I had hoped to move away from security blogging this week and focus on some other issues. But today I see that both CAUCE and John Levine are reporting that there is malware spam coming from a Cheetahmail customer. Looking at what they shared, it may be that Cheetahmail has not been compromised directly. Given mail is only coming from one /29, which belongs to one customer it is possible that...
From my inbox, missed by the spamfilter: Do you know people who have worked a lot or could not find a job for a long time and suddenly began to earn well, gain valuable items and look better? We can reveal to you their secret. Anyone who bought a diploma from us raised their standard of living in half! Our diplomas are verified and credible. We offer expert help in selection of the right option...
I made that joke the other night and most of the folks who heard it didn’t get the reference. It made me feel just a little bit old. Anyhow, Mickey beat me to it and posted much of what I was going to say about Ken Magill’s response to a very small quote from Neil’s guest post on expiring email headers last week. I, too, was at that meeting, and at many other meetings where...
Robert Soloway, one of the people crowned with the title “Spam King”, has been released from jail. He was an extremely prolific spammer, generating over 10 trillion messages over the course of his career. As Mr. Soloway exits jail, another spammer heads to serve his 20 year sentence. Peter Maxson Anyanyueze sent Nigerian 419 spams telling people they could profit from helping him move...
Sorry for the lack of substantive posts, things seem to have gone completely out of control and I’m not finding a lot of extra cycles to sit down and blog. I’ll try and get some stuff up this week, but I’m also getting ready for MAAWG and the sessions I’m a part of there. There was an interesting post by Romer over on his personal blog. If you don’t know, Romer helps...
I’ve been head down working on a doc for a client and started wondering what the average size of an enforcement team is. This client told me during one of our calls they wanted to be as clean and well respected as another ESP, but was shocked when I told them how large an enforcement and delivery team that ESP maintained. I know other clients of mine have 6 – 8 people for a very large...
Mailchannels put together another post looking at spam volumes. Related to that, many people are reporting that bot levels are climbing again.
There’s been a bit of a commotion on Twitter and over at J Caldwell’s blog about Al’s reaction to someone harvesting his address off LinkedIn and then adding that email address to his company’s marketing / newsletter database. Al objected to getting the mail, the person who did this shot back that it wasn’t spam, there was lots of arguing both over twitter and on the...
Ken Simpson, CEO of Mailchannels, was kind enough to give me permission to post their graph of spam and email volumes from September 1, 2010 through Jan 3, 2011. This chart also shows the trend of declining volumes of spam. There are some differences, though, which I think highlight how you get different pictures when looking at different data sources. For instance, the amount of real mail (blue...
I started hearing various people comment about lower spam volumes sometime in mid December. This isn’t that unusual, spam volumes are highly variable and someone is always noticing that their spam load is going up or going down. The problem is extrapolating larger trends from a small selection of email addresses. There’s too much variation between email addresses and even domains to...
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