Internet Defense Technologies

Some new type of email spamming I heard about recently is Outlook spam (haven’t seen one of these yet, but thought I would share some of the information I have heard so you can be ready for it).

Apparently spammers have figured out they can send you a spam email that is one of those emails you send to add a date to your Outlook.

With these Calendar notices you usually have to accept them to get them permanently placed in your calendar. However, for the most part, these items still end up in your calendar as tentative items. If you happen to share your calendar across your business, this means others might see a tentative appointment with porn at 3pm on Tuesday.

Even if you don’t use Outlook (I use Google calendars which sync’s with my Blackberry Calendar) you can still get these emails and they will be added to your calendar.

So if you are seeing strange calendar items on your/shared calendar you might need to look for a new spam filtering service.

Shameless plug here, come check out our service :)

Original article on IDT Blog about email spam

I have on occasion gotten an “out of office” message from someone, usually not a close friends, but some business contact.

While I appreciate the answer, there is some risk in doing this.

There are spammers who specifically send out messages with just one line of garbage in it. While you may feel it is just a mistake if you have ever gotten one, I am sure they are doing it for a good reason:

For every email that doesn’t bounce back to them, they know they have a good email address. They are doubly sure of this if they get an “out of office” message in response to their spam.

Here is what I would do instead of an “out of office” message:

1) send out a email to your list (don’t spam) telling all your contacts you are going out of town

2) ask a co-worker to check through your email regularly and answer any legitimate inquiries with an “out of office” message.

3) set up remote access to your email and check it once every few days

Small thing, but might keep you off more spam sending lists.

Original article on IDT Blog about email spam

Just wanted to remind everyone that today is Earth Day so you should make an extra effort to do something nice for the planet today.

Tomorrow you can go back to your usual behaviors if you feel like it (though I recommend trying whatever you choose out for some time and see if it grows on you).

Original article on IDT Blog about email spam

Some information and statistics about spam:

A new study indicates that 92% of all email sent in the first quarter of 2008 was spam.

4.6% of all spam originates from web based email services such as Gmail and Yahoo. With Yahoo the most abused web mail service and is responsible for 86.7% of web mail based spam sent (according to MessageLabs).

Spam from Gmail increased from 1.3 percent in January to 2.6 percent in February, with most advertising skin flick websites.

The rest of the spam is a from made-up or hacked domains.

Subject matters include:
* Online Pharmacies (vast majority at about 50%)
* Replica Products
* Casino and Gaming
* Software Sales
* Illegal Advertising
* Credit and Debt Relief
* Bank Phishing
* Job Offers
* Free Offers
(according to Barracuda Central)

The US has maintained is first place in relaying the world’s spam email, in Q1 2008.

Other countries like China, Turkey and Russia fight for the next three spots.

So, there is a general look at spam for this last week, exciting in nerdy sort of way and scary in other ways. Don’t see much change other than it getting worse while companies like ours continue to work to prevent the spam from ever reaching your box.

Original article on IDT Blog about email spam

Warning - spam message getting through some filters (please excuse the all caps - how I got the email on my hotmail:

Subject: CONGRATULATION!! TO YOU OUR RIGHTFUL WINNER.‏
From: master mega (mmmldraw007@gmail.com)

Text includes:
SPECIAL WINNING NOTIFICATION

PLEASE THE ATTACH MAIL IS YOUR WINNING NOTIFICATION FROM
MASTER MEGA MILLION LOTTERY 2010 WORLD-CUP PROMOTION SOUTH AFRICAN

Dear, Winner,

CONGRATULATION!! TO YOU OUR RIGHTFUL WINNER.

YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS WAS SELECTED ON

THE COMPUTER PROMOTIONAL BALLOT SYSTEM DRAW, AS ONE OF THE WINNING EMAIL ADDRESS ON THE INTERNET COMPUTER LOTTERY DRAW.

THE PROGRAM WAS HELD BY THE SOUTH AFRICAN LEADING LOTTERY ORGANIZATION, INCONJUNCTION WITH FIFA SUPPORT AFRICAN TEAM, KNOWN AS…

…MASTER MEGA-MILLION LOTTERY

Original article on IDT Blog about email spam

I have an old practice of using a hotmail address for all my on-line registration activities, keeps my main email address clean of spam (even before we started Internet Defense Technology it worked pretty well, but did start getting spam though I thought I had never used it, problem handled since we got started).

