So you’ve got an unmanned flying drone with deadly weapons, controlled by ground stations that could be hundreds or thousands of miles away. Of course you run it with the most popular and least secure operating system on the planet! I mean, what could possibly go wrong? I’ve said it before, in all-caps and bold [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Spam and Malware category.
“Man convicted of murder gets retrial after virus eats transcripts”
Twenty years ago, headlines like this one wouldn’t have even been imaginable.
Spambots Revisited
Back at the beginning of April, I killed about a thousand spambot accounts on this blog and added some new defenses against them. Those defenses helped quite a bit; I was still getting about ten attempts a week, but any spambot that gave an invalid e-mail address got blocked, as was any that gave a [...]
“Think you can outsmart Internet scammers?”
These are pretty good, and if you can catch them all, you’re probably pretty safe on the ‘net. For now, anyway. I was surprised to note that they didn’t include any URLs with look-alike Unicode characters though. That’s practically impossible for end-users to detect, so they’d probably get howls of protest if they did, but [...]
“Microsoft researchers build spam filter for HIV”
Speaking of unpredictable consequences, here’s another one: techniques developed to combat spam turn out to be useful against HIV. I always thought that spammers had a lot in common with viruses, in that both are annoying and potentially dangerous, but I didn’t expect the metaphor to stretch that far!
“As the Internet evolves, is there a place for spam?”
Apparently not: In the late 1990s Robert Soloway made $20,000 a day as a spammer. He drove fancy cars. He wore Armani clothes. He was, by all accounts, one of the most successful spammers on the planet. But if he were starting out today, he’d find some other line of work. In 2011, spamming just [...]
Scammers, Part III
This is getting ridiculous… in the last three days I’ve gotten two more of those computer scam calls. One woman, one man. Both with strong India accents, but both far more understandable than the first two. Far more annoying too. The novelty has worn off, people, go screw with someone else. For the first one [...]
Public E-Mail Addresses vs. Spammers
This post is old, but touches on a topic that’s near and dear to my heart — methods of stopping spammers from overwhelming a publicly-available e-mail address. It argues that posting an address in a somewhat-obfuscated form (like “myname AT spamtrap DOT com”) actually helps spammers, because it’s much easier to search for using Google [...]