Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

Terry Zink's Anti-malware Blog

Protecting your mail from the scum of the internet

May 2009 - Posts

New White House Cybercop Will Help, But Maybe Not That Much, Experts Say
General News at Investors Business Daily BY DONNA HOWELL INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted 5/29/2009 Our defenses are lacking and first-strike capability too, on a front once mainly depicted in science fiction. "Cyberspace is real. And so are the Read More...
If spammers continue to solve CAPTCHAs, we could all die
Email was created by Man. Spammers Evolved. And Rebelled. They clog and pollute the Internet. Some have convinced themselves they are legitimate. There are many spammers. And they have a plan. I've been working my way over the past few months through Read More...
Options for dealing with unwanted mail
Way back when I was dealing with spam, I used to through the abuse submission inbox and look for submissions that were good quality.  The best were the ones that contained full headers; generally speaking, messages with the spam attached were good Read More...
Ironies
I'm currently working on a research paper on how to alleviate outbound spam.  As I was going through it in my head today, I started thinking about how difficult it can be to separate out real spam from false positives, that is, mail marked as spam Read More...
The choice of email platform
I work for Microsoft.  That means I deal with a lot of Microsoft technology.  I know how to use some of the more esoteric features of our software, like Pivot Tables in Excel (which are fantastic), how to create custom blocks in Visio, and how Read More...
Adobe getting security religion
If you're like me, you've probably noticed that you've had to update your copies of Abode \w+ very frequently over the past year.  I know that whenever I get a popup saying "A newer version with security updates is available.  Would you Read More...
Interesting anti-spam cartoon on Youtube
Here's a cartoon I stumbled across on Youtube that talks about connection filtering and its difference from content filtering.  Enjoy. Read More...
A little more on virus researchers
As I was saying in my previous post, I thought I'd examine a little bit between the differences and similarities between spam researchers and virus researchers. The two classes share some similarities.  Both are involved in stopping Internet abuse Read More...
How virus researchers work
I haven't had the chance to work on virus analysis.  Spam analysis has a lot of heuristic tricks of the trade because language is so fluid.  While 90% of spam can be caught with IP reputation and another 5% with URL reputation, there's some Read More...
File scanning - whose responsibility is it?
The other day, we saw some spam that was a double-whammy of reputation hijacking.  First of all, we saw spam coming in from one of the four big web mail providers (Google).  Second, the payload was from a file-service-in-the-cloud with a link Read More...
Where's waledac... part 2
Originally posted on the Microsoft Malware Protection Center blog. The Spam Data The MMPC and the Forefront Online Service for Exchange (FOSE) conducted some research on Waledac related spam. In this study we included the following subset of Waledac owned Read More...
Where's waldo... I mean waledac?
This post was originally posted on the Microsoft Malware Protection Center blog. The Spambot Whilst Win32/Waledac is probably best known for the ability to send spam, it can also download and execute arbitrary files. In addition to using this downloading Read More...
Page view tracker