Captcha Advertising?

Take one of the more hated “prove you are human” to the spam assassins and combine it in an ad to earn a consumer response??  WTF!?  What am I missing here?  This idea is horrible.

Captcha Advertising

Captcha Advertising.

What happens when your twitter account is hacked?

This morning I received an email that my dad had joined twitter. It wasn’t from him, but the usual notification and I assumed it was him based on the username. I followed back and sent a direct over as well. Then nothing … though not that unexpected given my dad was probably trying to figure out what to even do with twitter.

Ronald Greene (rondgreene) on Twitter

I checked back this evening and see that the name and handle have changed though the twitter URL is the same. I checked with my dad and he can no longer login. It appears his account has been hacked … My guess is this will eventually be a spammer account, though who knows. I’m still the only person they are following.

Aseeva Elena (joker_ru) on Twitter

I have no idea how this has happened or what can be done, but am putting it out there in case someone else has any clues.

PayPal Palm Scam

I just received this nasty scam email which makes it look like I am being billed for a new Treo 700P. If you click the link, you get sent to a “looks like” Paypal phishing scam. Be careful and lookout!

There’s no actual history of this in my Paypal purchase history which is good to see – this is a total scam.

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Viagra iPod Spam

I just caught this as I was purging some spam and have to admit it caught my attention as I am sure was the intention.  It’s a total rip on the iPod ad treatment, minus the white headphones… best spam I’ve seen in a while.  A for creativity.  F for Spam.

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Already Read Spam

I am not sure how this technique works, but on a daily basis I get anywhere between 10-15 messages from the same better than Kazaa spammer but the messages come through as though they’ve already been read. It’s an interesting tactic since regardless of how many times I tell my spam filter they are bad, coming in as read seems to be beating the filter. Fortunately, Mail.app keeps them together and I can trash them en-masse without opening or confirming their receipt.

Anyone else get these? Any thoughts on tactics to block them?

Spammers starting the new year off strong!

I’ve received hundreds more comment spam attempts and actually about 200 hundred new spam comments this morning. The new ones are deleted, added to my blacklist and getting blasted. When my mail checks every 5 minutes I get anywhere from 30 to 50 new notifications of deletes. Pretty intense…

I checked the domain of the new guy – a pictures url – and it was registered yesterday, in obvious preparation for today.

UPDATE — I originally posted this at about 20 minutes to 1 p.m. It’s now 4 p.m. and I’ve received 1463 notifications on comment spam attempts. This is out of control! Fortunately, the Spaminator has an option to set the notifications to false which I’ve just done. With that many Spam notices, I can’t possibly utilize my Treo for email as it will simply choke on that number of new messages. At least Mail.app manages them as threads so they are listed as a single message until I open the thread and then… whoa.

Spaminator Strikes ’em down

I’ve received several hundred comment spam attempts here in the past 12 hours and my Spaminator plugin has smacked them all down which rocks. If you use WordPress, I can’t recommend this enough!

Actually they just keep on coming… there have been at least another hundred since I initially deleted the notes in my email. Pretty amazing… mainly Poker BS. So far none have successfully posted to my blog, which is great.

Spam Decline

AOL reports on a considerable spam decline for the year… check out that graph – those are BILLIONS of emails. And it’s just AOL…

Spam Graph

Time Warner Inc. unit America Online said it has seen a big decline in overall junk e-mail volume this year, in a reversal of a five-year escalation in spam aimed at AOL members. AOL said the decline is evidence that its efforts to fight spam are working.

“We used to be the largest target,” said AOL spokesman Nicholas J. Graham. “The target’s becoming a lot smaller,” in the face of aggressive filtering and spammer prosecutions that have made sending junk mail to AOL members less financially rewarding, he said.

In late 2004, AOL blocked half as much spam at the front door of its network as it blocked in the worst point of 2003, when it stopped about 2.4 billion e-mails a day, the company said. And the number of messages diverted to members’ “Spam Folders” fell 60% to 40 million a day in November compared with a year earlier. The drop in spam helped reduce AOL’s overall e-mail load by 22%, AOL said. [WSJ]

AOL Mailblocks

This seems like very good news in the fight against spam and seems to indicate that AOL just has way too much spam flooding their systems internally for them to figure out how to fight. One thing — I hope we all don’t start getting flooded with challenge / response emails.

AOL said it plans to add Mailblocks’ software to its existing antispam tools through a series of upgrades. The company also intends to completely redesign the Web-based e-mail systems offered on both its AOL and its Netscape sites, adopting Mailblocks’ user interface in an effort to make the sites faster and simpler to use. [News.com]

VeriSign service takes on spam

No pricing info yet… it will certainly be interesting to track how this works. Given the knowledge they have from behind the scenes, one would think Verisign has what it takes to identify who is and is not likely to be a spammer…

For blocking malicious mail, the service deploys three antivirus engines. For policy enforcement, customers can use domain-level filtering to scan inbound and outbound e-mail. And a disaster recovery feature allows for automatic switchover to VeriSign’s network to provide SMTP connections that queue e-mail, if a company’s e-mail server is not available.

The company has begun free trials of the service, which will be available on July 12. Pricing details were not announced.

VeriSign said it plans to add more functions, such as verification of sender identity and domain authentication. Domain names of all incoming mail will be checked against the company’s list of verified domains. This list will be made available free to antispam software and service providers. [CNET News.com]

Spam filtering for Symbian OS

An interesting approach if you use the device as a main form of info gathering, but I think you’ll be better off filtering from one central location and getting the benefits on the go… I guess it all depends on much control you have over your server.

Software publisher SymbianWare has announced a new e-mail utility for Symbian OS-based smartphones. SpamKiller is the first spam-filtering program for Symbian OS. It works using a customizable blacklist and content-filters to identify likely spam messages and diverts them from the device’s main inbox. Flagged messages go into a separate log file so that the user can later review them for false positives. Filtered messages also do not trigger an incoming message alarm, so it acts silently in the background without interrupting the user. The log file is cleared after a set period of time to save space. [infoSync]

overwhelmed by comment spam?

Craig over at Gearbits continues to get pummeled by comment spam… Craig have you tried MT-Blacklist? unless you upgrade to MT3 and use Typekey or just turn comments off and go with trackbacks and Technorati, this is going to continue… damn spammers!

I’ve been very successful at blocking spam comments in WordPress, btw. It’s not a problem at all there based on some settings in the prefs…There’s even a blacklist plugin, though I have not found that to be necessary just yet.