How many of you know someone who's had a virus on their computer? How many of you know someone who's had their computer hijacked? You hear about cities like Baltimore that were infected and unable to send email, and it happens more than you think.

We get so much email nowadays and so much spam it's hard to focus when you're looking at your inbox. You can see emails being downloaded as you're looking at your inbox thinking to yourself, 'How am I ever going to catch up?'

The spam gets mixed in with legitimate email and if you're like me, sometimes you mistakenly delete a legitimate email when you're hitting delete, delete, delete on your spam.

Then there are people who write to you from a bogus email address. You recognize the name but if you look carefully you see that the email addresses different. If you don't look carefully you might click on the email because you recognize the person's name and the next thing you know you have a virus.

It seems to come in waves.

Please be careful. Don't open an email without being absolutely sure that it's from someone you know. I hardly ever click on the attachment and I hardly ever click the link unless I've spoken to the person and I know to expect it.

People who put links and so forth in their unsolicited emails are really out of touch, I think. In fact I think it's really terrible marketing because anybody who's been around the block a few times knows better than to click the link or open an attachment.

Don't open something from someone that you don't know and even if you know them make sure that they sent it to you. An ounce of prevention is worth 10,000 pounds of cure not to mention some ransom that you might have to pay to get your computer back.

This says nothing about spam phone calls, which are another story...

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