Tagspammers

August 25, 2010

Botnets and viruses and phishing, oh my!

By laura

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25August

MessageLabs released their monthly report on email threats yesterday. Many media outlets picked up and reported that 41% of spam was from a the Rustock botnet. Other highlights from the report include: Spam accounts for over 92% of all email. 95% of spam was sent from botnets at the end of July 2010. One in 327 emails contains malware and one in 363 emails is a phish. The number of rustock...

July 9, 2010

Appendleads is not unusual

By laura

2 Min read

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09July

I called out David Williams from appendleads.com yesterday for his spam. Sure he’s a spammer, his database is full of garbage information and his email violates CAN SPAM but he’s not that unusual in the realm of list sellers. He is very typical of the people I see offering lists for sale. List sellers are the internet version of used car salesmen. Everyone knows they are slimy sales...

July 8, 2010

Buying Lists

By laura

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08July

One of my email addresses at a client got spammed today offering to sell me appending services. I was going to post the email here and point out all of the problems in how he was advertising it, including violating CAN SPAM. As I often do, I plugged his phone number into google, only to discover that my blog post from March about this spammer was the 2nd hit for that number. Well, go me. I can...

April 16, 2010

Analysing lead-gen spam

By steve

12 Min read

2 comments

16April

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...

April 15, 2010

AARP, SureClick, Offerweb and Spam

By steve

3 Min read

4 comments

15April

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...

April 13, 2010

Did anyone actually look at this email before sending?

By laura

2 Min read

8 comments

13April

I received spam advertising AARP recently. Yes, AARP. Oh, of course they didn’t send me spam, they hired someone who probably hired someone who contracted with an affiliate marketer to send mail. The affiliates, while capable of bypassing spam filters, are incapable of actually sending readable mail. That’s actually how the message appeared in my mail client: totally unreadable images...

February 17, 2010

News from MAAWG

By laura

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17February

During MAAWG a number of companies in the email space announce new initiatives, mergers, products and the like. This MAAWG is no different. Spammers adjust to security trends. This is not really news, spammers have been adjusting to new security measures since folks started blocking from: addresses back in ’95 and ’96. The tactics are different and developing, but for every security...

January 25, 2010

Spammers aren't who you think they are

By laura

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25January

Shady direct marketers exploit CAN SPAM to continue spamming but protect themselves from the law. This is something I’ve been talking about for a while (TWSD), and it’s nice to see the mainstream press noticing the same thing.
HT: Box of Meat

January 11, 2010

Important notification spammers break the law

By laura

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11January

I’m currently being inundated at multiple address with spam advertising spamming services. Most of these notices have the subject line: IMPORTANT NOTIFICATION. The text includes: E-mail newsletters, opt-in e-mail campaigns, e-zines, and other forms of responsible e-mail marketing are the norm for larger Internet businesses – why not yours? Click Here  to Find Out More Info! We can...

January 5, 2010

And the ugly…

By laura

4 Min read

1 comment

05January

Getting back to my series on the good, the typical and the ugly in the ESP field, and there is some very ugly out there. I have 3 examples of the ugliness out there and what ESPs and legitimate senders are competing with. The fake ESP A spammer approached me early on in my consulting career, asking me to help him set up a fake ESP. He wanted to set up his corporate network so that to an outsider...