Internet Defense Technologies

If you get this email and you actually are a Western Union customer, go directly to the website to check it out, but don’t click on the link.  This is a phishing attempt:

Dear Customer,

This is your official notification from Western Union. Your account has been limited due to a login attempt failure. To remove this limitation, you have to confirm your information on file with us. To continue, visit our website by clicking here >>

If you do not confirm your information, your Western Union online account will be permanently suspended and deleted from our system.

We are continually improving our website to better serve you. Be sure to check back with us often as we add exciting new services to meet your financial needs.

If you have questions or need assistance, our customer service team is here to help. Just visit our website.
Be sure to remember and protect your Username and Password. You will need them next time you sign in to our website.

___________________
DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL. IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS, PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE.

There is a new trend developing of email spam messages getting some filters that have no message text, just an MP3 file attached.

I have even heard some with the URL being said over heavy breathing (porn site you think?).

From what we have seen there is nothing dangerous with the MP3 file itself, but you don’t want to visit those websites.  Delete the file, you will be fine, nothing critical will be lost.

There are so many problems with service based internet issues today it’s a wonder anyone still emails! From Spam, to Malware, to Viruses, Phishing attempts and on and on it is a barrage of funk.

Imagine walking down the street and people yelling at you to buy this or try that or whatever other random comments real life Spam would consist of. Or if you went into a department store to buy something and no one was there to charge you for your purchases. I’d walk out and never go back!

As was recently announced Google’s Postini was shut down preventing many people from getting emails for hours and some for days.

Service support, per Tweets was nil. Which only adds to the irritation because if there is anything worse than having problems with internet and mail it is having problems with trying to resolve those problems!

There are REAL solutions to Spam and the host of other internet related filth out there!

Total Mail Defense (TMD) – not to be confused with Total Male Enhancement – is one of those providers!

I have had great success, uninterrupted, by using this service. There is no “Spam folder” to have to deal with, it is set up for real people who have real lives that don’t need extra work created by a “solution”.

There is no such thing, especially from @yahoo.com:

From: UNCC (tmsablan@yahoo.com)
Subject: REFUND PAYMENT FROM UNCC

United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) In Affiliation with Barrack Obama Campaign to Assist Scammed Individuals In The Settlement of Disputes through Trust Credit Bank.

Attention: Beneficiary

I wish to congratulate you for the approval of the compensation payment of $500,000.00 USD by this commission. The United Nation Compensation Commission (UNCC) was created in 1991 as a subsidiary organ of the UN Security Council. Its mandate is to retrieve lost funds through various law agents and also to process claims and pay compensation for losses and damages suffered as a direct result of Internet Fraud.
The UNCC in conjunction with the Barrack Obama Campaign on the 12th of October 2008 organized a confederation meeting which ended 2 weeks later with the UN Secretary General. This meeting was first held on the 8th of April 2003 by the then secretary to the UN. You can view this page for your perusal then do the needful by contacting the paying agent accordingly.
(http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2003/ik344.doc.htm).

This email is directed to all individuals that have been scammed in all parts of the world. In reference to the just concluded meeting, the UNCC in affiliation with Barrack Obama Campaign for Global Economic Crises eradication have agreed to compensate them with categorical payment sum of $500,000.00 each.

Trust Credit Bank(TCB) will handle the transfer of the fund through their Online Transfer System (E-Transfer). Your payment file has been forwarded to them so you should contact the bank today as soon as you receive this letter of notification.

Contact info:

Bank: Trust Credit Bank
Contact Person: Mr. Peter Brown
Temporary Emails: trustcredit@gmail.com or trustcredit1@gmail.com

DO REMEMBER YOUR PAYMENT REFERENCE: BR/FMWH/1001/09 AND IF YOU HAVE IN THE PAST MADE ANY FORM OF PAYMENT FOR THE TRANSFER OF THIS FUNDS, PLEASE DO STATE IT FOR OUR RECORD PURPOSE AS WE HAVE A MANDATE TO REPORT BACK TO THE PRESIDENCY THE PROGRESS OF THIS PAYMENT.

Mrs. Karen B. Magolie
Secretary

It seems like a ridiculous question.

I didn’t know it was Spam.

It looked legitimate.

I thought it was from my aunt Gertrude.

I needed to lose weight and it looked promising.

The endless list goes on and on, but the truth is marketing. You were a recipient of well planned marketing. No matter what you think the reason you responded to the Spam was the reality is you were “hooked”!

The subject line or that is was from someone who looked familiar, whatever it was you took hold of the line. That is what marketing does. Good. Bad. Legal. Illegal. All the same, it hooks you.

Would you open the front door of your house to someone who maybe looked like someone you know? NO!

If you start looking at your email as a real life communication channel, like your front door, you would think twice and stay away from the curiosity that is often just bait for bigger troubles!

Unfortunately, the answer is yes.

Often times when there is economic strife people will look for a get rich quick scheme, or buy more Lottery tickets than usual, or look for a great deal on something they are looking to buy.

