Entries Tagged 'Spam, Scams' ↓

Copyright 2005 Michael Murray

If you run any type of Internet business, Adware and Spyware can be a very serious issue. These programs hide themselves on your computer and do all sorts of annoying and potentially dangerous things.

Viruses spread on your PC. The good news is that Spyware applications usually stay put, much like a parasite. Spyware collects information about your messaging and browsing behavior and your online preferences with the intent to sell it to online advertisers.

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Originally posted 2005-07-06 09:35:16. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Here’s an email claiming to be from the Illegal Internet Downloads Dept. at the FBI:

We hereby inform you that your computer was scanned under the IP 61.75.48.254 . The contents of your computer were confiscated as an evidence, and you will be indicated. You get the charge in writing, in the next days.
In the Reference code: #6231, are all files, that we found on your computer.

This is the silliest, oddest bit of spam to come my way since the bizarre notice that I am a “pornography webmaster” and needed to give someone my credit card so they could launder my ill-gotten gains.

Originally posted 2004-01-04 09:42:54. Republished by Old Post Promoter

This $75 program is one the reasons I no longer use any stats program that can be seen by search engines on my websites.

[Program name omitted] is a … mass referrer spammer, which means that it will make a connection to a buttload of sites of your choosing with any referrer URL and User-Agent that you specify. This accomplishes several things. Firstly, it generates webmaster traffic from webmasters checking their referral statistics.

Yep, you might get a visit from me. If your traffic is really low another visitor might inspire a moment’s false optimism. That certainly won’t make me turn to you for mortgage information, buy the secret of untold wealth from you, use your dating service or get you an extra click on a banner ad. Seeing you aren’t a friend I’ll just close that Firefox tab and move on.

Secondly, it boosts your link popularity and thereby your Google PR, because a lot of sites have public referral stats with linked entries. [Program name omitted] operates on textfiles with URL-lists, and a textfile of 3047 active blog websites which you can use to start getting free traffic and PR right away is included!

I’m sure at least one of my sites is on that list. I used to run Refer there and like many webmasters made the stats available to anyone who wanted to look. That was how I learned about referrer spamming. It took less than a month to get all trace of those bogus referrals out of Google.

Even now “thehostingnet.com” sends a bunch of referral spam to that site. They aren’t getting an iota of Google PR from doing that. But it no more harms me than it does them a lick of good.

If you run a web statistics package ideally you keep it out of your server’s web accessible areas. If you can’t block the subdirectory in your robots.txt. You might want to password protect it as well.

Once you are listed as a site to be sent referrer spam I don’t think you’ll ever fall out of the lists. But you can keep the spamming from having any effect.

Originally posted 2004-09-03 11:53:21. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Spam, The Stuff You Love To Hate

Author: Jeff Colburn

We all get spam, and we all hate it. I always thought it would be great if I could open some spam, press a button on my computer and have a zillion volts of electricity shoot through the phone lines all the way to the computer that sent the spam and turn it into a smoldering pile of metal and plastic.

Before I made a few changes I used to get about 2,500 spam EVERY DAY! Now I only get about 250. Still a lot, but only 10% of what I used to get.

Learning how to do this for your own website, and your clients’ websites, will make you a hero in everyone’s eyes.

So let’s talk about some of the things you can do to cut back on your spam.

One of the things I did to reduce my spam was to remove the “Catch All” setting on my web hosting company. A “Catch All” does just that. It catches all e-mail sent to your domain name, in my case that would be Anything@CreativeCauldron.com, which would include JeffColburn@CreativeCauldron.com, Giggles@CreativeCauldron.com, PinkElephants@CreativeCauldron.com and so on. Any e-mail address that ended with @CreativeCauldron.com was grabbed by my hosting company’s e-mail program and sent to me.

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Originally posted 2005-04-18 10:53:31. Republished by Old Post Promoter

I may be tardy but I do try to reply to every email my weblogs bring me. I’m not talking about comments. Plenty of those are complete in themselves. There’s an on and off flow of commending and admonishing correspondents.

Not long ago I setup a copy of the Mozilla Thunderbird email client at work so I could read my personal email at the shop. To much surprise I discovered emails that had been dumped in my home copy’s junk folder. The one at the shop is trashing different emails that aren’t spam. (Actually Thunderbird’s current default junk filter seems too harsh. You should train it before you let it automatically sort your email.)

Wonder how many kind emails the sender thinks I just ignored?

See how spammers are increasingly confounding, probably hoping to kill junk mail filters I may just go back to hitting the delete key.

Originally posted 2004-01-19 16:34:44. Republished by Old Post Promoter

http://google.com/imgres?imgurl=cybercelebs
net/wallpapers/elizabeth-hurley …

I can only wonder why Cyber – celebs – . – net has been sending these bogus Google image searches to one of my websites for the last few months. Needless to say I don’t have the image, never have. I simply mentioned the actress in question.

