This is definitely NOT SPAM, is this?

The world calendar is full of funny and, sometimes, very strange holidays. The IT industry is no exception. The first week of May is filled with interesting events based on unusual stories. Let's talk about some of them.

May 3rd is considered spam text's "birthday". The story begins in 1978, when about 400 Arpanet users received the same advertising message from DEC, the electronics manufacturer.

The word "spam" is borrowed from the canned food SPAM - short for "Spiced ham" which remained in abundance after the World War II. It was one of the toughest advertising campaigns in history. SPAM was everywhere: on billboards, public transport, buildings, in newspapers.

Nevertheless, the meaning of annoying advertising mailings was applied to "spam" a bit later. In 1986, Dave Rhodes, with admirable tenacity, began promoting the new Ponzi scheme in emails, which began to be compared with the ubiquitous SPAM canned food advertising.

Today, the largest spam distribution goes by e-mail. According to  “Kaspersky Lab”, spam percentage was 70.1% in the total March 2022 mailing list. Both mail server spam filters and anti-spam protection,  do not guarantee spam safety.

Let's also remember the “love fever” that plunged the world on May 4th, 2000. One of the netizens (potentially a student) began bulk  mailing of his new virus worm with the subject "IloveYou". The script "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs" was attached to the letter. Naturally, most recipients opened the attachment.

The further spread of the worm proceeded fantastically quickly: "love" messages were sent automatically to all contacts from the address book. The assumed damage to the global economy was estimated at up to $10 billion. This virus worm removed certain file types, that become a disaster for publishers and media, as well as companies that own large archives of graphic and music files. Guinness World Records confirmed "I Love You" virus as the most destructive computer virus in the world.

Probably, this story also inspired “Intel” to declare World Password Day on the first Thursday of May. The idea of ​​the holiday is simple: all users are invited to pay attention to their online security and to update their passwords, as it became a tradition yet. For the first time, World Password Day was celebrated in 2013. But the vast majority of users still constantly forget the recommendations to change their "keys" regularly.

The most common password in the world is "123456" and the shortest is just one character. People often use the same passwords for different accounts.

Corey Nachreiner, CTO, “WatchGuard Technologies”, says: “World Password Day has served as an annual reminder that we all need to practice better password security for nearly a decade. And yet, 80% of breaches began with brute force attacks, or lost or stolen credentials last year. Attackers add millions of new usernames and passwords every day to the billions already available on the dark web. This has been the trend for years now!”  

One out of every five Internet users had their email and/or social media hacked. This is where we all have to be creative, because our accounts' security is in our hands!

LLHOST INC. would like to thank everyone who read the post from A to Z. The “secret password” of the day - is the promocode “NOSPAM”. Enter it in the special field when ordering any virtual (OVS) or VPN server and get a 40% discount!*

Thank you all for your attention!

*Promo code can be applied for 3 periods of monthly billing cycle and will expire on May 15th, 2022.