Thank you Brian Krebs of the Security Fix. He has just made the internet a little better place. He’s worked for several months investigating a group that is believed to have been hosting provider for up to 75% of the Internet’s junk email as well as child porn websites, rogue anti-virus software and who knows what other slime. Great work Brian. He essentially contacted the service providers of the group in question and presented them with the evidence that he and others uncovered.
Category: Spam
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Great tip for Dealing with SPAM email
In reading over at the Gmail Blog, I came across this suggestion to try with Gmail. The idea is, let’s say your address is johndoe@gmail.com Okay, next time you sign up for a mailing list, or need a free website login, use johndoe+freelogin@gmail.com or johndoe+spam@gmail.com or any other unique identifier (something you’ll be able to track.) The idea is this… gmail ignores anything after a + in the address and the mail will still get to your inbox, but… here comes the cool part.
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Site hosting tons of email addresses
A little over a year ago I was doing a web search for my email address (something that’s worth doing from time to time.) I ran across my name in a text file hosted at a domain called…..
http://www.freestuffengine.com/ There is a different site active at that domain now (although I don’t know if it’s owned by the same group, it may be….) Anyway, there were VERY large text files with (according to the file name) a million addresses. And YES… mine was in there.my address was in a file called…. nima_1million_1of2.txt
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Approaches to beating form spam submission
I’ve replaced bare email addresses on web page with either an encoded variation of the email or with a contact form to discourage spam scrapers and other automated tools from using it for a spam magnet. Well, it seems there are some tools that automatically submit forms – after all that’s what’s brought us the annoying captcha’s we see everywhere now. (You now those pictures with squiggly letters and numbers that you sometimes have to redo two or three times if you can’t read it correctly.) Well, Sans is talking about some interesting alternatives to the traditional captcha for protecting a form from automated spam bots.
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Persistent spammers
Over the last couple weeks I’ve gotten persistent and annoying spams from a place that is currently at broadcastemailcompany.com (although they have had variations on their domain during that time.) broadcastemailgroupcom and broadcastemailcorporation.com are some of their other recent aliases. They claim in the email that their offer is only for non-profit groups and to excuse the inconvenience if you have received this by mistake. Over the last weekend though, I received 7-10 of these on various postmaster@ and root@ addresses (Plus one sales@ address) for the various domains that I either own or administer for others.
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The Spam fight turns to blogs….
I’ve detailed some of the struggles I had for a bit with FLOODS of comment spam. Details of the issue and a fix which has been rock solid for WordPress can be found in the following posts (reverse chronological order): Update on comment spam storms, trackback spam countermeasures such as akismet and trackback validation, another trackback storm, botnets spreading trackback spam?, Initial trackback storm. To sum up though, I’ve found 2 plugins to make for a rock solid combination here in wordpress. Akismet (which caught 99% or so of trackback spam) and The trackback validator plugin which caught everything else. (99% sounds good, but when you’re getting thousands of attempts a day?)
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Trackback spam and countermeasures like Akismet and trackback validation
As I’ve already commented today…. there has been a massive trackback spam swarm going on the last 24 hours. I’ve now racked up 1300 or so in the Akismet filter on this site and another 150 or so on another two sites. Akismet has been very impressive in defending this attack. Only 1% of the trackbacks slipped through, or about 14 or so across three sites. I’ve looked to see what other measures I can take against trackback spam and found one that looks like it should eliminate the 1% that got through.
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Another trackback spam storm overnight….
All of the the swarms of trackback spam seemed to last an hour give or take a few minutes, so it does look kind of like “rent-a-bot” activity, lots of different IP addresses, trackback spam sites seem to have a common theme – the last batch was insurance type sites…. a sampling of about three or four found that they were all cloaked redirects for the same site/page …. http://www.finance-portal-online.com/insurance.php ALL are registered with moniker.com and all the insurance related domains being spammed (that I checked) redirect to the finance-portal-online.com site above which is registered to a “Bill Bilton” whose email is given as bill at top-support.net ….