December 2008
42 posts
CIO.com: How Spyware Nearly Sent a Teacher to... →
(via fergdawg)
Telegraph: Russian hackers penetrate Pentagon... →
‘Defence officials told the Los Angeles Times that the attack struck computers within the US Central Command, which oversees Iraq and Afghanistan, and involved malicious software - known as “malware” - that permeates a network.’
(via circleid)
November 2008
60 posts
Buy Nothing Day →
“Suddenly, we ran out of money and, to avoid collapse, we quickly pumped liquidity back into the system. But behind our financial crisis a much more ominous crisis looms: we are running out of nature… fish, forests, fresh water, minerals, soil. What are we going to do when supplies of these vital resources run low?
There’s only one way to avoid the collapse of this human experiment of ours...
Technology Liberation Front: Beware the Era of... →
“If politicians turn their gaze from the financial sector to tech in 2009, they will likely focus on the issue of personally identifiable information (PII) and privacy.”
Washington Post Security Fix: Spam Volumes... →
“Spam volumes could rise considerably over the next few days now that one of the world’s largest networks of compromised computers used for blasting out junk e-mail was brought back to life tonight.”
ISPs: time to cancel your staff’s vacation time.
mailing manager: Spam 2.0 →
“…it doesn’t matter if you keep referring to what the laws say - it is what the subscriber thinks in the first place which is Spam as they are the people who are reporting the emails in the first place.”
Fade to Play: Why Spammers need to be controlled... →
“Relevance: I’m in ur Facebook, spamming ur friends.”
Linux Journal: The Open Source Force Behind the... →
It’s not just the open source software. It’s the open source people, the open source ideas. ‘Britt Blaser calls it “the first campaign that functioned more like a Web service than a marketing blitz”.’
This is the future of marketing — and it isn’t marketing at all. You can’t create it, but you can create an environment that allows it to...
Seth's Blog: "Just doing my job" →
Something else for marketers & ESPs to consider as the holiday desperation sets in: “If you take a job, you’ve bought into what the company does. You’re responsible.”
MailChimp: How sending to old lists will kill your... →
we’ve all assumed that to be true, but here’s some real data to back it up — just in time for holiday desperation
Washington Post Security Fix: Pharmacy... →
ClickZ: Desperation Marketing Courts E-mail Hell →
“This fourth business quarter is a rocky ride, given grim holiday-spending projections and pressure to make budget. Maybe that explains why so many companies abandon good e-mail practices for risky moves like boosting frequency or marketing to iffy lists.”
(via mailchimp)
Direct: E-Mail Remains Top Internet Activity: MRI →
as usual, the study didn’t differentiate between personal email and email to/from advertisers.
CircleID: Whois Masking Considered Harmful →
‘…having a contract in place between you and the “privacy provider” isn’t a factor, the domain belongs to them, not you. If you want to do something about it, you’ll have to follow that up in court.’
CBC: Facebook wins faceoff with Montreal spammer →
“Last Friday, a California court ordered Adam Guerbuez and his company Atlantis Blue Capital to pay the popular social networking site $873 million in damages for spamming registered users on the site.”
(In 2003, the Montreal Mirror reported on Mr. Guerbuez’s previous business endeavors.)
Bronto Blog: donotreadthispost →
miro: Privacy: the price of relevancy →
“Ironically, just as we gain access to new channels/media/technologies that allow marketers to become ever more pervasive and ‘relevant’ we also stand at the fringe of an environment that has the makings of a perfect storm which can potentially redefine a brand’s value proposition in ways we might not appreciate.”
Exact Target: A Tipping Point for Email Marketing?... →
“New platforms like social networks will prove difficult for marketers to penetrate, because most will approach it a bit too brazenly. Our survey data showed that 18-24 year olds report being nearly immune to the ploys of marketers.”
Who Has Time For This?: Why I Just Invested in... →
“Only one startup was crazy enough to try this. With some amusement, I watched Daniel Dreymann’s team for three years trying to line up all these ducks. Suddenly, in September, I heard quacking.”
OPTA: OPTA imposes fine of over 100,000 EUR on... →
“OPTA, the Dutch Independent Post and Telecommunications Authority, today imposed fines amounting to more than 100,000 euros on two distributors of adware and spyware…. The two transgressors appeared to be an experienced businessman and a young adult male.”
Datamation: McColo and the Difficulty of Fighting... →
Ray Everett-Church explains why the McColo shutdown couldn’t happen until Brian Krebs dug up (and publicized) clear evidence of wrongdoing
bMighty: As More Lose Jobs, More Job-Spam Scams On... →
“Spammers get their clicks by preying upon fear, among other things. And as unemployment levels rise, job, income and related concerns are becoming more common spam-prompts than ever.And prime among them are money-mule scams that try to rope people into laundering money from home.”
