Spam mail

Zoom is a video conferencing app. Zoom Bombing is a cyber attack on your video call where an individual or a group of people enter it without the permission of the host. These individuals then display offensive or explicit images in order to cause distress to the recipients.

During the Coronavirus emergency period, video conferencing is helping many people to work remotely and allowing us to stay in touch with our families and friends. Unfortunately as worldwide use of video conferencing increases, so has the reporting of cyber attacks .

The links in Related Information provide details of how to secure your Zoom meeting and prevent unwanted joining.

If you have experienced zoom bombing, this can reported to Zoom and depending on the nature of the content, your Local Police Force.

Unsolicited e-mail, sometimes referred to as 'spam ' or 'unsolicited commercial email' (UCE), is electronic mail which is unwarranted and sent for the purpose of selling the recipient goods or services. It is most often used for multi-level marketing schemes, get-rich-quick schemes, work-at-home schemes or for questionable products or pornography.

Several years ago 'spammers ' developed software that could lift all the email addresses from web pages. The software is similar to that used by search engines to index websites.

Automated 'robots' follow links from one website to another and trawl pages looking for any text that contain the @ symbol. These are assumed to be email addresses and are taken for later use in mass e-mailing.

Some spam mail appears to be from people you would know with the title being something similar to Re: Hello, you are more likely to open one of these e-mails if you think it is a reply to an e-mail that you have previously sent. If you do not recognise the e-mail address then do not open the e-mail as this could infect your computer with a virus.

Yes, protect your email address. Only distribute your e-mail address to those people who you wish to have it.

Also, if you do find yourself receiving a lot of unsolicited e-mails, contact your Internet Service Provider (ISP). They can block future e-mails from the sender. If you are able to determine the ISP of the sender, then it may also be worth forwarding the message to the email address of abuse@ - the ISP's name, stating that it was unwanted spam email.

This is an important step that can help you and thousands of other subscribers. Once an ISP has reason to believe their network is being used to send unlawful unsolicited commercial e-mail, they can block all further e-mail sent to its subscribers from the address or domain name of the sender.

Never reply to 'spammers ', and never buy anything from them!

Educate yourself about filtering. A number of e-mail programs, including Eudora Pro, Microsoft's Outlook Express and Pegasus, have filtering features that let you set criteria to stop unwanted e-mail before it reaches your computer, or once it does, move it to a trash box where you can delete it without reading it.

The best way to stop unsolicited e-mails is to protect your e-mail address and only give it out to those people you wish to receive e-mails from.

You can also contact your Internet Service Provider who may be able to block any future messages from the sender.

A further step is to forward the unwanted e-mails to abuse@ISPname (i.e abuse@AOL.com etc) stating that it is unwanted mail. If the sender persistently sends unsolicited mail then the ISP may be able to block all future e-mails from this person.