All of us hate spam, right? Not exactly. A new poll by security firm Marshall has found that a surprising 29% of all web users have purchased something advertised in a spam message. The most commonly purchased items, perhaps not quite as surprising, are sexual enhancement pills, adult toys and software, along with knock offs of brand name fashions and jewelry. A similar poll conducted 4 years ago found that 20% of web users had purchased items from spam, so unfortunately for us, spam appears to be increasingly effective. Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who’s been around the net for a while is probably quite familiar with ASCII. Before color monitors and high end graphics, ASCII was the cool way to embellish emails, newsgroup posts, the opening pages of BBS’s and network login screens. It was simple enough: “#” represented dark pixels and “*” represented light ones. Whole fonts were made from collections of characters. It was fun and very creative. Read the rest of this entry »

Whether it’s high profile publicity stunts or really making a statement, spammers are on notice from social networks. The “terms of use” agreement every person has to electronically sign, before becoming a member of MySpace or Facebook, is being used against spammers in court. Read the rest of this entry »

Federal authorities in New Orleans have indicted a Brazilian man on charges he was planning to sell a botnet he created to a Dutch spammer. Prosecutors say 35 year old Leni de Abreu Neto created a botnet of over 100,000 compromised computers and was in negotiations to sell it to Nordin Nasari of The Netherlands, a spammer who wrote the virus Neto used to take control of the computers in his botnet. Nasari agreed to purchase the entire operation for $36,800. While Nasari s being prosecuted by Dutch authorities, Neto faces charges here in the U.S. and is facing up to 5 years in prison and a fine of up to a half million dollars. Read the rest of this entry »

Spammers have been exploiting the headlines for quite awhile now, so it’s not too surprising that a new wave of spam exploiting the Russia/Georgia conflict have hit inboxes across the net. The messages contain headlines from a fake BBC story claiming Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili is embroiled in a gay sex scandal, and invites the recipient to click on a link to read more. If clicked what it actually does is lead to a malicious site that downloads malware onto the victim’s computer and adds it to a brand new and very pro-Russian botnet. Researchers at the University of Alabama, Birmingham traced the malicious spam back to 44 computers, all which have no previous spam record, and several are located in Russia. It’s not yet known if the domains are truly malcious or have simply been hijacked by the hackers behind the attack. Read the rest of this entry »

The California legislature has passed a tough new anti-spam bill. The bill gives law enforcement and consumers new ways to fight back against spammers. If signed into law, district attorneys would be able to prosecute spammers, consumers could sue them in the county the spam was received in, and using a spoofed or stolen email address to send spam would become illegal. Read the rest of this entry »

As every experienced network administrator knows, standardization lowers the total cost of ownership. Creating standards lowers helpdesk support calls and facilitates easier maintenance. Companies establish standards for everyone using the same software and hardware. Server hardware configurations are standard for every new application implementation. Each server uses the same hard drive configuration, same memory chips and all software service packs are all the same version. So issues encountered with any server around the world can be easily resolved. Read the rest of this entry »

The other day I receive a frantic call from a client.  I’ve received this call hundreds of times.  All staff is being bombarded with spam from each other.  The client goes on to explain “staff is not sending these spam emails to each other”.  Now he wants to know how all this spam is getting through the spam filter.  While he was talking to me, I surf over to the company web site.  On the “Contact Us” web page 50 to 60 staff names are listed with their email address.  Now I explain to the client that spammers added to their mailing list by peeling off all email addresses listed on the web site.  Additionally, the spammers added valid staff email addresses to the “From” field of each spam email.  So the spam filter allowed the emails to go through. Read the rest of this entry »

Spammers have long been using lurid headlines based on current events to trick people into opening their messages and clicking on the links they contain. Their latest trick exploits the alert features of both CNN and MSNBC. Users are receiving mail that looks like a breaking news alert from one of the popular news sites. The headlines range from shocking (“Elizabeth Taylor Found Murdered” to amusing “Europeans Dislike Americans’ Attitudes”). While most are fake, some are real,(“NFL Greats Inducted Into the Hall of Fame”) which makes the emails seem legit. Read the rest of this entry »

Apple’s popular MobileMe service, which offers Mac and iPhone users webhosting, a personal email address, file sharing, and online data synchronization between their devices, has been hit with a phishing scam. Users received an email that looked like it came from Apple with the following message:

         “We were unable to process your most recent payment. Did you recently change your bank, phone number or credit card?”

The email then prompts the user to click on a link to update their info. The link is actually fake, and leads to a site owned by a Gmail user in Romania. The site steals the personal information of anyone who falls for the ruse and enters it into the phony Apple page.

This is the second time this year that phishers have targeted Apple. In May a similar email was sent to users of the immensely popular iTunes service. Security experts believe that phishers are aiming these attacks at Apple services to take advantage of Apple’s reputation of being more secure than Windows. They are banking on Apple users thinking such attacks could never happen to them and as a result not being wary of such emails. It appears that Apple users are not getting a rather rude wake up call. To scammers, no OS is off limits.