On the twelfth of October, I received a very odd phone call. When I picked up, an obviously robotic voice said: ATTENTION: BECAUSE YOU ARE A PREFERRED WESTJET CUSTOMER YOU WILL RECEIVE A SPECIAL GIFT. TO ACCEPT PRESS ONE. Um… in the first place, I’m not a preferred WestJet customer. So far as I can …
From: Buy Viagra? In USA Subject: Info for headgeek: 70% lowered prices today This link will lead you our shop © 2008-2010 many first killing exist. All rights reserved. Wow. I think I’m going to start a company named “many first killing exist, inc.” I think it’s safe to assume that it’s not taken in …
Geek Drivel is suddenly ridiculously popular with would-be blog spammers. I’m told that my primary defenses have blocked more than 400 automated spam messages in the last week, and maybe a dozen have gotten past them — all caught by my secondary defenses, I’m happy to say. I’m not sure what prompted this sudden surge …
Spam messages are rarely amusing enough for me to post anymore, but this one takes the cake: Subject: Hegihten the qulaity of your ereictons with Soft (ialis. Biggest_bIowout_sale of \/aIium in our onIine pharmacy Sorry guys, but SpamBayes wasn’t fooled. You’ll have to do better than misspelled words and ASCII art to get past it.
And the game of cat and mouse continues, with the good guys looking decidedly mouse-like at the moment. I’m sure this is good for us, on the whole. It forces us to continue improving the state of the programming art, in much the same way that disease forces us to continue improving the medical arts. …
Continue reading ‘“Ruggedised botnets pushing out even more spam”’ »
The last paragraph is particularly heartening: FireEye researchers said the key to dismantling the giant ring was a coordinated effort that worked in multiple directions all at once so that bot herders didn’t have a chance to counteract. “As it turns out, no matter how many fallback mechanisms are in place, if they aren’t all …
Continue reading ‘“Security firm chokes sprawling spam botnet”’ »
Complete text of a spam I recently received: Get an omnipotent porksword! Omnipotent porksword?! Running out of synonyms, guys? 😀
Spam purveyors are apparently having a very tough time getting past Bayesian filters. Check out this one: Subject: If you had a gold fish, you would ask for a bigger instrument. Would you like to have as many women so you could forget their names? All that would be possible if you added some extra …
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 …
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.)