Back in 2010 I wrote a piece about reviews on software download sites. In it I discovered that some developers manipulated the public perception of their program by adding fake reviews, usually in the form of a five-star rating for their programs. The problem here was that some developers went overboard with the fake reviews [...]

Categories: The Web

A US man who sent more than 27 million spam to Facebook users has turned himself in to FBI officers in California after being put on their wanted list.  Sanford Wallace, from Las Vegas developed a program that was able to circumvent Facebook’s spam filters.  The software then lured over 500,000 people to hand over [...]

Categories: Facebook, Tutorials Basic

I never really understood why it was this difficulty to identify the people benefiting from running a botnet. I mean, while it is relatively easy to use chained proxies, middleman and other means to stay anonymous, it is not as easy to anonymize the flow of money. Eventually, the money will land at the people [...]

Categories: Security, The Web

Most Internet users receive spam, largely because they have revealed their email address at one point or the other on the web. It does not really matter what they did, whether they signed up for free offers, an Internet service, left a comment on a blog or replied to an email that they did receive; [...]

Categories: Email, Tutorials Basic

You may have read that Google created an extension for its Google Chrome browser exclusively that can be used to block results in Google search from appearing again. The main reason for creating the extension however is not that, even though it is a nice side effect. You see, every site that gets blocked is [...]

Categories: Browsing, Google, Google Chrome

Blog spam, in the form of manual or automatic comments, trackbacks or pingbacks, has always been a problem for bloggers. It is just to lucrative to run a software that spams links all around in the hope that some will stick and benefit the site that they link to. List of blogs that do not [...]

Categories: ghacks

Yesterday I wrote here that global spam levels had dropped mysteriously month on month since August 2010 from a high of about a quarter of a trillion messages a day to about 50 billion.  Just to show how quickly everything can change in the world of technology, it all suddenly changed again yesterday. New reports [...]

Categories: Security, The Web

It’s been reported that the total volume of global spam email that is being sent has fallen, month-on-month since the beginning of August 2010 and nobody knows why. The fall, which you can see in the graph below, shows a steady decline from almost a quarter of a trillion messages every day to just 50 [...]

Categories: Security, Spyware

If you have an email account you will receive spam. That’s a fact unless you are very, very careful using it. If you sign up on websites, even respectable ones like big shopping sites, there is a chance that you will eventually receive spam. If you reply to emails or send out emails chance is [...]

Categories: Email