I haven't run the numbers yet, but I think this month will be the heaviest ever as far as spam concerned. More than a week ago, Eudora plaintively informed me that it couldn't add any more messages to the mailbox where I keep my personal spam archives, because it had hit the 32,000 message limit. This is the first time I've seen that particular message.
November 2006 Archives
Link-farms and auto-blogs
24 November 2006 - 05:54 PM | PermalinkI get a fair number of messages inviting me to exchange links with other sites. Most of these are fairly obviously automated, and it's clear that no human has even looked at my web pages. "Dear Xyz2300, I visited your website about kittens, and I think you should really add a link to our website about floor wax." Uh, sure you did.
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Diminishing returns?
21 November 2006 - 08:10 PM | PermalinkAn encouraging article about stock spam at the Register suggests that stock spam may not be working as well as it once did. According to their study, a number of recently-touted stocks have failed to perform after being pumped. Some have even lost money. It looks as if the spammers may finally be running out of naive investors willing to bet cash on an anonymous tip. Alternatively, the sheer volume of spam and the elaborate measures the spammers use to try to evade spam filters (rendering the messages nearly unreadable) may be working against them.
It's premature to declare the end of stock spam. Spammer logic dictates that if you fail to make a profit, it can only be because you didn't send enough spam. In the short term, volumes may rise even more. There is, however, some small satisfaction in the thought that some stock spammers may be getting left holding worthless paper and that the Johnny-come-latelies in the stock spam game may have spoiled it for the established players.
Once more, with ASCII
17 November 2006 - 11:18 AM | PermalinkThose ever-inventive stock spammers have come up with a new twist. Animated GIFs, crazy-quilt backgrounds and letters jogged up or down half a line to make things hard for OCR readers are so last week. The new trend? ASCII art.
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It's the new 419
16 November 2006 - 09:08 PM | Permalink'Fake check' scams seem to have taken off in a big way recently, and I see more and more new players in the game each day. They're also ramping up the volume. One scammer — identifiable by addresses at yahoo.co.uk that are all of the form <somename>.eauction, e.g. Geoffrey.eauction, Humberto.eauction etc — has sent me forty messages in the past week, including multiple messages to the same address. Another, calling himself either Euroimperial or Flowerland International, has sent thirty in the last fortnight.
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not.so.del.icio.us
09 November 2006 - 02:08 PM | PermalinkI'd like to propose a general rule:
If you have anything useful on the Internet, sooner or later spammers will try to ruin it.
Today's example? del.icio.us.
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Well, there's a surprise
07 November 2006 - 05:07 PM | PermalinkAccording to security vendor MX Logic, around 75% of email is now spam. Of this, apparently only around 0.27% — about one message in three hundred and seventy — complies with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Color me unsurprised.
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Bad ideas in spam #1
01 November 2006 - 09:08 AM | PermalinkThe current contender for dumbest spammer trick of the year is a message that I just received marked Warning - TSUNAMI, which continues:
Warning - TSUNAMI BULLETIN NUMBER 002 PACIFIC TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER/NOAA/NWS
ISSUED AT 2312Z 30 OCT 2006
THIS BULLETIN IS FOR ALL AREAS OF THE PACIFIC BASIN ...
and finishes with ALL DETAILS HERE followed by a link to an Australian website that sounds as if it could have something to do with tsunami warnings, but is actually a supplier of 'quality solid timber doors'.
I haven't named the site here, because I'm actually having difficulty believing that any business could be so stupid. I keep telling myself that this has to be a joe-job. But if it isn't, if the door company actually thought it would be a cute idea to try to sucker people into visiting their site by sending a fake tsunami warning, then perhaps a few thousand Thais, Indians and Indonesians need to stop by their place of business and explain in simple, easily understandable language why this kind of thing is NOT COOL.