Internet Defense Technologies

That honor goes to Angelina Jolie who is the most popular celebrity name used by spammers to tempt people into opening unsolicited email, according to new research.

The other famous figures in the top 10 table ranged from those well-known internet favourites Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, to less obviously appealing figures like Hillary Clinton and Osama bin Laden.

Spammers use the names of celebrities - frequently with a sexual twist - to encourage people to open emails which often contain damaging viruses.

Spam email bait top 10:
1) Angelina Jolie
2) Barack Obama
3) Paris Hilton
4) Britney Spears
5) Jessica Simpson
6) Hillary Clinton
7) George W Bush
8) Osama Bin Laden
9) Brad Pitt
10) Michael Jackson

Original article: Angelina Jolie most popular spam email ‘bait’ from UK Telegraph

With the large number of people saving trees and sending out electronic holiday cards rather than paper ones there is a lot of greeting cards flying through cyberspace.

The spammers know this and are sending out a lot of their own greeting card spam.

An easy way to spot greeting card spam is if the subject and greeting are vague. Legit greeting card emails will list the sender’s name in the subject line and address you by name in the email itself.

Make sure you recognize the sender before you click through and never install anything from these emails.

Canada ranks 5th worldwide as a source of email based spam, behind only Iran, Nigeria, Kenya, and Israel.

Canada is the only G7 country (definition for this here at Wikipedia) with no anti-spam laws, and more and more spammers are taking advantage of that.

Recently Facebook won a lawsuit against some spammers, but their servers are based in Canada so this may lead to some problems.

It’s clear Canada must wake up and inact anti-spam legislation soon. Otherwise spam filtering companies might have to take drastic actions.

Links:
Is Canada a Spam Haven?

I have heard many complaints about the spam that gets sent around inside Facebook. This is something they definitely need to address and somehow work out how to minimize this action.

It now seems the spammers are using the fact that we do get some emails from Facebook we want to exploit us and get us to open emails.

Like reports of getting an email saying: Lawrence Lessig confirmed you as a friend on Facebook (do a search on his name to find out who this is, it is funny that they picked his name). These emails don’t actually have anything to do with Facebook and should just be deleted, but how do you know if this is something you should pay attention to.

My suggestion is if you don’t recognize the name of the confirmed friend, don’t click through the email.

Go straight to Facebook itself.

Login and see if you have the note there, if it isn’t there, it was definitely spam.

If it is there, well not sure about that, you will have to decide for yourself.

Been awhile since I did a collection of email spam subject lines. I just put up the ones from very recently, might have fun to do a huge one, but that is too time consuming:

• How to communicate effectively via email
• Success is what your wear
• Global Orgasms for Peace
• A Pac-Man for your arteries
• IT consultant of perfect love making art
• Perk up your pecs
• Oi. You. Zombie Apocalypse. Now.
• Your mommy’s friends are weird (or all gay)
• Someone please for to helps me!
• Agents wanted: For CSI
• WORM CANNIBALISM TO GAIN MEMORIES OF DEAD WORMS
• Win $1000 a day
• You’ve got cash

If you get an email claiming to be a major professional of some kind (like a lawyer, doctor, judge or something) take a look at the email address.

Any lawyer, doctor, etc. worth their weight in salt does not use hotmail as their email provider.

It is pretty safe to assume that if you got an email from someone claiming to be such a type of professional and the email address is a hotmail address, it is spam or a phishing attempt and you should just delete it.

As a note for any lawyers, doctors, etc. reading this, if you are, you really need to get an email address with your own company’s domain in it.