Spam rocks Virgin Media

During the last few weeks there were so many reports regarding the hijack of email accounts of Virgin Media users. The Virgin Media customers are having a tough time as the contacts in their address books were sent spam messages by the infiltrators. A large section of Virgin Media customers believe that the acquisition of contact information on the large scale could be the result of security breach in the email servers of the provider.

Virgin Media did not admit this security breach and they also did not give any reasonable explanation. The support team of Virgin Media, about this problem, has posted on web forums suggested that apart from Virgin Media web mail services, other web mail services were also affected by this problem. It recommended that it would be safer for the customers to run security checks on their computer and it also requested them to change their email passwords. The employees of the Virgin Media suggested that the problem might have been caused by a wave of so called “brute force attacks”. It is also to be noted that the Provider has not given any supporting evidence to this effect.

Usually, ‘brute force’ attacks depend on algorithms that match combinations of numbers, letters and words to the password of any given account. Passwords having no numbers or case variation, passwords consisting of whole words etc. are easy for hacking while passwords interspersed with numbers, random sequence of characters in upper and lower case are difficult to hack The internet users must be aware of the security threats as the cyber criminals are employing more and more sophisticated methods.

It is roughly estimated that almost 75% of the email messages sent and received through net is spam even though a major portion of these messages are filtered out before it reach its recipient.