Entries Tagged 'Spam, Scams' ↓

author:Niall Roche

In a word Bayesian spam filters are “intelligent”. Bayesian spam filters are intelligent in so far as they’re capable of comparing two sets of information and acting on the result. This is in direct contrast to the vast majority of other spam filters who use pre-built rules to decide which e-mail is spam and which is not. Bayesian spam filters can take one group of legitimate e-mail and another group of spam and compare the values and data of each. The definition of legitimate e-mail that it creates at the end of this comparison session is what it uses going forward to scan your inbox for spam.

FYI Bayesian spam filters are named after Thomas Bayes an 18 century cleric who created something known as Bayes Theorem. In summary Bayes Theorem is as follows: ..”in statistical inference to update estimates of the probability that different hypotheses are true, based on observations and a knowledge of how likely those observations are, given each hypothesis.” In plain English it looks for obvious repeating patterns to form an “opinion” on something.

In spam filter terms that “opinion” becomes a rule which keeps you spam free (or pretty close

The really neat thing about Bayesian filters is that they’re capable of learning. For example if they decided to block an e-mail because the filter perceived it as junk but the user marked it as valid mail the Bayesian filter then knows not to block that type of e-mail in the future. So, in time, this type of spam filter learns enough to block spam far more effectively. AOL have embraced this type of spam filter with the launch of AOL 9.0 and AOL Communicator- if the big dog wants it then it must be worthwhile?

So what Bayesian spam filtering options are available to you? Well quite a few to be honest and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by some of the names involved The first one on the list is AOL with their AOL Communicator product.

The spam filtering features in AOL Communicator and AOL 9 are, to be honest, impressive. Think what you will of the provider themselves AOL Communicator is an excellent product and is suitable for use by both PC and Mac OSX users.

Next up we have Eudora. The nice folks at Qualcomm have designed an excellent e-mail client that also has built in Bayesian spam filtering. I’ve used Eudora in the past and it’s a neat little package. Again the benefits here are advanced integrated spam filtering with your e-mail automatically. Mac OSX and OS9 users are in luck with Eudora providing support for both.

If you’d like to know more about spam filters or just spam in general please drop by our site at www.spam-site.com

Nicole Dean

Are you making yourself a target for fraud? More and more often I am hearing stories of people who have had their accounts hacked. They have had money stolen, lost sleep, spent hours setting up new accounts, or had their credit ruined. Don’t let this happen to you.

Are you making these dangerous mistakes?

Mistake #1: Using the same password for all your accounts.
Please don’t do this. Use different passwords for every email account, and definitely use unique passwords for shopping websites where you’d enter your credit card.

Mistake #2: Short passwords
The risk of someone guessing your password is increasingly difficult the more characters are in it. So, go for the gusto and make your passwords long.

Mistake #3: BradPitt, Charlie, Sarah, Princess, Barbie, Gandolf — Did I guess it yet?
Do not use kids’ names, pet’s name, nicknames, names from characters in books or movies or celebrity names. Even if I didn’t guess it in my list, someone who knows you could.

Mistake #4: Easy to remember English words
Easy to remember is also easy to guess. Passwords should not contain English words found in a dictionary. Non-English words or any words in any dictionary are a high risk as well. And, for goodness sakes, if your password is “password” or “test” then it’s a wonder you haven’t been hacked yet!

Mistake #5: Numbers are no-no’s.

Seriously, stay away from birthdays, anniversaries, addresses, social security numbers or telephone numbers. They are all too easy to guess.

Choose random passwords for banking sites like PayPal. Combine letters (both uppercase and lowercase) and numbers.
If all of this sounds too hard to remember, then consider using a Password program. Most of the good password programs will not only store your passwords on your computer, but they’ll generate completely random passwords when

you need one.

Here are a few to try.

http://www.fgroupsoft.com/Traysafe/
http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/
http://www.treepad.com/treepadsafe/

It’s never a good time to find out that someone has stolen money from you — or locked you out of your own email account. It’s a waste of your time and money. Please protect yourself.