New thing being talked about now is “Disposable Email Addresses” or DEA.

Some are paid, some are free.

Some are set up where you just get one free email address, use it for your registration, get the registration information and then “dispose” of the email address.

Some have you tell them what your real address is, then sign up for several fake addresses which will be forwarded to your real address. You use each fake address once for a sign-up and can watch to see which one eventually gets spammed (and then you know who sold your address) and can dispose of that address.

While this has been around for a little bit, I just recently heard of it. Looks pretty good, only issues I can think of is if you need to be able get back in to a registration or profile information and have to have that email address and you already disposed of it, would have a problem.

However, I really like the idea.

Update: Just saw a good list of these which I thought I would just link to rather than trying to re-do: http://www.techsnack.net

Original article on IDT Blog about email spam

Saw just today (doesn’t include less dangerous spam)

1) From: William Vusi

Part of it said: “I was doing my annual auditing in our bank this year I
discovered there is an account opened in this bank far back in the 80’s
and since then nobody has operated it. So i went through some old
files in the records, I discovered that if I do not remit this money out
urgently it would be forfeited. Moreover, as an auditor i won’t be able to
claim this amount.

“The owner of this account is Mr. Andreas B. Smith, a foreigner and a
Miner at Kruger Gold Company. A Geologist by profession, who died in
1990.”

2) From: membersavings@passporttofunplus.com

Subject line: Your Passport to Fun+ Membership Information - UPCOMING CHARGE

Big alarming headline that says: “UNLESS YOU CANCEL, YOUR CREDIT
CARD ACCOUNT WILL BE CHARGED.”

Then: “You’re receiving this email because you accepted a special offer to save money through the Passport to Fun+SM savings service.” Which I haven’t.

Original article on IDT Blog about email spam

Pew Internet & American Life Project titled ‘Teenage Life Online’, six out of every ten online teens have received an email from a perfect stranger; with 63% admitting to responding to the stranger.

To the parents this may fit into the same category as spam.

More than half of parents today have filtering software on the computer their teens use at home. There are several systems that exist where the child/teenager has to get the parents to add someone as an approved email source or a site as an approved site before they can get the information.

While I agree with the fact that what children see on the Internet must be controlled (I have a 2.5 year old and am not looking forward to the day) it is very sad that we have to do so much work to protect ourselves from the stuff we don’t want.

Original article on IDT Blog about email spam

The “CAN-Spam” Act of 2003 (dubbed the “Yes, You Can Spam” Act by some) was supposed to reduce spam.

The arrest of Robert Alan Soloway in May 2007, a 27-year-old man described as one of the world’s most prolific spammers and called by some the “King of Spam”, had the federal authorities predicting that computer users across the Web could notice a decrease in the amount of junk e-mail.

However we have been seeing an increase (below numbers from Wikipedia):
2005 - (June) 30 billion per day
2006 - (June) 55 billion per day
2007 - (February) 90 billion per day
2007 - (June) 100 billion per day

It feels like we are just going to continue to see this increase year after year.

On the other side, the filtering technology is getting better and better so users who get set-up on a good spam filter (insert plug for our Total Mail Defense product here, LOL) can expect to not even notice this increase.

Original article on IDT Blog about email spam

Gmail isn’t having the best time with spam right now.

Over the past month, anti-spam vendors have had to apply scrutiny to Gmail in a way they haven’t had to before (some actually outright blocking of Gmail).

It all began when Google’s bot-busting CAPTCHA for Gmail was defeated sometime in February. So spammers have started sending out their spam from Gmail accounts, causing problems for spam filtering services.

Then Google announced that they are removing the spam folder from Gmail all together per doobybrain.com (couldn’t find a mention of this on the Gmail page myself).

Then one of my friends on twitter complained that they are getting more spam than usual.

With the “spammers” constantly working on ways to “get around” the spam blockers, doesn’t seem to make sense to totally remove the spam folder. Plus, what about the occasional real item that ends up in spam.

While it is possible to get up to 99% accuracy on spam detection (as we have found) we have also found it is better to always allow the user some access to their emails for those every now and then mistakes.

Lets see what Gmail actually does here.

Original article on IDT Blog about email spam