White House Email, Cyber Security & Cyber Crimes: Cash for Access | Violating Email Privacy

When your email privacy and cyber security is violated in the name of a worthy cause. How email scam artists manipulate recipients to break the law. Are friends, family members & colleagues sending your private email address to the White House? Are they unknowingly helping bad guys commit real crimes? Dr. Joyce Starr interviews cyber security expert Dr. David Gewirtz on the Rights Radio Power Hour. Show Date: August 6, 2009

Your Cyber Security Rights

Rights Radio was ahead of the news! This program aired the very day that Google, Facebook and Twitter were targeted by a massively coordinated  cyber attack and a week prior to the White House email controversy.

On a related privacy security front, Cash for Clunkers turned out to be Cash in Trade for Administration control over auto dealer computers + access to the privacy information and confidential data of customers. This could include third party friends and family members of both customers and employees. I call this cash for cyber insecurity…

Dr. David Gewirtz, Editor-in-Chief of Zatz Magazines, is a renowned expert on cyber security and cyber privacy rights. This is his second appearance on Rights Radio.

Dr. Gewirtz will explain how small business owners and entrepreneurs can naively jeopardize and even destroy their businesses by forwarding emails and sending unwanted emails to business AND personal lists.

WARNING – The email you forward could be under the control of bad guys across the world. DO NOT OPEN OR FORWARD ATTACHMENTS FROM THIRD PARTIES EVER!!!!

Your friend or family member might send you something that says it’s a normal image or jpeg – but it is easy to hide a extension. The true file name (virus) is typically invisible to the naked eye. Even PDFS can harbor dangerous codes. Your computer is then used for attacks on other computers. We were attacked by three million computers. It reached the point where our security system literally melted.  – Dr. David Gewirtz

Don’t miss this show!

Dr. Gewirtz is a leading Presidential scholar specializing in White House email. He is a member of FBI InfraGard, the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism & Security Professionals, a columnist for The Journal of Counterterrorism and Homeland Security, and has been a guest commentator for the Nieman Watchdog of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. He is a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley extension, a recipient of the Sigma Xi Research Award in Engineering and was a candidate for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Letters. He is also authoring a book about the health care hostage crisis – with chapters featured on CNN in advance of publication.

How to Listen: The show is streamed below. Bookmark this page and tell your friends.

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I received a forwarded email this weekend advising recipients to break the law by sending a copy of the forwarded email to every person on their email list – without the permission of the persons and email addresses copied on the email. Recipients were told that the message chain would be broken if they failed to forward the email – and that the final destination was the White House.

Email chain spam is typically couched in “critically important” issues. The cause in this case: Stop the Administration from providing Social Security to illegal immigrants. It’s easy to agree with the message (don’t fix Social Security, just destroy it) – which is precisely what made this one of the most dangerous pieces of email chain spam that I’ve encountered.

For each and every violation of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, a business or person engaging in commercial emailings can be fined up to $11,000. State and federal agencies are beginning to team up with ISPs to bring down these SPAM rings. Recent busts have resulted in many years in prison and millions of dollars in fines.

Under CAN-SPAM, it is illegal to sell, trade, transfer, or offer for any purpose, email addresses of any recipients who have opted out, or requested that they be removed from your email list.

Homeland security begins at home!

To your cyber security!