Browse by Tags
All Tags »
Miscellaneous (RSS)
You may have noticed that my rate of posting has declined this year, and this month in particular. That’s because over the past year, my work priorities have expanded (well, maybe shifted is a better term) to include a lot of things that don’t necessarily
Read More...
In two months, on September 23-25, 2009, Virus Bulletin is having its annual conference. This year, it will be held at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Geneva, Switzerland. What is so special about this year's conference? Well, I am going to be one
Read More...
I don't use very many Instant Messaging pieces of software anymore. In my time, I have used Yahoo messenger, ICQ, Live Messenger (MSN), AIM (AOL), Gaim, Office Communicator (Microsoft corporate) and Google Talk. I used to really like Yahoo messenger
Read More...
You know, it's bad enough that these fracking Twitter spammers are polluting my Twitter following count (inflating it from zero to three). I went and checked out the page that they redirect to and when I type into the address bar to navigate away
Read More...
A couple of weeks ago, the Financial Times ran an article entitled "Secret War on Web Crooks Revealed." Here's an excerpt: The people who run the world's internet systems are a rather secretive bunch. Three times a year, senior technical
Read More...
With the explosion in popularity of Twitter (of which I am not a twitterer or even a subscriber), I've wondered to myself whether there is such a thing as twitter spam. Now, spam in the email sense is when spammers flood your inbox with unwanted email.
Read More...
In a story by PC World, spam kingpin Alan Ralsky has plead guilty to a stock fraud case where he pumped up Chinese penny stocks: Ralsky and four other individuals pleaded guilty on Monday, joining three others who had pleaded guilty earlier, the U.S.
Read More...
I was reading in today's issue of the Financial Times that Gartner reported that 5m (million?) US consumers lost money due to phishing attacks in the 12 months up to September 2008, up 40% from the previous year. The percentage of funds retrieved
Read More...
Over the past few weeks, there have been a number of instances where some of our outbound customers have been compromised and started sending out spam. An abnormal amount of them have occurred on weekends, the times when myself and another spam analyst
Read More...
It's been over a week since McColo's operations had its plug pulled, and our spam volumes are still way down (I still haven't figured out a way to take credit for that). On average, it is down by around 40-50%. The last couple of days have
Read More...
A few months ago, Yahoo rebuffed Microsoft's attempt to purchase it. Now, this morning, I come across the following story : Now that quasi-white knight Google is out of the picture , Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang has some advice for
Read More...
In an ideal world, all you would really need in order to do spam filtering is one filter - this filter would be able to do everything. It would catch spam, keep the obvious stuff out of the network and let all of the good mail through. In the real
Read More...
We're at the state now where the problem of spam has grown to the point that it threatens to ruin the Internet. Spammers and their botnets spew out piles of mail, infect computers worldwide, sign up for free web accounts, create landing pages in
Read More...
One of the ideas that floats around in my head from time to time is that of automation vs human analysis - which works better to fight spam? In an ideal world, machines would be able to generate spam rules to fight spam and humans would be taken
Read More...
Spamwars reports that the SANS Internet Storm Center have reported a number of domain names containing the word "gustav" are being registered. In case you are unaware, Hurricane Gustav is the latest hurricane that threatens to pummel the
Read More...
