Over the last week Steve and I have posted about the AARP hiring affiliates to send spam on their behalf: starting with the poorly done email message, moving through the process of identifying the responsible entity and then walking through the details of how we tracked the spammer. Why spend a week writing about the AARP spamming? I initially posted about the AARP spam because it was such a...
What Happens Next…
or Why All Of This Is Meaningless: Guest post by Huey Callison The analysis of the AARP spam was nice, but looking at the Mainsleaze Spammer Playbook, I can make a few educated guesses at what happens next: absolutely nothing of consequence. AARP, if they acknowledge this publicly (I bet not) has plausible deniability and can say “It wasn’t us, it was an unscrupulous lead-gen...
Analysing lead-gen spam
Yesterday I showed how major companies hire hard core spammers. Today I’m going to show you some of the technical details as to how I found that data. This is a fairly quick and shallow analysis, the sort of thing I’d typically do for a client to help them decide whether the case was worth pursuing before expending too much money and time on investigation and legal paperwork...
AARP, SureClick, Offerweb and Spam
On Tuesday Laura wrote about receiving spam sent on behalf of the AARP. The point she was discussing was mostly just how incompetent the spammer was, and how badly they’d mangled the spam such that it was hardly legible. One of AARPs interactive advertising managers posted in response denying that it was anything to do with the AARP. This isn’t from AARP…this is a SPAM that’s been going...
Spam from mainstream companies
Yesterday I wrote about spam I received advertising AARP and used it as an example of a mainstream group supporting spammers by hiring them (or hiring them through proxies) to send mail on their behalf. My statement appears to have upset someone, though. There is one comment on the post, coming from an IP address allocated to the AARP. This isn’t from AARP…this is a SPAM that’s been going around...