A 27-year-old man, dubbed the Spam King by investigators, has been arrested in Seattle where he has been indicted on charges of mail fraud, wire fraud, fraud in connection with electronic mail, and money laundering.
Read More… (From The Register - Security: Spam)
If it’s not obvious by now, I’ve tightened up the spam filtering. We’re getting hammered by comment spam this last week or so — some big new round of scripts is going off.I’m sorry if your comment is delayed, but it’s either that or TypeKey, which I don’t really want to do either. This sucks. I have to find a solution of some kind — I’m open to suggestions.
Read More… (From Gadgetopia: Spam)
If the USPC is anything similar to our Canada Post (I suspect there is little difference between the two), youre eventually going to get the following story
Read More… (From Fixing Email Weblog)
Four men suspected of sending an internet-congesting 5.4 billion spam emails to promote a dating website have been arrested in Japan.
Read More… (From The Register - Security: Spam)
The Bank of Ireland is the latest target of a phishing scam.
Read More… (From Phishing News)
Email systems and local councils in Britain just don’t seem to mix.
Read More… (From The Register - Security: Spam)
Burma (Myanmar) may be in the running for the world’s slowest email: more than four months. clipped from www.lirneasia.netLIRNEasia and ISEAS organized an expert forum on ICT indicators in Singapore in March 2007. On the 26th of January, the Myanmar…
Read More… (From loose wire blog)
Phishing and identity theft will be two hot topics at this year’s CeBIT IT fair in Hanover.
Read More… (From Phishing News)
RSS pushes old concept with new technology [BtoB]
The Holy Grail of electronic marketing is a way to deliver targeted messages directly to the desktop of a qualified, interested buyer. While e-mail has emerged as a crucial tool for marketers, so-called push technology—best exemplified by the ill-fated Pointcast network—failed miserably and faded into oblivion.
But push may be set for a comeback. Savvy marketers are beginning to tap a promising new one-to-one channel called RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, depending on whom you ask). RSS is beginning to draw the attention of the b-to-b marketing community.
Some RSS tools even integrate with applications like Microsoft Outlook, which portends a day when individuals may peruse RSS feeds right alongside their e-mail in-box.<more>
RSS is at the core of blogging technology and news aggregrators like Radio Userland. I predict that a combination of blogging and news aggregrators will largely replace B2B email marketing within 5 years. RSS has been around since the old Netscape’s introduced MyNetscape in the mid-90s. In 1997 pundits were predicting the emise of email marketing due to the original push technologies like Pointcast but that didn’t happen. While push didn’t kill email marketing it would be ironic the evolution of push solved business marketers most vexing problem — spam, spam and more spam.
John Lawlor - business blogging e-van-gel-ist - blogging from Boca Raton, FL 2003-05-05
Read More… (From John Lawlor: Spam)
As a freelance consultant, I have my CV registered with a number of online job boards, some of which are read by people who offer me work.
Mostly, though, I get mailshots from companies offering to re-write my CV so I can get more mailshots….
There’s an increasing trend, however, of low-tier recruitment agencies sending bulk emails to poorly-targetted lists of candidates, in a scatter-gun model, hoping they’ll hit someone who is the least bit interested in the job they’re offering.
However much I explain to these people that I don’t want to do their side of the work for them, that they’re being paid by their clients to find the right person for the job, and should do some legwork before they contact a potential candidate, they persist.
Today’s example - a solicitation for a Project Manager (I’m not one of those), must speak Italian (I don’t), specialising in EMC SANs (about which I know nothing). And to top it all, they attached a 500k Powerpoint presentation full of marketing speak about the agency (but nothing about the client).
Doh!!!!!
A Dutch spammer who used compromised PCs to spamvertise web sites has been fined 75,000 ($97,000) by Opta, the Netherlands telecoms regulator.
Read More… (From The Register - Security: Spam)
A reader of our blog recently informed me that Chase is requiring its customers to “update their profiles.” Shady enough, this was the first thing he saw when logging into his account yesterday.
Isn’t this a common phishing ploy? “Please come update your account info.” This clearly makes recognizing phishers hard, since now they’re not the only one directly asking for your private info.
(Link to a screengrab of the site)
Read More… (From Stop-Phishing @ IU)
Microsoft has filed 117 lawsuits in the US against suspected phishers.
