At the spooky time of the year and at any other time, cyberspace is already crowded with evil spirits who want to haunt your computer, mess up your files, steal your credit cards, push porn on you and do a hundred other dastardly deeds. Just this week, after my iMac was repaired, I carted it home and fired it up. The repair nerds did an excellent job, because all the lights and whistles worked, but an unwanted invasion overwhelmed my email inbox like a flight of Halloween bats.

During the six or so days in the shop, someone or some gang of hackers had put me on a prime sucker list and sent me about a thousand emails. I have a junk mail eliminator click on my iMac, and except for four five innocuous spam notes day, I never had much of a problem. But that was before I took my iMac to the Apple hospital. Seeing my email mess, I thought about accusing an Apple repair employee, a sneaky type who may have done it out of spite or to make some quick bucks from the spammers.

Strangely or humorously, hundreds of the spam messages were from such varieties of sites as lonely hearts clubs, porn services, quick loan sharks and auto dealers. I'd say crooked auto dealers, but that would be redundant. Now, I'm 82 years old, and may be a bit flattered that all those cyberspace girls, innocent and sinful, out there believe I'd be eager and/or able to spend a buck or two to match up with them.

Of course, considering my previous experience with such sites, I know most of the "girls" in the emails are actually fat guys smoking cigars and squatting in front of their computers in Africa, Russia, India and the Caribbean. They sweat 24-7 trying to make a buck from some clueless and lonely American nerds. And woe be to the nerd who uses his credit card to buy the services. Goodbye, bank account in a cybersecond!

Of course, my experience this week had nothing much to do with Halloween, although it was a bit more frightening than seeing a ghost in a graveyard. There are many more cyberspace pitfalls that can invade your computer, and because of the growing sophistication of computers. This Halloween, as I have throughout the year, I've told friends and family not to send me any passed-on emails where the address starts with FW: Experts say that is one of the easiest ways the cyber thieves and hackers can invade your email address and other parts of you computer to do considerable, and too often, permanent damage.

There are several internet invasions that could have Halloween

• 1
• 2
• next page >>

---

Add your voice

Know something about Cyber-security and Halloween?
We want to hear your view. Write now!