E-mail spam (including Trojan and virus messages), instant-message spam (“spim”), blog-comment spam, postal “bulk business mail,” and any other kind of unwanted, underhanded, and/or intrusive advertising. Also covers viruses, worms, and other malware.
I had an interesting e-mail discussion with Ploni Almoni the other day, about how I should set up my new MacBook‘s security. He suggested installing a separate firewall program, despite the fact that OS X already includes a built-in “application firewall.” After some web research, I told him that it looked like the built-in firewall …
Computer security people have seen this coming for years. Signature-based detection of specific malware variants is less and less effective all the time; there’s no way antivirus programs can keep up anymore, and they’re just going to get further behind. Not to mention the ongoing problems with false positives. (I don’t even bother running an …
Continue reading ‘“Virus arms race primes malware numbers surge”’ »
SpamBayes marked this one “unsure” (only 87% probability of being spam) so I looked at it to make certain. Then I decided to give my tongue-in-cheek “answer” to it here: To: (someone else’s e-mail address at my ISP) From: jeanette (random nonsense e-mail address) Subject: hi from jeanette I would never have guessed. Hi It`s …
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Interesting idea. I can see how this would be a lot harder for hackers to work around, at least for the moment. But it won’t do anything against spambots that use other people to get around the problem, directly or by trickery.
All that fear and hype, and it turns out to be nothing more than a spam-generator and password stealer? The author(s) really ought to be ashamed of themselves. An amusing bit from the end of the article: I’m personally grateful that it brought to mind a moment from the original Die Hard film. “You want …
Continue reading ‘“Conficker Doomsday Worm Sells Out For $49.95”’ »
We always knew it was inevitable, but the break from it was nice while it lasted. (No, this is not an April Fool’s joke, much as I wish it were.)
Oh great… a penis-lengthening system that might actually work?! The spam level is going to go through the roof now. 🙁
I find it curious that, ever since I installed the Yawasp module on this blog, my weekly hits are down 50%. Apparently spambots were responsible for fully half of Geek Drivel’s traffic. No great loss.
You can’t help but admire the imagination of these malware writers. I doubt the approach will catch on though, it doesn’t scale and makes it a lot easier to pinpoint the culprit.