Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

Terry Zink's Anti-malware Blog

Protecting your mail from the scum of the internet

May 2007 - Posts

One of the world's worst (alleged) spammers arrested
Forbes has an article on (alleged) spammer Robert Soloway, described as one of the top 10 spammers in the world. Other blogs including Ed Falk and Spamnation are also reporting on the story. I don't have much new to add other than my response to a couple Read More...
What happens on Facebook stays on Facebook
I have read some blog posts by other writers about the "questionable" email practises of tagged.com (wherein they login to your email address book and spams everyone in it, encouraging them to sign up for their own page). I agree with the other writers' Read More...
Hotmail seeing a slowdown in traffic also
I have noted that in the past 5 months, the total amount of mail that we are seeing in the Exchange Hosted Services network is decreasing slowly but steadily. I wasn't sure if this was a common trend (since the antispam articles I read all say spam is Read More...
If you give stuff away for free, people will abuse it
In what is starting to sound like a broken record, one of my favorite companies, Google, is being abused by spammers - again. First we found spam blogs in Blogspot, then we found spam coming from Gmail users, and now I have found a third abuse - spammers Read More...
IETF approves DomainKeys as an official standard
The Internet Engineering Task Force, after years of wading through the process, has finally approved DomainKeys as an official standard. DomainKeys is essentially a sender authentication mechanism. It enables domains to insert an encrypted signature into Read More...
If spam increases one week, what happens the following week?
We sometimes hear on various forums that spam is always on the increase and that email servers are getting blasted with it. I decided to investigate the relationship between spam volume one week to the next. Specifically, I decided to determine what the Read More...
A new Human-Interactive-Proof from Microsoft Research
I came across an interesting page from Microsoft Research. In it, they talk about a new technique for a human interactive proof. To save you the trouble of looking this up if you don't know, a human interactive proof is a task that humans need to perform Read More...
Chinks in Gmail's armour are still there
A couple of weeks ago I noted that some spammers were sending spam through Gmail. Well, I noticed it again. Whereas in those messages from two weeks ago they were stock spam, this latest batch is enlargement pill spam that contains an image, a link and Read More...
OCR and image spam
John Graham-Cumming writes on his blog today that perhaps OCRing image spam is having some effect. Why else would spammers start to obfuscate the text in their spam (ie, V1@GR@ vs VIAGRA)? He has a point. Logically, one would think that as soon as spammers Read More...
Sender ID is pretty effective, but on the other hand, so am I
I read the following article that Microsoft's Sender ID hits new milestone for stopping spam . In the article, Microsoft has announced that their Sender ID spam filtering technology has blocked over 3.8 billion spam messages. It goes on to say that Microsoft Read More...
Direct marketing and spam techniques
I was reading the following article entitled "Classic DM Tactics are Spam for Filters." It's by an account planner for a marketing company. In it, the author goes through the rationale of why spam filters will flag messages as spam - it's because the Read More...
Safety first! Right?
I've been checking around some other anti-spam solutions and one of the selling points that they mention is that they do end-user whitelisting. This is supposedly a selling point of the product - that the users can do individual whitelisting. It's not Read More...
Virus outbreak: April 30 - May 2
Just a note to all my readers out there, in the past three days (April 30 - May 2) we are seeing a virus outbreak on our networks. The average daily number of viruses caught in the past three days is twenty times the daily average for the past year. Make Read More...
EU Spam Symposium: Vienna
The European Spam Symposium is coming up this year in three weeks on the 24th and 25th of May, being held in Vienna, Austria. It looks like an interesting event, a place where anti-spammers can get together and discuss strategies of fighting spam. In Read More...
Becoming the best: Measure everything
I was reading some of my other trading blogs and I came across a post over at TraderDNA that describes some of the metrics that professional traders use to improve their performance and gauge their success. In my own trading portfolio, I have a few metrics Read More...
Page view tracker