or virus on your local hard drive and if you uploaded a file through FTP the malware could install a billion files on your remote server. WOW!  This was news to me. Yuk. It took me an hour to delete the files from the server.

I have started scanning my PC every night for Malware now.  I use Pareto Logic’s virus & malware checker . It seems to do the job well.

So if you have a website and you upload files please keep your PC scanned and cleaned regularly to avoid any nasty viruses.

On that note I read a funny bit today. The tech review site Gizmodo got caught themselves. (funny) They were advertising spammy antivirus on their site. These software come in disguise and actually install real viruses on your hard drive.

If you think you’re getting a lot of spam these days, well, you are not alone. Microsoft has released a report that says 97 % of mail that is being sent is unwanted spam like phishing attacks or viruses.
The good news: Spam filters are getting better than ever. Microsoft’s filter system for Exchange now scrubs out 39 out of every 40 emails sent. Spam also saw that slight decline thanks to the shut down last year of the ISP McColo, a major haven for spammers who suddenly had to go shopping elsewhere.

What are we being spammed about? Pharmacy and other product ads make up the lion’s share of spam, accounting for 72.2 percent of all spam sent. Only 10 % of that is for Viagra or Cialis. Image-only spam, dating come-ons, financial spam, and fraudulent diplomas round out the remainder of the most common spam subjects.
In the related world of malware infections, the Microsoft report noted that worldwide, 8.6 machines were suffering from malware for every 1,000 which were clean. That sounds pretty good, but it still translates to about 9 million computers worldwide suffering from malware attacks. What do you need to watch out for today, attack-wise? The most common attacks at the moment target Microsoft Office and PDF files, and those types of attacks are further on the rise.

Is your computer protected? The only way to stay ahead of these spammers is to keep all your softwares up to date and keep your Anti virus up to date as well. If you don’t have one I encourage you to buy a real anti virus. I use Pareto Logic anti virus. One worry out of my way.