We don't use E-gold quite often since the majority of our internet business and shopper sales are conducted thru our online company account. Nonetheless we occasionally have someone who will request paying by E-gold so we keep an account there because of this. Once a month or so we withdraw the funds and decided to do so yesterday. Imagine our dismay when we logged into our E-gold account yesterday and found our balance to be a great fat Nil! We had checked the balance only a few days ago so we knew this wasn't correct. After investigating the history of the account, we revealed that a spend had been made to another e-gold account user WITHOUT our data or authorisation. We had been hacked!

Since we have current anti-virus and firewall software on our PC, we believed we were safe. Not so! It looks this isn't enough to keep away the hackers as the software does not forestall “Spyware” from being installed on your personal computer.

“Spyware” is software that gets onto your personal computer and literally “spies” on your activities. The spying can go from comparatively harmless use of cookies tracking you across multiple websites… To extremely perilous “keystroke loggers” which record passwords, credit cards, and other private info. That data then gets relayed to the individual that put the software on your personal computer.

Adware gets on your computer in one of several other ways.

First, it rides with software you download from the ‘Net and install on your system.

2nd, they come as email attachments (much like viruses) and instantly install themselves on your computer when you open the email message.

Third, hackers find an open port on your P. C and use the “back door” to install basically anything they desire.

And 4th, the more antagonistic types, like keystroke loggers, can even get installed by somebody with direct physical access to your personal computer such as an employer, suspicious spouse, business rival, or someone who would like to know precisely what you're doing.

So how do you protect yourself against these evil hackers? You want a programme that particularly scans your system for the tens-of-thousands of existing spyware programs along with the newer ones appearing daily.

Below are two programs which especially check for and get rid of spyware from your system:

“Spybot Search & Destroy” – http://www.safer-networking.org
“Ad Aware” – http://www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/

You could have malicious software slinking on your P. C at this time so protect yourself today by downloading one of the above programs!

As a point of reference, we made contact with E-gold and informed them that we had been hacked. We provided them with the account number of the person that received the funds and demanded a contact email address on the individual. E-gold informed us that they couldn't provide that info without a “court order” and that fundamentally there wasn't any way of getting the cash back!

Do something today to defend yourself from this growing threat! The bottom line is: – Keep your antivirus program current

– Install a firewall
– Thoroughly screen software before installing it
– Scan specifically for malicious software weekly
– Stay current on this growing threat.

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