August 2008
53 posts
Justin Mason: How tightly linked are the top spam... →
Justin reviews some interesting recent findings from botnet researchers
Cumberland Sentinel: The things that escape our... →
“I find it significant that smear e-mails originate only on one side of the [political] debate, and that’s why I wrote about it.”
sudosecure.net: Comment Spam leads to rogue... →
While investigating the source of a recent run of blog comment spam, Jeremy discovered “trojan horse” malware disguised as anti-virus software.
InfoWorld: Eight crazy e-mail hoaxes millions have... →
The Email Wars: You Are the Ones We Despise →
“…people that mess with email marketers data with false names, fake names, friends names, or my favorite asdf@asdf.com (look at your keyboard) make our jobs hard.”
Since when was the recipient expected to make the marketer’s job easy?
Seth's Blog: The first law of mass media →
“One by one, the mass marketers have insisted on robocalling, spamming, jingling and lying their way into our lives.”
Why? Who benefits?
Wired.com: Virus Infects Space Station Laptops... →
(via fergdawg)
Washington Post Security Fix: Thwarting Anti-Spam... →
Recently there were a whole bunch of blog articles crowing that “CAPTCHA is broken” at major webmail providers & such. But as Brian Krebs explains, “…automated programs that spammers use to thwart CAPTCHAs still aren’t nearly as successful as the practice of hiring thousands of people to do nothing but remotely solve the puzzles for clients.” This article...
Macworld: Earthlink and the devil's spam filter →
Yep, challenge/response still sucks for anyone you might want to correspond with.
(via intellectual intercourse and word to the wise)
CircleID: Thoughts on the Best Western Compromise →
A Best Western hotel’s network was compromised, though there’s some debate as to the extent of the damage. John Bambenek sanely reviews the situation, and offers some lessons that any IT staff should take to heart — especially if you think your network isn’t a likely target for nefarious activity.
Email Marketing Reports: The new email marketing:... →
Mark Brownlow dares to mention ethics
Wonko: Enough already with the email newsletters →
In complaining about receiving too many newsletters, Ryan Grove reminds us that senders have to consider not only the frequency of mail they send, but also the potential overload of mail from all senders to their recipients.
Blog Olympics - Sticking on the Post
Apparently there’s a Blog Olympics going on — basically just a big game of tag, where everyone has seven hands. Or maybe it’s more like a virus. In any case, the Box of Meat was tagged by Word to the Wise, who was tagged by EmailKarma, who was tagged by BeRelevant, who was tagged by Communicatiemannen in Belgium, who may have been tagged by I-On Media. That’s where the...
revenge is a dish best left in the freezer and...
There’s no denying that the fight against spam attracts a lot of crazies, both pro- and anti-spam. One of the common attribtues of the anti-spam kooks is that they often think in terms of somehow taking revenge against the spammers — regardless of who else gets hurt along the way.
In 2005, that revenge came in the form of BlueFrog, a service which purported to launch what can only be...
lies, damn lies, and anti-spam vendor press...
There’s a lot of chatter about a recent study purporting to show that 29.1% of internet users has bought something from spam. As ITWire reported, “Marshal were not only interested in how many people were purchasing from a spam source, but also what goods and services they were buying. Perhaps less surprisingly this revealed that sex and drugs sell well online.” But at...
social media hasn't killed email, but spam may...
ShareThis reports that even though they allow people to share content via a number of methods, email is still king. Ignoring social media, Jill Kurtz suggests that perhaps it’s because telephones have become increasingly inconvenient.
Over at LifeHack, Dustin Wax describes how to spam with examples from twitter and email (tongue-in-cheek, of course.) He offers an intriguing definition...
spamfighter: One of these things is not like the... →
The Nigerian 419 scammers* keep finding new & innovative ways to ruin community services like Craigslist.
* it doesn’t matter if they’re really from Nigeria; most of them claim to be, and many arrests point there, so it’s true more often than not.
VietNamNet: Spam senders face $5,000 fine →
Under a new anti-spam decree in Viet Nam, “[s]enders of spam e-mails and text messages which aim to cheat, disturb people, diffuse viruses, or advertise will be fined.”
Spam on War
Image via Wikipedia
As the meatspace war between Russia and Georgia appears to settle, their cyberwar is escalating. MailChannels has investigated the source, and compares it with the other current major botnet, which is sending those CNN and MSNBC forgeries.
Related articles by Zemanta
Antivirus products still fail on fresh viruses
MSNBC Alert - Phishing warning
Unixwiz: An Illustrated Guide to the Kaminsky DNS... →
ZDNet: 1.5m spam emails sent from compromised... →
“By personalizing phishing emails (spear phishing) impersonating the University of Otago, spammers managed to obtain the passwords of four staff members, whose accounts were used to send 1.5m spam emails in 60 hours….”
Consumerist: Pizza Hut Sends Unsolicited Email To... →
Is that a good practice, or a bad practice? Is it even legal?
Update: spamresource and the email wars respond.
CIO.com: Eight Quick Ways to Get Your Site... →
Esther Schindler provides a very good, C*O-ready roundup of the worst common email marketing practices
ArticleCube: Beginning of a Code of Ethics for... →
perhaps someone could point this author towards an existing code of ethics?
Spam Wars: Our Last Best Chance to Defeat... →
“Because I did none of the above, how can I be subscribed? If I never subscribed, how can I have then selected to receive promotions?