MySpace goes from being a popular playground for spammers to one for phishers. Will people ever learn to not click on links sent by someone they don’t know?

Probably not.

According to net security firm WebSense, the fraudulent site also sets a “cookie on the victim’s computer, which prevents the phishing attack from being displayed on any subsequent visits”.

Phishers aim to hook MySpace users

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

Why are the comment spammers using these ultra-WASP names like Tyler, Dylan and Alexander? Anymore if I see a comment from someone named Zachary or Joshua I’m apt to treat them just as I do my old acquaintances Canadian Pharmacy and Xanax Phentermine (not to forget that guy from Texas Mr. Holdem).

It has to be a very inexperienced weblogger who falls for “great blog” or “I’m glad I found you.”

The guys who persist in starting their comment spam with a <H1> tag shouldn’t be quitting their job at the gas station any time soon.

I imagine the “black hat” sharpies who really know what they are doing have moved on to better means of making Google their bitch.

Google Update Jagger - sounds like a Japanese superhero team - has me checking some of my sites’ inbound links via Google.

So many are just AdSense spam sites that have scraped my pages to create keyword dense but worthless pages to snag AdSense revenues.

Today Matt Cutts explained how to report AdSense spammers:

You see a low-quality site that is running AdSense
If you run across a site that you consider spammy and it has AdSense on it, click on the “Ads by Goooooogle” link and click “Send Google your thoughts on the ads you just saw”. Enter the words spamreport and jagger1 in the comments field.

I’ve often feared the websites that use parts of my sites’ content will eventually have the search engines devalue them because they see me - rather that the scraper sites - as perpetrator of duplicate content. Not something I want, having invested time and money. Even when I use freely available articles I take time to reformat them.

So this morning I spent about an hour playing AdSense cop. I checking sites “linking” to one of mine. If all I saw was a scraper site I reported it. (Talk about tons of invisible text.)

I guess for the foreseeable future I’ll continue to scan my inbound links for links to AdSense spam pages and report them to Google.

I wonder how many millions of websites are violating the AdSense TOS this way?

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.

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.

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I get huge amounts of referral log spam. None of my referral logs are visible to search engines so it does the spammers no good.

My guess is sending referral spam is practically free so they don’t bother to check if spamming a particular site’s logs gains them visibility.

The big exception is the sites that manage to get the false referrals into Alexa results. Regardless of what you think of the value of Alexa’s metrics some sites that are indexed by the search engines publish them.

I’d hardly care about the log spam except that my stats have become useless.

So I was glad to discover aStatSpam:

aStatSpamm is a PhP script that will help you to get rid of referer spammers. The script is connected with our blacklist database, and it will put some lines in your .htaccess files, in order to redirect the spammers to other sites.

This way they will not produce fake visitors to your site, plus you will not have bandwidth usage raise.

Get Rid of Referer Spammers

Author: Robert Ing, DSc, FAPSc, CPO

Identity Theft in the Western World has increased dramatically since the beginning of the millennium and has replaced credit card fraud as the new number one technology crime.

What It Is.

Identity Theft is when someone steals (uses) someone else’s identity for the purpose of personal or financial gain, or in order to support the commission of a criminal act.

Specific Examples.

Specific examples of identity theft involve the perpetrator posing as someone else to obtain credit, to hide from the authorities or others, to conceal a criminal past, to obtain access under an assumed identity to an otherwise “off limits” facility, or to cross a border. The ideal identity for most seeking a new one, is that of an average working citizen; one with a fairly ordinary life that will enable the perpetrator to blend in easily.

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Spammers find inspiration where you’d never expect it. Bah!

Hurricane Katrina is bringing out the worst in people on the net as well as on the streets of New Orleans. Spam emails purporting to offer links to news about Katrina are been used to tempt potential victims onto a site hosting Trojan malware.

Katrina-themed malware attack hits the net