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Setbacks and Triumphs The domain registration task became exponentially more challenging on March 4, 2009, with the discovery of Worm:Win32/Conficker.D. Investigators reverse-engineered the new variant and determined that it was programmed to generate
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The Conficker Working Group Is Born In January 2009, representatives from a number of security research companies and domain registrars, along with the anti-botnet Shadowserver Foundation, began discussing how best to implement a defensive Domain Name
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One of my favorite stories in the recent edition of the Microsoft Security and Intelligence Report v7 , pp 29-32, is that of the story of Conficker. I thought I would repost it here because it illustrates the problem of Conficker and the way the industry
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Today, I got a spam in my junk mail folder that nearly fooled me. Below are the headers with some information removed to protect trade secrets: Received: from VA3EHSMHS008.bigfish.com (unknown [10.7.14.235]) by mail29-va3.bigfish.com (Postfix) with
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A few weeks ago, I changed my Comment posting policy to disable anonymous comments. Since I have done that, the amount of comment spam I get has dropped to zero. Before, I used to get tons of it. Unfortunately, there was no facility to disable
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This past weekend, I was watching Return of the King. Even though I think that the first one is my favorite, it is my opinion that the third one is the best one. Anyhow, I was struck by how the characters behave in selfish manners in the movies
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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
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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
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We all know about Microsoft's automatic spell check feature. It's that handy-dandy feature that converts things like teh to the . In other words, it finds common misspellings of words that occur frequently in the English language, usually
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Regular expressions are a tricky thing to pick up. The ability to write them well is a skill that takes a while to develop. We recently hired a bunch of people in, oh, let's say London. They were visiting here for a while learning the system
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Last month, Seattle had a snowstorm that shut the city down for about a week. Don't laugh, all of you mid-westerners, here in Seattle we have hills that go nearly straight up and down so in icy weather you can't drive anywhere. Not only that,
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Spammers throwing in the towel Pill purveyors can't push products anymore Disassociated Press, updated 2 hours ago. Several of the world's most notorious spammers said Thursday that they planned to cut the amount of spam they send because of the current
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Reflecting on the events of today, January 20, 2009, I thought I would take a time out from spam blogging to post this cartoon.
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Well, it's a yearly tradition in the western hemisphere that at the end of the year, we compose a top 10 list of the 10 most <insert description here>. So, I thought that I would create my own list of the top 10 spam stories of 2008.
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(Note to readers: Most parts of this story have been made up for creative license). Continuing on from my previous story, I had taken a trip to China and had gone to the Great Wall where a spammer had confronted me. He was very angry that I had
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