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Terry Zink's Anti-malware Blog

Protecting your mail from the scum of the internet

March 2009 - Posts

Whither, Conficker
As has been posted on others sites, tonight at midnight, UTC, the Conficker computer virus is due to start executing.  What is Conficker?  It's a computer virus.  Here's what Wikipedia has to say: Conficker, also known as Downup, Downadup Read More...
What time of the day is worst for spam complaints?
Following on from my other post for which day of the week is worst for spam, I decided to look into what hours of the day are worst for spam? Now, keep in mind that this is not our inbound spam, it is our outbound spam.  I monitor the size of the Read More...
An entertaining video
Sometimes, over the course of mail processing, I stumble across an entertaining video.  Usually, these are on Youtube. I think that the following one is one of the better videos I have come across.  Enjoy! Read More...
When do spam outbreaks occur?
Since August, I have been monitoring some of our feedback loops.  We participate in a number of feedback loop programs, including Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL.  If you don't know what a feedback loop is in regards to the context in which I am using Read More...
Oops. Wish I could take that email back
I came across the Gmail blog the other day and they were announcing a handy little feature that lets you take back email messages before they are actually delivered to the Internet.  For example, let's say you were sending a friend a message: Hey, Read More...
Ironport's list of Top spam sources
Ironport has a list , updated daily, of the top spam sources from around the world.  I meandered on over today to take a look and one thing jumped out at me which I have highlighted below. If you can't read that, it is IP address 66.207.164.167.  Read More...
スパムフィルターと外国のスパム、第5部 - Japanese
Japanese is a complex language.  It's so complex that I thought I'd dedicate an entire post to do a very brief overview of it.  If you speak Japanese and something I say is incorrect, it's because I don't speak the language.  You may correct Read More...
Spam étranger et les spam filtres, partie 4 - Single byte character sets
In my last post, I spoke about the problem of character encoding.  The ASCII character set works fine in North America (excluding Quebec, Mexico and Miami) but as soon as you leave the continent, you start running into all sorts of weird characters Read More...
Spam filters and foreign spam, part 3 - ASCII
If everyone spoke English, and spammers only sent spam from bots, spam filtering would have a relatively simple task (relatively speaking, of course). But, that simply isn't reality. The biggest shift in spamming over the past 18 months or so is the use Read More...
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