7 posts tagged “spammers”

Shame on the following companies today:

Panda Security, for spamming the Medinge Group. While there is always a possibility that forged headers led to our address being subscribed, there was never any confirmation from us, plus I’ve since used all their unsubscribe methods in their spams, and have even written to the company using its feedback form. This is sad for a company that supposedly is looking after home computer security.

Tech2.com: never subscribed, yet the target of spamming for a year at least. We have Tech2.com’s IP addresses manually entered into our server, which means we get a tiny header notification in our trash—signalling that they are still coming. Again, a company that should know better.

   Have other Voxers ever been surprised at who spams, given what their corporate missions are?

Email downloading

I hate days that start like this. Last night, about 20-odd spammers decided to collude and put in one of our addresses—not one of our firm, but one which I get cced on—in the ‘From’ header in their email. Where do the bounces go? Right here.
   I’ve received roughly 2,300 bounces in the last 24 hours.
   My spam filters are pretty good but it’s the sheer time that one needs to download. The morning one was the above—945 messages to download, with roughly 850 of them bounces overnight.
   We had probably reported all of the spammers to SpamCop automatically, and our filtering software probably filed a second report, so it is annoying that so many ISPs left open proxies and unprotected servers for spammers to exploit.
   Many of these were with respectable American firms (e.g. Verizon), plus the usual suspects in Thailand, Red China, Poland, Italy, Hungary and South Korea.
   I’m annoyed at the bounces but I cannot see a second way out. I hate it when I get no bounce from an invalid address or if my email has been delayed. But surely ISPs can recognize offending IP address from blacklists and conclude, ‘Right, this is spam, it is selling Viagra, and we won’t bounce it because there’s a blacklist match.’
   We filed our SpamCop reports when the count was around 400 so I am disappointed that so many ISPs left either their server proxies open or failed to check with their blacklists. Even we have a blacklist that we use here on the work server. As a result, another 1,900 bounces came in during the next 22 hours. Seven megabytes’ worth of traffic.
   The spammers’ techniques themselves are fairly clever: by colluding on spamming (and there was no consistency to what was sent—it included porn, fake watches, Viagra and fake handbags) they try to ensure that if you shut down one, there are still another 20 operating.
   But it gets annoying with the sheer quantity of bounces. I believe this is the third such incident in as many weeks, so I’m waiting for these idiots to move to another domain! They probably have no idea that the latest domain is even connected to us.
   Hey, spammers, instead of creating even more negative karma for yourselves, why don’t you stick in some non-existent addresses into the ‘From’ header? You are assholes already but did you have to go even lower down on the food chain?
   And with all that there were two people, perhaps out of 10,000 spam bounces over the last three weeks, that wrote to us to complain. That’s not too bad. We simply explain to them, as they seem unaware of the nature of spam, that spammers forge ‘From’ fields in email.
   Roughly 40 spam bounces since I began typing this post.

You know how spammers regularly put a fake name next to your email address that’s somehow compiled from their database?
   It’s been a wonderful filtering tool because somewhere along the line, one spammer decided my name is Newton Singewald. Evidently that spammer had sold on that list with the alias intact, so I now receive emails addressed to Newton. Bingo—the name is in my filters now.
   How very cooperative!
   As Christians know, Newt was one of the first five disciples: Matthew, Mark, Olivia, Newt and John.

One thousand, eight hundred spams today. I hope that record will not be broken for a while.
   Thank you to those spammers in the United States (Comcast, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves—plenty came through you, so it’s ironical you block so many other ISPs and accuse them of spamming), Turkey, Poland, Red China, Hungary, Mexico and Chile for wasting my goddamn time today.
   To the ISPs and hosts with open relays: come on, get with the programme.
   But with our reporting software, we added a heck of a lot of IP addresses to blacklists today without my lifting a finger.

As some bloggers know, our posts can get picked up by blog-spammers. These are folks that take a post, usually as an RSS feed, and repurpose it on their blogs, making out that it was theirs. Sometimes they will link it to the wrong author (just whomever is programmed in to their script). They will do numerous ones daily, with the aim of driving unsuspecting people looking for certain keywords to their site, for instance to get some ad impressions sold.
   It’s a clever, albeit slightly unethical, idea. You can find plenty of these on the Google Blog Search, for almost any term. And my latest from Vox is a porn blog, just because I had the words Bush twins, I believe. Amazing what these folks program their scripts to see. Amazing and sad.
   Or how about one that not only takes the feed, but does an automated translation into Japanese? This one looks more legit, but people may wonder why my Japanese is so bad.

[Cross-posted] What has dawned on me these days is that the ’net is no longer a place of escape. Not that long ago, businessmen like me could go online, easily find colleagues who were interested in making a difference on the planet. Go online now, and you’ll find spammers, petty jealousies, gossips—everything that you might confront in the physical world, but more invasive. The shield of civility often disappears, replaced by the biting tongues of those who are ill-educated, but think they are armed with all the knowledge of the ancients.
   Inevitably, we will all congregate into groups, only to find that as those groups grow, the same pattern is followed. The ’net in general gave way to the blogosphere, where many of the better thinkers went. But as I watched the whole Jennifer Siebel-attacking matter unfold over the last week (SFist’s obsession seems unnatural, but try telling its contributors that), it is fair to conclude that the blogosphere is suffering from the forces that made the web clunkier, slower and less exciting. The new frontier, just like California must have been to its first settlers (I do mean the native Americans), gave way to the white settlers, lawlessness and disease, before an experimental civilization began to take root. That experimental, occidental civilization is now armed with the internet, slagging people off while ignoring the homeless people minutes away from their residences. It just seems easier to be nasty, but is it more natural given one’s humanity?
   I imagine we must start with other communities, other groups, and hope that contact with the educated class rubs off some knowledge on to the ill-educated. We now live, at least in this medium, in a world of the information-rich and the information-poor, but even we must depend on schools and governments—perhaps online schools (?)—and the hope that reasoning is something we are born with. That the internet remains somewhere where all can learn and better themselves, not a medium where pettiness and hate are propagated.
   The realignment of what the internet is must start with those of us who write in it, conducting ourselves in the hope that we are working toward a utopia that will, God willing, transmit its positive energy in to the real world.

For the last few months, my Blogger account gets around eight to twelve blog spams a day. These are folks who use automated programs to feed in fake comments, containing their URLs, into blogs. The good thing about Vox is that, knock on wood, I have been free of this junk.
   I have to wonder whether blog spammers are plain wasting their time. Comments on my other blog are moderated. When their posts appear, they are blindingly obvious. Most are signed ‘Anonymous’ and in the first-line preview that Blogger gives you, it’s clear their words have nothing to do with the post.
   Blog spammers simply are making blogs about as useless as email. I remember when email communications were more collegial, respectful. Now, most of email is spam. For a time in 2006, I would surf the blogs first, then check my emails, because I didn’t want to deal with spam (today, McAfee SpamKiller, admittedly, does a reasonable job and my inbox remains around the 80 mark).
   Some folks, for whom blogging is just a hobby, will leave the blogosphere, and then to whom will the blog spammers market?
   And, let’s face it, who is dumb enough to buy off those cretins anyway? Get with the 21st century: consumers have become more and more savvy, and, blog spammers, no one gives two hoots about you or the crap you are flogging.