StillSecure, After All These Years

'Tis the season - for spam

Barracuda Networks released a new survey they did on spam today. According to this survey between 90% and 95% of all email sent is spam.  I knew the number was high but that is just staggering.  Also of interest was that business executives view spam as the worst junk advertising.  Spam far out paced junk postal mail and telemarketing. I don't know but I think telemarketing calls are the worst, even worse than spam. Also with the holiday season, we are seeing a pick up in holiday theme related spam.  Also according to the survey, expect a flood of New Years related spam around new years resolutions. 

If nothing else spammers are resourceful and persistent. What I could never for the life of me understand is who clicks on these emails and buys the things the spammers sell?  If no one did, there would be no spam.  So I guess one mans spam is another mans great find.  Anyway here is hoping your own spam filters are in place and sparing you from the deluge!

How not to do marketing

God knows that when another company does some stupid marketing, I am the first one to jump up and down and call them on it.  Some companies and former friends have gotten upset with me for doing it, but I call them as I see them.  So it is with some regret that I have to stand up and say that we at StillSecure did some stupid marketing, that I have to apologize to my blogging brethren for.  It seems our PR folks, realizing the tremendous influence security bloggers exert (hey don't forget the most influential people in IT Security list), thought the best way to reach them was to send out a story pitch to all the people on our blogrolls. This is the same way they do to it in pitching to the traditional media. WRONG!  That's what makes blogging, blogging.  It was not cool, a mistake and we are all sorry here.  We will make sure that does not happen again.  Lesson learned and now on with the show.

A new take on the Nigerian bank scam - Kelly's Heroes

I am sure you have all received the usual email story of the bank or government officer from some African country that is looking for help in moving millions of dollars out of the country.  It is sometimes the widow or relative of a disposed leader or some other such thing.  Though I never respond, I frankly enjoy reading the stories and wonder how anyone would be stupid enough to get involved.  Do you really think there are 10 million dollars (american) waiting and these people would be kind enough to give you a 30% or better fee to help them?  If you respond to that stuff, you deserve what you get. 

Today, though I saw for the first time a new wrinkle on this one.  Showing that the bad guys know how to use current events, I call this one Kelly's Heroes, named after the Clint Eastwood movie about a bunch of American GI's taking stolen Nazi gold out of Europe at the end of WWII.  In this scam it is some British soldiers looking to ship out dollars from Iraq.  I publish it here for your amusement:

Hello,

I am Major Ralph Harland, I am a British officer attached to UN peace Keeping force in Iraq, I am the commanding officer of the First Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment, as you may know everyday, there are several cases of insurgent’s attacks and suicide bombs going on here.

We managed to Move funds belonging to some demised persons who were attacked and killed through insurgent attacks. The total amount is US$9.5 Million dollars in cash. We want to move this money to you, so that you may keep our share for us until when we shall come over to meet you.

We will take 60%, my partner and I. You take 40%. No strings attached, just help us move it out of Iraq, Iraq is a war zone.

We plan on using Diplomatic courier and shipping the money out in two large metallic boxes, using diplomatic immunity. If you are interested I will send you the full details; my aim is to find a good partner that we can trust and assist us can you be trusted?

When you receive this letter, kindly send me an e-mail here  ralpharland@yahoo.co.uk , or majorralpharland@aol.co.uk signifying your interest including your most confidential telephone/fax numbers for quick communication and also your contact details.

This business is 100% risk free.

Respectfully,

Major Ralph Harland

Hey Computerworld, whats with the cheap pop up ads

I was reading a post by Douglas Schweitzer on compromised credit cards and referred to another ComputerWorld article by Jaikumar Vijayan.  I read ComputerWorld alot.  Some of my blogging friends have blogs on ComputerWorld and usually the stories are pretty good.  Today though, when I clicked on the link to Vijayan's story, I was instead taken to a full page ad.  You know the type, up on the right corner is a link to skip this ad.  I really didn't find it too bothersome. I skipped the ad (I usually do), and the article loaded. I was about 3 words into it when another ad popped up on screen. This was one of those that you would normally see if you hit the "scroll over to expand" type thing.  It was blinging and loud.  Before I even had a chance to close that one, another smaller one started up.  I finally closed them both and was able to read the first page of the article.  At the end of the page I hit next page link. On the next page of the story, same exact thing.  Except this time there were three of the popping ads!  I just decided not to read the rest of the story, rather than put up with the adware at that point.

My experience made me feel like I was at some sleazy, third rate site trying too hard to push a mortgage refinance down my throat.  ComputerWorld should be better than that.  I am not against advertising and usually look at ads on the page of the story, but when they make it too hard to read the story because the ads are too intrusive, I just won't read the story or go to the web site.  Come on ComputerWorld, stop this!

Spam levels hitting new highs

Good article by Ellen Wulfhorst in ComputerWorld about the increased levels of Spam we are seeing this holiday season.  Postini says 93% of email was spam over the last few months.  I would tend to agree with that.  Even with all the spam filters that we have at the gateway, on the server and in my mail client, it is still getting by way too often. 

The article points out that the reasons for this increase are that spammers are using new tricks to get by the filters.  They are using image e-mails that account for 30% of spam. Another big player are the phishing emails, which appear to be legitimate. But my all time insidious ones are the pump and dumps.  I have been getting hit especially hard with these lately.  Maybe you have too, the email is from a persons name, like John Doe and subject is, It's John. Or some similar use of the persons name. What boggles my mind, is who in their right mind would read this crap, let alone go out and buy a stock they were touting.  However, one thing about spammers, if they are not making money, they don't do it, so there must be some idiots who act on this.  For me, I never have a problem hitting the delete button early and often.  Real simple, don't buy anything or respond to the Spam, take the economic incentive out of it and we will all save the billions of dollars it costs us!