Security Tips
Never reply to spam. Doing so only identifies your phone, email or IM account as active to the sender and guarantees you will get further unwanted messages. The most effective way to protect against email spam is to use a filtering system: some filters are available to purchase (such as Spamtitan) but there are also spam filters available as free online downloads (POPfile, Spamfence, Spamihilator). When dealing with content that does not offer filtering, such as forums and comment sections, you essentially have to rely on your own better judgment: anything that looks like marketing or advertising or generally out of place usually isn’t worth your attention.
Types of Spam Filters
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- List-based
filters essentially categorize users as either trusted or not trusted and allow messages only from trusted users. You can use either blacklisting or whitelisting techniques to create your own lists: blacklisting means creating a list that specifies which users to decline mail from, while you can whitelist by creating a list that specifies which users to accept mail from.
- Content-based
filters, such as the filters used by most webmail services, evaluate individual messages to determine whether they are legitimate or spam rather than blocking all messages from a particular email address. This is done by evaluating the words and phrases in an individual message. A variety of content filters exist. The most basic are word filters which simply block any message containing certain, pre-specified words. Heuristic filters are a little more sophisticated and evaluate patterns of text and series of words. Bayesian content filters are the most advanced as they use mathematical probability to determine which messages are spam.
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The most effective way to defend against mobile phone spam is to protect your email address. Avoid giving out your email address in a public forum or, if it is absolutely necessary to do so, write it in such a way that a person can read it but not a computer (for instance, write out the @ sign as “at” or the periods as “dot”). To prevent sales calls on your mobile phone the strategy is very much the same: never give out your mobile number if you do not have to.
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If you are receiving marketing calls on your mobile phone, you can add your number to the Do Not Call Registry.Telemarketers are not allowed to call numbers on this list: the exceptions are charities registered in Canada, political parties, and general-circulation newspapers. As well, telemarketers can call you if you have an “existing business relationship” with them: this is defined as having bought, leased or rented something from the telemarketer, having a written contract with the telemarketer that is still in effect or has expired less than eighteen months ago, or having asked the telemarketer about a product or survey in the last six months.
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Well known VoIP providers (such as Vonage or Skype) carry calls through their closed systems and they already implement a certain amount of protection against SPIT. Much the same as with email spam filters, whitelisting seems to work effectively against SPIT because you are creating a safe and closed calling list
- List-based