Read More… (From Phishing News)
InfoWorld: Will new filters save us from spam? The roughly 500 programmers, researchers, hackers and IT administrators gathered in a chilly classroom on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Friday aren’t just looking to slow the relentless onslaught of spam — they want to completely destroy its business model. [Tomalak’s Realm]
Read More… (From John Lawlor: Spam)
While complaints continue to roll in about cell phone spam from SMS text message spammers Mblox and their partners Dada Mobile, new complaints are starting to surface about new SMS spammers FunMobile, Freeze Mobile (a/k/a FreezeMob), Free Mobile and My Lifestyle. FunMobile may come through with the short code 99621, and Freezemob as short code 36726.
Read More… (From The Internet Patrol)
We saw in part 2 of this series that when a receiving email server gets the message, it inserts a Received: header into the mail headers of the message. Let’s go back to our previous example and see what happens if the message is routed through a couple of more servers. Suppose that on its way from mailhost.tzink-is-awesome.com, mail sent from tzink.net had to go through a couple of forwarding relays. From me@tzink.net
Received: from mailhost.tzink-is-awesome.com (mailhost.tzink-is-awesome.com [292.13.130.22]) by mail.tzink.net (8.8.5) for me@tzink-is-awesome.com with EMSTP id 123456789-0AH for <me@tzink.net>
Received: from tdk4127.com (example_mailers_competitors.com [284.33.167.99]) by an_email_program (1.0) with SMTP id 71718149989; Thu, June 21, 2007 23:06 -0800
Received: from example_mailers.com (example_mailers.com [267.99.33.167]) by another_email_program (7.3) with SMTP id 9899481717; Thu, June 21, 2007 23:01 -0800
From: my.alias@tzink.net
To: another.email@tzink-is-awesome.com
Date: Fri, Jun 18, 2007 20:20:20 PST
Message-ID: <elmsley-flushtration-484@mail.tzink.net>
Subject: How’s it going? I’ve highlighted the received headers in different colors. In general, you read received headers from bottom to top, with the most recent one getting stamped at the top and being the most reliable one. In the above example, the message started from the IP 267.99.33.167 at a mail host called example_mailers.com. It got routed through their competitors example_mailers_competitors.com (IP = 284.33.167.99), went through mailhost.tzink-is-awesome.com before finally arriving at its end destination at mail.tzink.net. It’s a complicated process but from the above, we can see that the message originated at 267.99.33.167, the first IP address. In real life, it doesn’t quite work that way. Spammers will often insert fake routine information into the headers. Here is a real life example of a spam message that I just received in my own email account (with some of the identifying information removed): Received: from 200-122-3-37.dsl.prima.net.ar (200-122-3-37.dsl.prima.net.ar [200.122.3.37]) by mail25-blu.bigfish.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 78128787654; Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:46:40 +0000 (UTC)
Received: from 208.109.233.77 (HELO positivenews.net) by frontbridge.com with esmtp (1/9B/+4-) LD*H)
id (<C/(,-Q>,0(B-E< for me@example.net; Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:46:50 +0300 From the above, we can see that the message originated at 208.109.233.77 from a machine calling itself positivenews.net, passed itself to a machine in a DSL pool in Argentina before finally arriving at my inbox. Or did it? Look at the blue received header, it looks suspicious. That first received header is wrong. For one thing, it says Received: from <IP address> rather than Received: from mail host. Then, typically we would expect to see IP address in parentheses rather than only the name of the host. Of course, some mail servers are configured differently and this could be a configuration issue, but it is suspicious. Generally, as a spam analyst I would use this information alone to call it a forgery. Moving onwards, look at the SMTP id. A bunch of characters including forward slashes, + and - signs and the asterisk. That, too, is suspicious and more than enough to confirm this received header as a forgery and is not authentic. Thus, we look at the line above and see that this mail originated from 200.122.3.37. Spammers can insert more than one extra received header. Sometimes they are easy to spot, sometimes they are not. The times when they don’t look like regular received headers gives them away; they will have syntax errors and extra X-headers that don’t make any sense. Other times, spammers will be quite subtle in that they will mimic actual received headers. That makes things harder to pick out. The last (ie, first in the header list) received header is correct because it contains the latest hop that the message went through and your machine stamped it. It doesn’t mean that the mail originated at that IP but at least you have some information about where the mail recently came from.
Read More… (From Terry Zink’s Anti-spam Blog)
Get this for a new spam angle –I had shared my Yahoo Calendar with my wife, so she could add events. Somehow I must have hosed it up, because some idiot has managed to add events to my calendar so that I’m amply remind that I need to join his Party Poker site every single day.These aren’t on my calendar — I have the bonehead’s username and I’ve turned it into Yahoo. But I checked my settings again, and I only allowed “Trusted Friends” to view and add events to my calendar.No idea how it happened, but it just proves that spammers are bleeping weasels.
Read More… (From Gadgetopia: Spam)