Since these false Google image searches don’t show up in any log indexed by search engines I can only assume that the spamming webmaster is totally clueless as well as dishonest. Unsurprisingly the sight is just a link farm for a host of adult websites.

Well if you are looking for photos you probably should go there. No telling what sort of malware, trojans, dialers they might try to put on your computer.

Originally posted 2004-10-08 13:53:13. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Author: Krishna Pai

If you know what is the ‘Fishing’ then it’s very easy to understand the definition of ‘Phishing’. Just replace letter ‘F’ from the word Fishing with ‘Ph’. Yes I am not joking. I mean it! Phishing is higher level of spam. Phishing is nothing but fishing in the sea of Internet. The victimized Net users are the fishes hooked by the hackers.

Phishing & Spoof Web sites

The role of hacker is to lure the innocent Netizens by sending an e-mail from spoof sites, pseudo claiming to be an legitimate enterprise in an attempt to force the user into surrendering private information such as password, credit card number, and social security number etc; which will be used for identity theft.

The hyperlink in the e-mail directs the innocent user to a spoof Web site where they are asked to enter personal information like passwords, social security, and bank account numbers. Basically hackers create Spoof Web sites to steal the user’s personal information.

The Idea Behind Spoof Sites

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Originally posted 2005-09-25 15:08:19. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Congress has to defend too many vested interests – campaign contributors – to ever really pass an effective anti-spam law. From an editorial:

CAN-SPAM does give the government and private industry a legal framework to go after spammers in the United States, says Gregg Mastoras, Sophos senior security analyst. However, Mastoras believes that CAN-SPAM suffers from a major flaw: It allows a business to send commercial e-mail until a recipient opts out and tells the sender to stop. Mastoras says that until marketers have to get your express permission before they can send you their pitches, spam will continue to be a problem.

Others, including [Jordan] Ritter, don’t feel that laws can ever effectively fight spam, even within the United States. “It takes laws years to become effective. It takes days or weeks for the newest Internet e-mail threat to wreak havoc,” Ritter says.

FTC releases progress report on Congress’s antispam law, but some experts are not impressed

Originally posted 2006-06-03 08:34:28. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Here’s some odd moronic crap from a ZDNet columnist. Of course if you write a regular column you have to find something to say. And it should be colorful shouldn’t it? Simply saying Google will be offering free email isn’t enough. Your editors could buy a script to write that story. Even if Google makes it clear they won’t scan your Gmail email you can just invent silly crap to spook the prudish folks out there. Or are you titillating them, making them hope you’ll return to the theme of a dominatrix sometime later?

Contextual advertising has been around for years. Type “dominatrix” as a search term, and you’ll find enough hard-core bondage and fetish ads to keep you occupied for quite some time. But search is one category; your e-mail is quite another. Do you really want Google snooping so close to home? The company says it is not going to read the contents of anyone’s in-box. Still, you don’t need to be a privacy extremist to realize that this fundamentally remains a bad idea.

Why Gmail gives me the creeps

Originally posted 2004-04-02 16:33:36. Republished by Old Post Promoter

This spam email beats the Dept. of Illegal Downloads all to hell:

ATTENTION. Clearance offer. Buy 30 grams of heroin, get 5 free.
Prepay your batch of rockets (air-to-air) and recieve a portable rocket-launcher for free.

The email’s subject was:

Your credit card was successfully charged for $1171.32.

Though it is oddly followed with the warning that my card will be charged “$2019.99 at next 12 hours.” Not my credit card. Even if they had the number I only have a $500 limit.

• 1. Heroin, in liquid and crystal form.
• 2. Fake currencies, such as Euros and US dollars, prices would match competition.
• 3. Also, as always, we offer widest range of [porn crap: text deleted], to keep out clients busy.
• 4. Stolen Credit Cards.
• 5. Spam and Fraud Hosting.

These amazing offers were from a couple of variation of the Carderplanet domain. Firing up Opera – for which I’ve never installed any plugins so even QuickTime won’t run I visit the domain. Indeed all I see if a broken QuickTime logo. Looking up the page a whois.sc they show the front page which looks harmless enough. The owner of the domain lives in Moldavia.

This spam email certainly tries to appeal to everybody: the nervous person who thinks the spammers really do have their credit card data, and people who dissatisfied with all the offers for free Soma and Levitra want ‘crystal’ heroin (not to mention rocker launchers).

My first reaction was that this oddity of junk email was a cunning ploy to exploit both fear and, desire for controlled substances and greed. Maybe it was just a reckless attempt to get people to visit the website.

Originally posted 2004-03-15 14:28:10. Republished by Old Post Promoter