Wednesday, July 7. 2004
The next SPAM Problem - SPIT
Qovia is warning that there will be a new SPAM problem coming to a voice mailbox near you - Spam over IP Telephony (SPIT).
Well, at least they're out there anticipating it. Yuck.
Well, at least they're out there anticipating it. Yuck.
Friday, July 2. 2004
Wonder why you keep seeing offers for drugs?
From Network World:
Promoting drugs is the aim of 30% of all spam, with Viagra alone accounting for 14.1% of spam.
Friday, June 25. 2004
What were the spammers doing?
Monday and Tuesday of this week, we had a significant downturn in SPAM -- The stats are:| Date | Total Email | Delivered | SPAM |
|---|
| 2004-06-14 Mon | 27578 | 6997 | 20972 |
| 2004-06-15 Tue | 28105 | 6099 | 22354 |
| 2004-06-21 Mon | 21764 | 6183 | 15479 |
| 2004-06-22 Tue | 18127 | 4094 | 13970 |
| 2004-06-23 Wed | 27826 | 6759 | 21277 |
| 2004-06-24 Thu | 27710 | 6941 | 20612 |
Wed and Thur we're back up to normal levels. The total amount of email dropped a little more than the amount of SPAM. So the conclusion is...we got a LOT less SPAM Monday and Tuesday.
Were the spammers reconfiguring their software to use tens of thousands of new relay hosts? Were they taking a holiday?
I have no idea - but any time the spammers change behavior, I'm on my guard.
Thursday, June 10. 2004
Referrers List is Gone - Please Comment
You may notice that the Top Referrers list is gone from my sidebar. I got hit with "Referrer Spam" this week. I've noticed for weeks my hit counts going up with adult sites as referrers, but at first wasn't sure why. They found my blog this week, and now I know why.
The adult sites are trying to increase their "page rank" by having more sites link to them. So they have robots that find weblogs that have automated referrers lists, and then increase the hit count but hitting the page over and over again. Before I turned it off, one incest-taboo.org page had 107 referrer hits in my list.
The dev team is debating how to handle this. I deal with SPAM all day, and at this point I think the only effective way to deal with this is to have the blogger approve referrers. There's some resistance to this on the Dev team. Please comment here...do you agree with me? Or do you think some kind of automated tool would work, and be preferable?
JaBbA says let me hear you...
Update...
I've deleted the porn spammers and put in some blocks to keep them out, so I've reactived my referrers list. However, we're still looking for a real solution - this is only temporary.
The adult sites are trying to increase their "page rank" by having more sites link to them. So they have robots that find weblogs that have automated referrers lists, and then increase the hit count but hitting the page over and over again. Before I turned it off, one incest-taboo.org page had 107 referrer hits in my list.
The dev team is debating how to handle this. I deal with SPAM all day, and at this point I think the only effective way to deal with this is to have the blogger approve referrers. There's some resistance to this on the Dev team. Please comment here...do you agree with me? Or do you think some kind of automated tool would work, and be preferable?
JaBbA says let me hear you...Update...
I've deleted the porn spammers and put in some blocks to keep them out, so I've reactived my referrers list. However, we're still looking for a real solution - this is only temporary.