FTC: Court Orders Halt to Sale of Spyware →
“According to the FTC’s complaint, the Florida-based CyberSpy Software, LLC marketed and sold RemoteSpy keylogger spyware to clients who would then secretly monitor unsuspecting consumers’ computers. The FTC seeks to permanently bar the unfair and deceptive practices and require the defendants to give up their ill-gotten gains.”
Direct: Top Firms Fumble Opt Outs: Return Path... →
“More than 10 years since e-mail became a viable sales-and-marketing channel, many of the best-known marketers in the U.S. handle opt-outs poorly….”
Terry Zink: Categories of problems in outbound... →
“We’ve implemented a number of solutions and incrementally have started to tighten the screws in what we will allow customers to send out without any interference from our side. We have discovered that the following about outbound spam from customers….”
Joho the Blog: Is the Net dangerous for kids? The... →
“Actual research, not scare stories or assumptions…” (which will be published in January) appears to show that “…the increased popularity of the Internet in America has not been correlated with an overall increase in reported sexual offenses; overall sexual offenses against children have gone steadily down in the last 18 years.”
CyberCrime & Doing Time: Enlisting YOUR BANK to... →
recent malware hijacks your browser and adds fields to your bank’s web forms, then steals the results
Spam Wars: Falling Hard For a 419 Scammer →
when smart people won’t listen to other smart people — who also don’t listen in return — nobody wins.
profy: Less Email Spam, More Blog Comments Spam.... →
6 tags
two more for the "don't" list
Al Iverson at Exact Target gives us a new acronym: D.E.A.T.H., for Don’t Email Ads To Hardbounces (a weird way of saying “don’t send mail to addresses that aren’t accepting any mail.”)
Laura Atkins at Word to the Wise gets email from a stranger, who sent it because she was “in [his] address book under Spamhaus.”
Don’t do that.
SearchSecurity: Web-borne malware targets... →
“A study…analyzed how many times its Web security service blocked malware when users browsed compromised Web pages. The result showed the highest incidence in four startling verticals: energy and oil, pharmaceutical and chemical, engineering and construction, and transportation.”
(via fergdawg)
CAUCE: Should I Stay or Should I Go? →
“Working in the anti-spam and online malware fight can be depressing or at best invoke multiple personality disorder. We all know things are bad on the net, but if you want a dose of stark reality….”
ReadWriteWeb: Are Tagged Photos on Facebook a New... →
“…this is the latest in guerrilla marketing efforts making its way through Facebook right now. It’s so slimy, we hesitate to even mention it here, lest we give anyone ideas.”
Tony de Marco on Flickr: São Paulo No Logo →
A city without spam: “Back in December, 2006, the mayor of the 11-million-person Brazilian city of Sao Paulo banned all outdoor billboard advertising, citing advertisers’ unwillingness to comply with the city’s rules on what sort of billboards can be placed where.”
New York Times: States Investigate Warranty Sales... →
Continuing this evening’s non-email spam theme, the New York Times reports “Attorneys General in several states are investigating what they suspect are telephone sales scams promoting extended car warranties, often by calling cellphones or numbers that are listed on do-not-call registries.”
(via @cameo)
The Metric System: “Single?” Lawn Signs Conquer... →
a very impressive investigation into the sprawling online business behind the physical-world spam we’ve seen all over North America.
(via Charlie’s Diary)
The Spam Diaries: Classmates.com sued for false... →
USA Today: Internet thieves make big money... →
“By clicking on the link, the workers infected their PCs with a virus that shut down the company’s antivirus defenses….
The virus swiftly located — and infected — some 300 other workstation PCs, silently copying the contents of each computer’s MyDocuments folder. It transmitted the data across the Internet to a gang of thieves operating out of Turkey.”
Washington Post: Alleged Host of Internet Spam... →
“The volume of junk e-mail sent worldwide dropped drastically today after a Web hosting firm, identified by the computer security community as a major host of organizations engaged in spam activity, was taken offline.”
Twits of Meat →
Somewhat surprisingly for a web 2.0 phenomenon, twitter is — at heart — a broadcast medium. People have come up with ways to make it more social, but those are largely afterthoughts. This is probably why twitter has become so popular with marketers recently: for them, a one-way broadcast is much more comfortable and safe and familiar than actually having to have a conversation.
The...
MailChannels Anti-Spam Blog: Is spamming more... →
Deliverability.com: Marriage and Marketing →
Quoting Seth Godin: “Walking into the singles bar, the Interruption Marketer marches up to the nearest person and proposes marriage. If turned down, the Marketer repeats this process on every person in the bar.” The rest of the analogy is even better.
CircleID: DDoS Attacks Getting More Powerful, ISPs... →
“Massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against ISPs and their customers have almost doubled over the past year, according to…” Arbor Networks.
All Spammed Up: Educate yourselves about phishing... →
APWG and Carnegie Mellon are working together to create informational content aimed towards end users
Washington Post Security Fix: Researchers Hijack... →
“…researchers…sought to measure the conversion rate of spam by quietly infiltrating the Storm worm botnet, a vast collection of compromised computers once responsible for sending an estimated 20 percent of all spam.”