I got a few emails in the past 24 hours that need to be addressed. I’ve seen both of these issues before, but never has it become so common that I see two almost back to back.
Character Encoding
VideoSurf sent me an invitation to check out their product. Unfortunately I’m a somewhat busy person [...]
Archive for the ‘Spam’ Category
Poor Website Email Practices
Google Mail Fail
Found an interesting header when doing some tests with mail filtering:
Received: from qb-out-1314.google.com ([172.21.30.5])
by mx.google.com with ESMTP id k29si2692710qba.7.2008.09.06.14.48.05;
Sat, 06 Sep 2008 14:48:06 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: softfail (google.com: domain of transitioning user@example.com does not designate 172.21.30.5 as permitted sender) client-ip=172.21.30.5;
Authentication-Results: [...]
Google Used For Spam
This happened a few weeks ago. I kept it quiet and reported it. Hasn’t happened again, and I haven’t heard anything, so I presume it’s fixed.
It appears spammers have learned to hijack Google Alerts for spamming purposes. By setting up an alert with a spam text, the email is sent through [...]
Spam Havens Follow Up
Ok, so 1 business day after I found a few spammed sites:
Apple has removed the page, no comment.
Riverside, CA acknowledged and said they are in the process of resolving. I’ll keep an eye out to see how long it takes.
AOL has removed the page, no comment.
So there you have it, 3 reports, 2 of [...]
Spam Havens?
I’ve recently seen an increase in spam around here slipping through the filter. In an attempt to keep this site clean, I keep a close eye on comments. Typically checking several times a day, and removing url’s that are pure spam, or just inappropriate. But over the past several days things have [...]
Google Badware Notification
Google has started providing notification before it lets you visit a search result known to contain badware. It’s done in partnership with StopBadware.org, who has a list of sponsors including: Google, Lenovo, and Sun Microsystems.
So far the feature seems pretty good. I’m sure there will be a few C&D’s trying to get this [...]
The Crushing Junk Folder
Since 9/19/2006 when I last emptied my Junk folder, my personal email address has 1.65GB (yes, gigabytes) of Spam/Viruses in it. That is in my opinion a sign of a serious problem.
Oh yea, a few weeks ago, we began auto-rejecting email from certain blacklisted servers, which drastically cut down on spam. And still [...]
Bayesian Spam Filter Poisoning With RSS
Overview
Bayesian Filtering is a great method for fighting spam. Unlike rule based filtering which spammers can easily adapt to with simple modifications, Bayesian adapts with the spammers changes, making it much more difficult for them to defeat the filtering. As a result it’s used in server side mail filtering as well as client [...]
Coming Soon: Bluejacking
If you have bluetooth on your phone, there’s yet another reason to turn it off when you don’t use it. Besides saving battery life (which is always a good thing), and just general security you’ll be seeing more and more spam as time goes on if you keep it on. It’s already [...]
Phishing Unit Testing And Other Phishy Things
Seeing these results is pretty cool. I hope someone has/will come up with a way to have a test like this running periodically (at least weekly, if not daily or multiple times a day) which does an analysis on Phishing sites and how many are being blocked. I’d presume Google and other data [...]
