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Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Discussing Internet security in (mostly) plain English
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Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
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Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Speak of the devil...
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
2
Comments
The other day, I wrote a blog post about the possibility of instant message spam filtering. I wondered whether or not there was even a need for instant message spam filtering. Well, just yesterday, I logged into Yahoo Messenger and I got spammed on...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Golden Crosses Not So Golden
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
1
Comments
On Friday, Microsoft stock had a golden cross. A golden cross is when a stock's 50-day moving average crosses its 200-day moving average from below. This is usually interpreted as a positive sign for the stock. Conversely, a death cross is when a stock...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Instant message filtering?
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
128
Comments
This is an idea that I have been thinking about for a while and that is the concept of instant message filtering. I don't get too much spam on my instant messenger (I use or have used ICQ, Yahoo IM, Windows/MSN/Live Messenger, AIM, gaim, and Office...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Don't answer the door... we know it's our neighbors
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
1
Comments
A couple of years ago, I can remember Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates saying that the problem of spam would be solved by using a reputation-based anti-spam system. Mail would be allowed on the basis of the reputation of the sender. This would work extremely...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
And I thought we had problems
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
0
Comments
We here in Exchange Hosted Services get a lot of traffic over our networks, but it's nothing compared to what they see over in Hotmail. I was talking to some of the guys who do some Hotmail spam filtering and the problems they have are things that we...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Lousy blogging in the past week
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
0
Comments
I've been away on business the past week which is why my blogging has been sparse as of late. I hope to get back to it more consistently in the next week.
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Parking a car
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
1
Comments
Recently, I stumbled across an email with a flash animation that challenges people at parking a car. It's a computer game and it is kind of fun. I could get to level 4 before I had to move on and get back to work.
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Spam pays, but sometimes we catch up to you
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
1
Comments
This story reminds me of 2005 when Microsoft settled a case against Scott Richter, of opt-in real big, for several million dollars. Spamming may pay well, but if Microsoft ever brings you to court you had pretty much be prepared to give up all of your...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Can trading concepts be used in spam fighting?
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
1
Comments
Ever since I started learning how to trade stocks nearly two years, I am amazed at how many applications trading has to real life. Of course, when something doesn't quite fit I simply make my concepts looser until they do fit, but you get the point. ...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Looks like Yahoo has changed their footer
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
0
Comments
Readers of my blog will know that I frequently complain about Yahoo's spam filtering service, Yahoo SpamGuard. They claim to have the best spam filtering around, it was in their email footers. Well, I don't see it in their email footers anymore. I...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Spam has no political affiliation
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
0
Comments
Now that election season is starting to heat up (in the United States) I am starting to notice a lot of submissions coming from people that are political in nature. These are usually fundraising letters or "rally-the-troops" emails from the Democratic...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
I'm hearing rumours...
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
0
Comments
Lately, it has come to my attention that we seem to be seeing a new kind of spam that contains only subject lines and empty body text, or limited body text. These types of spams are tricky in nature because we don't yet know what the deal is. Why would...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Do people talk this way in real life?
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
1
Comments
One of the things that amuses me (amuse being a relative term, when you analyse spam the bizarre can be amusing) is the way 419ers speak. At least, it used to amuse me. In the spam world, 419 is a short-hand way of classifying a particular category...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Back to school, but not for me
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
1
Comments
It's now September and it's the time of year when students return to school. I remember when I was in school and later on in university, I didn't particularly look forward to September (with the exception of the year before my last year of university...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Spam volume by weekday
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
4
Comments
I have recently been reading about the performance of the stock market on various days of the week. I recently learned that Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are negligible in terms of extraordinary performance but that both Mondays and Fridays are very...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Maintaining my lead is tricky business
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
0
Comments
About a month or go or so, I was mentioning how I created a search pattern for spam that hit 9 million times in one day. I was quite proud of that and I figured that was the record for spam pattern matching (it was quite specific). Since then, I have...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
It turns out that stock spam works
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
1
Comments
I just did a search for the topic of stock spam and it turns out that there is a noticeable effect of stock spam and the price of the stock. You can find an article here or another one here . The results, however, are just what I expect - investors...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Theorem 5 - The precision of anti-spam pattern matching techniques are inversely proportional to their risk
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
0
Comments
We have seen how spam and legitimate messages can share common characteristics, and that in order to increase a spam filter's effectiveness it needs to be able to detect the boundaries in the overlap. The last theorem only marginally is related to...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Theorem 4 - Improvement in spam filtering effectiveness is achieved by improving detection of the granularily of the "overlap" area in the Spam Curve
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
1
Comments
Recall from previous discussions that some spam and non-spam messages can closely resemble each other. While most spam filters can easily detect the email that is obviously spam, many of them have trouble detecting the difference between spam and non...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Theorem 3 - spam filters are not 100% effective at catching spam because some spam can contain legitimate content
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
0
Comments
Theorem 3 is a corollary to Theorem 2 , the two basically go together. One of the things that spam filters must do is catch as much spam as possible. This would be fairly easy if it weren't for the fact that a great deal of spam contains content that...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Theorem 2 - Spam filters are not 100% effective at avoiding false positives because legitimate email messages can contain spammy content
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
1
Comments
In the world of spam filtering, a false positive is a message that is flagged as spam when it should not have been. Sometimes these are newsletters, sometimes these are personal messages and other times these are business-related messages. The reason...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
The more things change, the more they stay the same
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
1
Comments
The other day I was browsing through my personal email (a free service that claims to have the best spam-filtering around - which they do not) and I noticed that I had a lot of image-only spam. This spam looked virtually identical to the spam that I know...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Theorem 1 - It is impossible for a message to be both extremely clean and extremely dirty at the same time
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
4
Comments
According to the Spam Curve , the bulk concentration of messages are the ones that contain a lot of spammy content (extremely dirty) or they contain plenty of legitimate content (extremely clean). We all know what dirty messages look like, they contain...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Microsoft shares look bullish to me
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
2
Comments
As all Microsoft employees know, in April Microsoft shares gapped down 10% in one day. The preceded to sell of another few dollars and it caught me off-guard -- how does a large-cap like Microsoft experience so much volatility? This past Friday (August...
Terry Zink's Cyber Security Blog
Spammers using Outlook? That's a switch
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
tzink
0
Comments
I got some spam in my personal email account the other day so I took a look at the source to see if we are blocking the same type of mail when we encounter it (ie, is the mail actually the same or is this a new variation). I was surprised to see that...
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