Archive for the 'spam' Category

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MySpace: bulletin and other spam

Published on October 25, 2006 in spam. 19 Comments Tags: , , .

MySpace spam

MySpace is a vast collection of web real estate begging to be spammed. I keep receiving spam bulletins from some of my MySpace friends, so this is a little explanation of what MySpace spam is and how it can be fixed:

Tricks used by MySpace spammers

Trick #1: hidden bulletin post form
As described by ericis.com, MySpace did not protect the bulletin submission page enough. Bulletins could be sent by an unsuspecting logged-in user through a hidden form, instead of only through the official submission form. So you might click on what seems to be just a link to a site/profile, but you are really sending a bulletin to all your friends. This mail might invite them to click on a link which hides another hidden form and …
STATUS: This vulnerability has been addressed by MySpace, but whether it is completely fixed is another question.

Trick #2: man-in-the-middle password theft

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Colorbar: belgian spam

Published on August 25, 2006 in spam. 5 Comments

Colorbar: belgian spamIn the last three days I have received 3 mails from Colorbar, a “lively private club for colorful people”. The first one didn’t trigger my suspicion, since I am subscribed to some music-related mailing lists. The two next mails came for 2 @forret.com aliases of which I am certain they never subscribed to any list. So I took a closer look at the email. No contact details are given, no indication of where the email addresses came from, no possibility to unsubscribe, i.e. it’s a spam mail. To be even more specific: a belgian spam message.
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Mark Hostetler, Austrian spammer

Published on June 16, 2006 in spam. 16 Comments

(This is a blog post about an Austrian spammer. The reason I did not put anything more offensive in this post’s title, is because there is another Mark Hostetler, a Florida-based Wildlife Ecology professor. He’s probably a nice guy. I’m talking about a scumbag who lives in Vienna)

Belgian spammers?

I was just looking at today’s catch by my Akismet comment spam filter. BTW: the existence of spam filters like Akismet and Spam Karma is the only reason blogs can still be interactive. I already have more than 2600 detected spam comments since I migrated to WordPress: that’s 2600 in 3 months or 30 a day on average. Since it’s an accelerating thing, I guess I must be at 100 spams per day now.
I noticed a lot of .be domain names, which seemed kind of new to me:
Akismet: spam detector for WordPress
Are there really Belgian spammers, with Belgian addresses that you actually could go to and throw bricks through the window? Not really. The first traces went to Poland:
Pikod Darek - Poznan - PolandPikod Darek - Poznan - Poland
A Mr Pikod Darek from Poznan (Poland) has registered a load of .be domains on Dec 7th, 2005 through EuroDNS. The DNS registration was last updated on May 29th, 2006, probably because they were ready to start spamming then. All these .be sites are hosted at theplanet.com with 70.87.15.* IP addresses. I doubt Pikod hired multiple dedicated servers himself, he probably just bought a minimal shared hosting from a reseller. Why minimal? Because the only thing the .be domain does is forward you to an URL like http://www.find.fm/?aid=4077. Who is behind this ‘search engine you trust’? Enter Hostetler!
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Size doesn’t matter

Published on March 29, 2006 in spam. 7 Comments

Sometimes a spam mail escapes my filters and shows up in my inbox. Last week I got a “Enlarge your …” mail with some girl’s name in the From field. I deleted it right away but subconsciously I had already read some of the content. So I went back and retrieved it from my Deleted Items just to be sure: they really talk about “enlarge a penis up to 10 cm“? (UPDATE: I read this as 10cm TOTAL length, not 10 cm EXTRA length)
Indeed:

First off: as a straight guy I have no practical knowledge of what average size a girl has to put up with these days. Nor am I about to disclose my own dimensions (I want women to like me for my personality). Nevertheless, 10cm or 4″ strikes me as rather short, certainly as an ideal to be reached by taking pills. For those who cannot estimate dimensions: that’s the height of a cheap Nokia phone (the 1100, say).
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