Radio Smart Talk for Tuesday, August 30:
The U.S. Department of Justice announced last week that it would investigate allegations that the News Corporation hacked into the cell phones of some of the people killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks (read more from npr) Hackers released personal information on San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit police officers and customers as a way of protesting BART's decision to cut passengers' cell phone and data services earlier this month. Large companies' websites are often invaded or corrupted by hackers.
Technology is everywhere around us. For the most part it has made life easier and opened many, many doors that have a positive impact on our lives. But there are those who use technology for criminal or malicious reasons.
What can we do to protect our personal computers or iPhones, especially when governments, defense contractors and the largest, richest companies in the world can't?
On Tuesday's Radio Smart Talk, we'll discuss cyber crime and protection with Chuck Davis, a security manager at IBM Global and a faculty member at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology and Michael Wright, a systems engineer at IBM.
What questions do you have about computer or other data security?
Also, comedian Paula Poundstone , a regular panelist on npr's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" program (airs Saturdays at 11 a.m. on witf 89.5) will join us. Ms. Poundstone will appear at the Ephrata Main Theatre on Friday, September 9.
LISTEN TO PROGRAM:
comments
Some of these emails only show up on my smartphone, not my desktop. In order to delete the email from my phone, I have to open it. I never open the attachments. Does opening the email alert the sender that they have found a good email address?
--Mary Jane
You don't state what type of smartphone you have but generally you don't have to open an email to delete it. I routinely delete emails without ever reading them. Blackberry's have a delete key but you can also use the smartphone's menu to delete the email without ever reading or opening it. Nokia, Samsung all have menu options which enable you to delete an email without ever opening it. Most email providers have spam filters available but in some cases this may require you to "turn on" or enable it. You can also look into SPAM filters for your smartphone.
Dana
Those e-mail sound suspicious and I would certainly recommend that you delete them or scrutinize their authenticity.
The reason why you may see the email on your smartphone and not on your desktop is that there is probably a spam filter removing these from your desktop view but not your smartphone. Without knowing details about your email solution, I can't say for sure but that's my best guess.
At this point I would suggest that you delete the email from your phone without opening them. As you indicated, opening the email can let the sender know that they found a "good" address if your mail reader loads image files.
If you know it's not something you want to read, delete it before opening.
I hope that helps!
-Chuck
As soon as we talked about that and said, "Athens and Sparta" I thought "doh! Trojan horse -- Troy." We always aim for accuracy.
The article is the third part of a series regarding social network security, but the tips also apply to personal computer security in general.
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