“Two years from now, spam will be solved,” said Bill Gates in 2004. Since that two year mark in 2006, spam levels have steadily climbed from 56% to 80% of all email by 2008. While antispam filters have become more sophisticated, it is clear that spammers are not giving up the spam fight. An emerging technique is using hacked personal email accounts to scam contacts in the address book.

An example of an email from a hacked account will look something like this:

Hello,

I am in a hurry writing this mail, I had a trip to “Country/Place X”. Unfortunately for me all my money got stolen at the hotel and since then I have been without any money. So I have only access to emails, my mobile phone can’t work here so I didn’t bring it.

Please can you lend me $2,500 so I can return and settle the hotel bills. I’ll pay you back as soon as I get home. You can send the money through moneygram or western union. Please reply so I can know where and when you are sending the money…

1. Use a strong password, at least 8 characters long that includes a mix of numbers, lower and upper case letters and not composed of words that can be easily guessed, such as words in the dictionary.
   
   
2. Change your password regularly, particularly if you usually access your account from public computers, because these might have hidden malicious software, such as password capture applications.
   
   
3. If you get a suspicious request for money or other form of assistance from a “friendly email”, don’t respond to it directly. Contact your friend by any other means available to you to confirm that this is a genuine request for assistance.
   
   
4. If your account has been hacked, where possible contact your Email Host or Internet Service Provider to regain your account. However this might be difficult since the hacker will usually change the account details such as password, address and secret question to keep control of your account.
   
   
5. If all else fails, open a new account and send out a message to your contacts of the change in email address, so they ignore all future emails from the hacked account. Therefore, it is recommended that you keep a back-up of your email contacts. If you use 2 or more email accounts, keep the address books equally updated, so that one acts as a back-up of the other. Also have a different password for each email address, so they don’t get hacked at the same time.