CITP Blog - Formerly Freedom to Tinker

Tag: Spam

  • Engineering an insider-attack-resistant email system and why you wouldn't want to use it

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    Earlier this week, Felten made the observation that the government eavesdropping on Lavabit could be considered as an insider attack against Lavabit users. This leads to the obvious question: how might we design an email system that’s resistant to such an attack? The sad answer is that we’ve had this technology for decades but it…

  • There’s anonymity on the Internet. Get over it.

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    In a recent interview prominent antivirus developer Eugene Kaspersky decried the role of anonymity in cybercrime. This is not a new claim – it is touched on in the Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency Report and Cybersecurity Act of 2009, among others – but it misses the mark. Any Internet design would allow…

  • When spammers try to go legitimate

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    I hate to sound like a broken record, complaining about professional mail distribution / spam-houses that are entirely unwilling to require their customers to follow a strict opt-in discipline. But I’m going to complain again and I’m going to name names. Today, I got a spam touting a Citrix product (“Free virtualization training for you…

  • Assorted targeted spam

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    You can run, but you can’t hide. Here are a few of the latest things I’ve seen, in no particular order. On a PHPBB-style chat board which I sometimes frequent, there was a thread about do-it-yourself television repair, dormant for over a year. Recently, there was a seemingly robotic post, from a brand new user,…

  • Targeted political spam

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    I’ve complained about spammers before, but this one is new. I recently received a spam that supports the case of Michael Skelly for Congress, saying negative things about incumbent John Culberson. What’s interesting: this is my home precinct. These people are actually competing for my vote. This leads to the question: how on earth did…

  • A curious phone scam

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    My phone at work rings.  The caller ID has a weird number (“50622961841” – yes, it’s got an extra digit in it).  I answer.  It’s a recording telling me I can get lower rates on my card (what card?) if I just hit one to connect me to a representative.  Umm, okay.  “1”.  Recorded voiced:…

  • Cheap CAPTCHA Solving Changes the Security Game

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    ZDNet’s “Zero Day” blog has an interesting post on the gray-market economy in solving CAPTCHAs. CAPTCHAs are those online tests that ask you to type in a sequence of characters from a hard-to-read image. By doing this, you prove that you’re a real person and not an automated bot – the assumption being that bots…

  • 30th Anniversary of First Spam Email; No End in Sight

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    Today marks the 30th anniversary of (what is reputed to be) the first spam email. Here’s the body of the email: DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T. THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY OF COMPUTERS HAS EVOLVED FROM THE TENEX OPERATING SYSTEM AND…

  • spammers gone wild

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    I’m sure this sort of behavior is old news, but it’s still really annoying.  Starting last night and continuing as I’m writing this, some annoying spammer has been forging my email address as the “From” line of a variety of spams.  This is causing a staggering volume of backscatter, mostly of the “Delivery Status Notification…

  • attack of the context-sensitive blog spam?

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    I love spammers, really I do. Some of you may recall my earlier post here about freezing your credit report. In the past week, I’ve deleted two comments that were clearly spam and that made it through Freedom to Tinker’s Akismet filter. Both had generic, modestly complementary language and a link to some kind of…