Sir, I allege that your pants are on fire.”
PC World - AOL Phisher Gets Seven Year Sentence →
Michael Dolan “…has been sentenced to seven years in prison for masterminding a phishing scheme that targeted AOL users over a four-year period.”
footprints in snow as spring comes
Steve and Laura have been collecting haiku related to the borging, and to email delivery in general. Some are really funny, but it’s clear that one commenter is somewhat bitter about the deal.
(Background: as Ken Magill explains, Habeas started out by licensing a copyrighted haiku. Anne Mitchell, who originally came up with that idea, is cheering the borgosity. Ray Everett-Church, who...
Techdirt: Do We Really Need Software To Catch Pump... →
While the author seems to think that the market will take care of itself, the comments are much more interesting.
Email Marketing Reports: Plain text emails: design... →
Mark has a nice collection of links about crafting plain text email messages.
One of my old favorites is to make the right and left margins evenly justified, without adding extra spaces. (People who’ve never seen email displayed in a monospaced font have absolutely no idea what that means.)
Reuters: U.S. fails to prosecute Internet fraud... →
“While Web users drown in spam and fend off scams aimed at stealing their money, U.S. federal and state law enforcement authorities are doing little to resolve what has become a multi-billion-dollar problem….”
Return Path borgs Habeas
Following the press release and CEO Matt Blumberg’s blog post, journalists have had some interesting interpretations of what this means — usually starting with difficulty in figuring out what the two companies are.
CNet: “junk-mail fighters”
Crain’s New York Business: “New York tech firm buys Silicon Valley rival”
San Jose Business Journal:...
communityspark: How spam can destroy online... →
“Online communities are all about the exchange of information. This makes them highly susceptible to spam, scams and other content of an undesirable nature. If you don’t keep on top of this kind of content, your online community will suffer and ultimately fail.”
Word to the Wise: Delivery thoughts →
Laura’s got an interesting new analogy about how modern spam filters work.
SitePoint: Is John McCain Encouraging Comment... →
“What has rubbed people the wrong way is that McCain is incentivizing blog comments with a points system.”
As spamnation adds, “[i]t’s hard to believe that cut-and-pasting the campaign pabulum over and over into the comments thread on a political website will contribute meaningfully to the discussion, or even influence the readers one way or another.”
ComputerWorld UK: Dutch police notify botnet... →
working with Kapersky Labs, Dutch police have apparently taken control of a botnet and used it to notify infected users that they have a problem
(via fergdawg)
CNN Behind the Scenes: Fraudulent spam about... →
CNN acknowledges that they’re the target of a big ongoing spam run
WebProNews: Tagged.com: Spam Your Friends →
Tagged, the social networking site that spams your friends without asking first (almost always resulting in a sheepish apology), has some interesting history.
CAUCE North America: ACLU, Anti-Spam Laws, and the... →
Wired Gadget Lab: China, Coca Cola to Spam Phones... →
bluetooth spam is here, whether anyone likes it or not
Pew Internet: Search Engine Use →
“…the number of [people] using a search engine on a typical day is pulling ever closer to the 60% of internet users who use email, arguably the internet’s all-time killer app, on a typical day.”
(via circleid, which has a nice synopsis of the report)
DMA Email Marketing Council Blog: Video in email →
“…video in email is not reliable in the way that website based video is. It won’t work for all your recipients, and those it does work for, may well not be happy it did.”
Ken Magill: EmailAppenders List-Purchase Nightmare →
It’s the same old story: an inexperienced marketer buys a “permission-based” list of email addresses from a shady list broker, and is surprised when everyone thinks he’s a spammer.
But this time, the inexperienced marketer has gone public with his complaint — because he wants the shady list broker to clean the list and sell it to him again.
(also on word to the...
USA Today: Meet A-Z: The computer hacker behind a... →
“He’s a crack programmer, successful entrepreneur and creator of sophisticated software tools that help his customers make millions. Trouble is, A-Z’s masterstroke is a computer program called ZeuS that helps cybergangs steal people’s identity data and pull off Web scams on a vast scale.”
(via fergdawg)
Email Experience Blog: MAKE IT POP!: Know the... →
As if conversations between technologists and marketers weren’t already difficult enough, it appears that the DMA’s Email Experience Council wants to redefine long-standardized terms such as “header” and “message.”
Lisa Harmon ends the article by saying “Talk the talk; walk the walk!” It reminds me of the scene in the movie Hustle & Flow where...
Spam Resource: Political Sending Reputation →
“Ever wondered what the sending reputation was for your favorite presidential candidate?”
InformationWeek: Online Threats Cost Consumers... →
“Consumers have lost almost $8.5 billion over the last two years to viruses, spyware, and phishing attacks. But computer security problems have been good for the computer business — consumers replaced some 2.1 million computers because of malware infections.”
(via fergdawg)
ZDNet Asia: The trouble with spam laws →
Bryan Tan bemoans that Singapore’s anti-spam law is insufficiently specific, while a commenter says it’s way more forgiving to businesses than the U.S. CAN-SPAM.
IA Blog: A Recipe for Prize-Winning Email Spam →
“To start, gently fold together the large cup of business ruthlessness and your generous serving of greed. ‘Financial Gain’ brand greed is best in this recipe, though other brands of greed may be used, such as ‘Greed for Power.’”