Just One Click

Before we left Blogstream, John the Squabbler and I shared email addresses. He's a fellow NY stater, wasn't sure what he was going to do and didn't want to lose touch. I was among the first people to comment on his blog. There are times when I wish I had his writing ability although he says (I think he's lying) that I write better than he does.

One can believe they have knowledge of someone else through their interpretation of the writings of that person. That knowledge I believe I have leads me to think that his email has been hacked. I received 3 emails from him a week ago which came to me as "No subject" and didn't contain anything except a link to someplace. Something didn't feel right to me about them. My belief in who John is leads me to feel that if this were something he wanted me to see, he'd have said so. John likes words. Lots of words.

His only access to us, at the moment, is from a library computer and possibly a cell phone. Even given that he would have to be working quickly, I still believe he would have said something in explanation. Since that's how I feel, I didn't click the links. I did send him an email asking if his email could have been hacked, however, the only response was more emails with more links and still no explanation. The last that I received occurred at 3:30 this morning.

I am no longer even opening them on the off chance that they contain malware. He has a Facebook account and another online friend of mine with a Yahoo email had her email hacked via her Facebook account the same day I started receiving the ones from John. Facebook is a hotbed of problems like that. I can have enough trouble with Twitter along those lines if I were not careful about clicking on links. Come to think of it, most of the malware picked up in Twitter are posted through peoples Facebook account.

For the social media addicts, being able to post once and have it occur in all of their accounts at the same time seems to appeal to them. With the number of people who still use the internet without proper security on their computers the number of computers that can be infected is infinite. Once infected, that computer sends out the malware infected emails to all those listed in the computer address book and so it goes. On and on and on. Very hard to contain when that happens, since most don't know they've been hacked until their friends start complaining about the unwanted items they were sent.

That reminds me, in case opening the first of those emails infected my computer with something, don't open anything I send you if there isn't something said by me in the subject line. I keep checking my "Sent" folder and nothing is in there that I didn't send. I'm not sure that's a good way to tell, but it seems to me to be. After all, if I send out something it's in there, so why wouldn't a hacker's be too?