Slowing down... to a stop

Well, less than a year into this particular blog, I am putting this one down for the most part. My schedule is getting increasingly busy and there are a few things in place that look (hopefully) like I will be leaving the IT world and getting back towards more programming/analysis. Therefore I can't afford to give this blog any real attention.

To be fair, in the time that Spamblogging has been here, we have covered pretty much everything that can be covered about spam. There really is only so much that can be said about spam/anti-spam before it just gets so that the same things are repeated all of the time.

I won't shut this down entirely, but I will be posting much less (and had already backed off on it as it was). I have turned off comments for the whole site since I have been getting a ton of comment spam lately and it is too annoying to have to clean out nearly 1K spam comments a day (not to mention the huge amount that get blocked by MT-Blacklist).

If for some reason you need to get in touch with me, my e-mail is on the site in many place.

If you want to still follow a spam blog, there are others out there. They each have their merits and faults as does any blog - so try them all out and hopefully none of them are as bitter and jaded as I have become ;)
Here is a short list that I know of for following the spam news:

1. Google News: spam
   
2. Aunty Spam


3. The Spam Weblog (part of Weblogs Inc)


4. Spamfo

So I guess the nerd closing should be "So long and thanks for all the fish."

Posted by Eric at 10:42 PM | TrackBack

Microsoft suing more spammers

Slashdot tells us that Microsoft is suing more spammers.

This time it is related to not complying with the CAN-SPAM section noting that porn spam has to follow certain guidelines as to how it presents itself.

Posted by Eric at 02:11 AM | TrackBack

More on the anti-spam screensaver

Continuing in the talk of the anti-spam screensaver that Lycos is distributing, Slashdot has more on it.

Essentially they are saying that while the software is supposed to back off and not hit a site hard enough to DDoS it (distributed denial of service), it is still doing that. Some sites are getting knocked out by this.
This is bad because it is:
1) not legal
2) rude
3) against the point of the product, which is to waste bandwidth on the server - and bandwidth can't be wasted if the server is grinding to a halt under the load (yes it does take a lot of bandwidth to reach that state, but it is going to be better in the long term if a lower rate is sustained instead of bursting huge amounts all at once)

For the sake of the other people that use the servers, I hope the spammers have a dedicated system/line and aren't sharing.

Posted by Eric at 01:40 AM | TrackBack

ASCII Spam

Boing Boing has something up about ASCII spam.

The general idea being that if images are going to be filtered out and the Bayesian analysis stuff is getting good at blocking text... then the next step must be ASCII art.

Off the top of my head, I would guess that eventually the Bayesian filtering software would learn to weigh "pre" tags more towards spam, as well as large patches of spaces (which actually are more important than the "pre" tags in this sense, but the pre tag is what allows the spaces to survive on the screen in web browsers).
So while the Boing Boing mentions that it is hard to block - I would bet that the filters that can learn actually do fairly well at blocking them (assuming that they don't compress spaces).

Posted by Eric at 01:32 AM | TrackBack

Spyware is expensive

Slashdot has an post up referring to a series of articles on spyware.

The key points being that 2/3 of user machines are infected with it and the amount of money being spent to deal with it is growing at a non-linear rate.

This is very good news if you are in the business of selling software to stop this stuff. Bad news if you are an end user. And if you make spyware products, it likely doesn't mean anything different for you other than another step in the cat and mouse game that is spam and malware.

On a side note I spent an hour yesterday here at work trying to track down all of the problems with a machine left over by an old user here (the machine had been sitting in a corner turned off but needed to be brought out in an emergency, but it kept crashing for "unknown reasons" relating to winlogon.exe grabbing all virtual memory). It had 6 viruses, 8 spyware programs, and not enough Windows updates.
That is partially my fault for not looking closely enough at that machine, partially the user's fault for ignoring what I told him about avoiding such things, and partially the fault of our multiple software layers that are in place to block/remove that stuff.

Posted by Eric at 11:21 AM | TrackBack

Wired tells us that more spam is on its way

Wired has an article up discussing the various new ways that our phones are going to spam us with more junk.

The article talks about the features of Bluetooth, WiFi, VoIP, etc that make our lives easier, but also open new ways for spammers to take advantage of a path to give us more ads.

None of this is new, but seeing mainstream press like Wired cover it will hopefully increase awareness that this sort of thing should be considered now before it is a real problem (*cough*e-mail*cough*).

Posted by Eric at 10:04 AM | TrackBack

Lycos Anti-Spam Site Hit By Hackers

We had previously mentioned that Lycos has made and is distributing a tool to attack spammer websites. While that is perhaps effective to some degree, it is also fairly anti-social (fighting one rude behavior with another).

So it is not a big surprise now (along with the more pressing monetary side as well) that hackers are now attacking that site.

Spammers are suspected of hacking into and downing Lycos's anti-spam Web site just hours after it went live. The Web site is currently inaccessible and could also be the victim of a DDoS attack.

So yeah, you read that right - the spammers were getting fed up with a near DDoS on their sites... so they did a full out one on the anti-spam site.

Something about this is slightly amusing to me - but there is also something unnerving with it, in that it is potentially a sign of how things are going to escalate each time a new anti-spam tool is released.

Posted by Eric at 11:00 AM | TrackBack