This post is a bit of a rant. On this particular blog, all of my commenters are quite intelligent.  You all provide good content and I try my best to respond to most of the comments.  The times I don't is because the connection screws up and...

The second major disadvantage of multiple antispam strategies is the overall cost of maintaining multiple filtering strategies. We have a spam team of less than 10 people. I'd wager to say that most antispam organizations have a similarly sized team....

Spammers use a variety of tactics in order to push their payload through to the end user.  In return, anti-spam companies have a variety of tools in their arsenal in order to combat spammers.  At one point, we, in the industry, need to ask ourselves...

One of the annoying things about Facebook is that whenever I want to install an application, or respond to a friend's application, I have to install it, check 5 different checkboxes and then ask if I want to send the notification to all my friends. ...

A reader sent me a link to a list of points that make Gmail really great.  I'm not sure whether or not these points are enough to convince me that Gmail is fantastic, but I admit that it does do some things well (Hotmail does a few things well, also...

Over the past couple of weeks, I have seen a particular spam pattern hitting my Yahoo inbox. Krissy@alleninfo013.info Elodia@dataex621.info In other words, it follows the regular expression: [A-Z][a-z]+\@[a-z]+\d{3}\.info For those of you who can't read...

JD Falk of Box of Meat has a post that describes a problem Yahoo had with one of its new email security features. The article states that the problem arose when Yahoo decided to stop any emails going through the servers, which it runs for its partner...

A few months ago there was a research presentation presented on computer security.  It touched upon botnets and the presenter gave some data.  Below are some summary results based on a 9-day down-sampled spam trace from Hotmail. There were 294...

Accused spammer Sanford Wallace has been sued... again.  And he has had a major judgment made against him... again.  This time, it's to the tune of $230 million. From the Associated Press: NEW YORK (AP) - A notorious "Spam King" and...

About 15 months ago I started work on a project that measures our spam effectiveness.  Just last week the first part of it finally went live, end-to-end.  It was a long time coming but we finally got it done.  If you're wondering what took...

Several of the characteristics of botnets are not only significant in and of themselves, but are emblematic of some of the unique challenges that cyberwarfare as a whole presents. This is part of a series run by Stratfor with some additional commentary...

In my previous post , which is taken from a series that Stratfor has run recently, we looked at some of the motivations of hackers. Let's take a look at some more. Altruism The tenets of altruism vary greatly, depending on the person subscribing to it...

Why do hackers do what they do?  Are they motivated by something?  Altruism?  Greed?  Strafor examined this in one of their recent articles, parts of which I have below with some additional comments from me. The personal motivations...

There are more than just blue, black and white hat hackers. There are a few more types of folks out there that don't fit into the above categories. This article is taken from Stratfor with some commentary by myself. Coders Many of the hackers described...