I have seen the topic make the Digg frontpage and I was wondering why it exactly did make it. A little bit of common sense which every webmaster should have is all that is needed to know what this new spam preparation comments are all about.

If you do run a website you might have come upon comments that are posted that contain one sentence saying something unrelated but positive about the website or webmaster. Those comments can be clearly identified as spam because they do not add to the discussion or article in any way.

Categories: ghacks, The Web

If there is one thing for sure it is that spammers are creative in finding new ways to bypass anti spam filters. They send distorted pictures, add random text to their messages, zip their spam, use excel files, pdf files and nowadays fdf files. Fdf files ? What’s that again ?

Categories: Email, Security

The Internet community has been pestered with yet another wave of spam mails containing fake membership information and e-cards. The spammers use two attack vectors if you click on the ip that is listed in those emails. They try to convince you to download a so called Secure Login Applet which is nothing more than an infected executable named applet.exe and also try to use several known exploits.

Categories: Email, Security

Spammers tend to use more advanced spam methods to avoid the dreaded spam filters that become better and better. I would like to present some examples from my personal mail folder and analyze the latest image spam trends. Many spam filters concentrate their efforts on blacklists and the text that the mail contains. Spam that is not caught immediately will be caught in the future if the user marks that mail as spam. Language and keyword filters and whitelists do their part and reduce spam and false positives.

Categories: Email, Security

We all known that quite a few spammers make big bucks by offering software like antivirus, antispyware or hard drive utilities whose main function is to either spy on the user or spam him. Those products are quite common nowadays and it is difficulty for an inexperienced user to remove the software completely again.

Categories: Operating Systems, Tools, Windows

Everyone knows how to send and recieve emails but only a few understand the concept behind the process. Emails are normally not send directly from your machine to the recipient. Mailservers that are setup by your ISP for instance process incoming emails and send them on their way. This information is stored in the headers of the email. Understanding email headers helps you identify spam directed at you.

Categories: Knowledge

Spam is a big issue these days and people are always on the look out for ways to stop it. There is little that we as internet users can do about spam because there is always going to be a bunch of people that believe that spam is a good way to get people to buy things from them. There is little to this theory because so many people are so aware of spam that there is little in the way of sales from this type of email that it is going way down hill and very fast at that. There is not a matter of people actually stopping anything from going on even though there is a big field of research that is trying to help with the problem of spam and how to stop it from reaching a person.

Categories: Knowledge

It´s a well know fact that some spammers use automated scripts that scan websites for email addresses and include them in their list of email addresses that will be spammed. Sarven Capadisli compiled a huge list of mechanisms to hide the email address to counter those robots. Most can only be used if you have certain rights on the website for example number seven uses javascript to hide the email address and this is normally not active for site users.

Categories: Security

Phishing, which is a construct of the words Password and Fishing, becomes more and more common on the internet. Many people recieve daily mails from sites like ebay and paypal but also from financial sites like citibank that look authentic and direct you to a website that looks like a copy of the original site. They “phish” your login data or credit card information from that fake website.

Categories: Knowledge