In today’s economic and electronic times this means more Spam, more Spam, more Spam.

Spammers are predatory in that they don’t care who they solicit or what they solicit. They only care about their own bottom line. Not the American way, certainly not the way of a Republic, but it seems to be the growing trend in today’s modern world, an “all for one, one for none” type of an attitude, which helped with the economic collapse the world is experiencing today.

Recent surveys from the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) suggest that 80% of consumers surveyed after visiting a Spam site or responding to a Spam message in the U.S. don’t think that it is possible to get a virus, mal-ware etc., from such a visit.

This “never going to happen to me” attitude is problematic because in fact it likely will happen to anyone clicking through to a dangerous site solicited by Spam.

Further, according to the survey, most people who think that they cannot be infected are the best targets because they don’t pay attention and look for problems in their system and therefore are in a “dangerous” position.

This is just the right mixture of real (but very old and no longer a problem) virus and a hoax. A friend of mine sent this to me (along with their entire address book) who didn’t bother editing the copy which says it was from her son (she has no son).

This is a hoax, not a real email and you should delete it.

As a note upfront: If you read the entire Snopes page this email links to, you would find at the bottom in reference to this exact email being sent around:

“The virus it references (i.e., the Mail Server Report worm) was a real one, but it’s neither new nor currently rampant (as claimed in the warning text), nor does it manifest itself in the fashion described (since the “symptoms” provided in the warning are merely a reworking of the text of an earlier virus hoax). All in all, that message doesn’t really merit the dire warning to “SEND A COPY OF THIS TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS, And ask the to PASS IT ON IMMEDIATELY!”

The email being sent around:

Subject: Warning - READ IMMEDIATELY !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

HI ALL THIS was sent to me by our son who is in charge of the computers for the state of Florida — whenever he receives anything like this it is a warning to the State as well as all us little people –

VERY IMPORTANT , PLEASE READ THIS

Anyone-using Internet mail such as Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and so on.

This information arrived this morning, Direct from both Microsoft and Norton

Please send it to everybody you know who has Access to the Internet.

You may receive an apparently harmless e-mail titled ‘Mail Server Report’

If you open either file, a message will appear on your screen saying: ‘It is too late now, your life is no longer beautiful…’

Subsequently you will LOSE EVERYTHING IN YOUR PC, And the person who sent it to you will gain access to your Name, e-mail and password. This is a new virus which started to circulate on Saturday afternoon. AOL has already confirmed the severity, and the anti virus software’s are not capable of destroying it.

The virus has been created by a hacker who calls himself ‘life owner’.

PLEASE SEND A COPY OF THIS E-MAIL TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS, And ask them to PASS IT ON IMMEDIATELY!

THIS HAS BEEN CONFIRMED BY SNOPES.

http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/mailserver.asp

Alan Ralsky is the Michael Jordan of the Spam world, in that he is prolific and very influential in the community.

Alan has made public appearances in a variety of media sources, including the Detroit Times, which makes him stand out from the seedy Spammer crowd. Not to defame him, but just to illustrate the defiance he wages, it is not unlike a child molester wearing a T-Shirt declaring himself such, as was the case a few years ago with the guy who declared himself over the net. And while it is appreciated and frankly both should be branded it nonetheless leaves little one can do about it when the crimes are veiled.

According to the Detroit Times, Ralsky pled guilty to various charges relating to Spam and agreed to testify against other Spammers in an effort to truncate his own sentence, which is why his name has come back to the forefront of mainstream media.

For years there has been an ongoing Federal investigation into the crimes of Spammers, including Ralsky, and U.S. Attorney Terrance Berg seems to consider this recent coup to be the modern day Al Capone case in that they always get their man!

Just one of our systems blocked 13.1 million messages in one week.

That equaled 99% of all traffic sent through it!  Meaning that our customers servers never had to bear that load and this barrage never slowed down their systems.

With 1% of email making it past our first level of filtering, another 27% were blocked at the next stage.

Through all of this, not one legitimate email was blocked.

This is WAY more than usual amounts of traffic, email spam is definitely not slowing down.

Spam levels have surged to the highest in about a year and a half. Image spam, a technique not seen for some years has resurfaced and at extremely heavy volume.

Image spam can be difficult to detect due to it’s lack of easily identifiable content.

Images are used commonly on many on-line systems today to validate user logins to websites such as ebay, financial institutions and many others. The purpose of these is to ensure that a real person (and not a computer program) is logging in to a given system.

Many of you have undoubtedly had to decipher hazy characters, letters and numbers in order to change a password, sign up for an account or bid for an item. This is precisely why image spam is difficult to detect - using the same rationale, spammers reason that since email systems are automated and individual messages are not monitored individually by people, sending spam that simply contains an image is a great way to defeat many spam filtering systems.

This may account for the increase in spam you are seeing and we have recently published an article on some safe computing habits you should implement.