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Terry Zink's Anti-malware Blog

Protecting your mail from the scum of the internet

July 2006 - Posts

Dow Theory and stock spam
One of the things I do in my spare time is trade stocks on the stock market. With all of the stock spam we (ie, customers) receive I wondered if there were any applications to the market and market theory. Something I have learned about in the past two Read More...
I don't want to brag... but I will
This past week we have been getting a flood of image-only spam. These types of messages are difficult to filter, as I have alluded to in another post . Well, just yesterday I put in a spam rule that was designed to block those types of spams. Today, I Read More...
Interesting phobias
I recently stumbled across a list of phobias in a message. Some of these are very interesting, like a lektorophobia , which is the fear of chickens, or c horophobia, the fear of dancing. Some phobias would be really bad to have, like chrometophobia which Read More...
Frequency of spam - distribution by category
On another news website that talks about image-only spam, Craig Sprosts, senior product manager at IronPort says that they are generally seeing the same spam topics. "Drugs remain number one," says Sprosts. "We're seeing an increase in stock spam. Adult Read More...
Examining images - an interesting wrinkle
Recently, in and around the internet, people have been getting hit with an onslaught of image-only spam. These spam messages are almost always stock spam pumping a penny stock, usually traded on the pink sheets (ie, ending in .pk). Lots of our customers Read More...
You have to know your audience
A few weeks ago I was out at a lake (actually, at a camp on a lake) when somebody mentioned "You know what? We should go fishing." I said "Capital idea, old bean!" I then proceeded to get out my laptop and started typing: Dear So-and-So, As part of our Read More...
Cute-sie comments in messages aren't that cute
From a spam analyst's point-of-view, little "cute-sie wootsie" comments in emails are not really all that amusing. What do I mean by "cute-sie wootsie?" I mean things that are not real words but are meant to convey a certain meaning by avoiding all proper Read More...
No such thing as generic Viagra
We've all seen the ads in our spam filters at one time or another, some spammer advertising for generic Viagra, perhaps advertised as “Viakra” or something similar. Having worked with spam for a long time and having dealt with false positives that deal Read More...
The inaugural post
After running a blog for around two and a half months internally, I have decided to make this blog available to the outside world. In the coming weeks I will probably repost some of my other posts from my internal blog onto this one because I thought Read More...
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