RunOnFriday.com Blog

If you ever need a good resource about spam — what it is, why it’s bad, and what you can do about it — check out SpamPrimer.com.  It only takes 15 minutes to read the entire site, and it’s well worth the effort.  (So much so, in fact, that I’ve added a permanent link to it on this blog’s sidebar.)

The Spam Primer started in 1996 as a way to help people deal with a new problem: spam. Even then, author Randy Cassingham realized spam would become a huge problem for everyone who depends on e-mail (and it has: it’s estimated that about 90 percent of all e-mail traffic is spam, which makes it difficult for legitimate e-mail to get through, and to find it among all the garbage!)

The next time you hear someone say “what’s the big deal, just delete it” (or worse, “just click cialis no rx the unsubscribe link”), send them to SpamPrimer.com.

For those of us who follow our BlogTalkRadio show, you may have noticed we haven’t had one for a few weeks.  It’s just the usual end-of-summer/back-to-school buy cialis online rush at the end of August that’s been keeping us too busy.  We plan on resuming our show soon, though we will probably be mid-week rather than Sunday.

BTW, I wanted to post this on our BTR blog, but they have removed that feature.  (Existing posts remain, but you can’t add or change posts.)  So much for the “B”.

The latest mass attack to hit my inbox has been a deluge of fake LinkedIn notifications.

Coming in the guise of a new message from one of your LinkedIn contacts, it’s actually an attempt to infect your system with a trojan, which will probably let “the bad guys” steal your passwords, or take remote control of your system, which will be added to their ever-growing botnets.

Now, I don’t have a LinkedIn account, though I do get the occasional “real” e-mail from them with an invitation to join from someone buy cialis I know. But, even if I did have an account, I would like to think that, upon opening my e-mail in the morning and finding 217 identical messages from overnight, red flags would be going up for just about anyone.

So, what’s the payload?

Continue reading ‘Deluge of fake LinkedIn notifications’ »

There was a rather, umm, “interesting” theme in today’s batch of spam that made it through my filters. Here’s a screenshot of the subjects, after deleting the dozens of duplicates.

Of course, the attached  HTML document, supposedly a link to a news report about a plane crash, was instead cialis dosage an obfuscated Javascript program which would attempt to download an infection.

(I didn’t bother investigating what, exactly, that infection was.)

It’s hard to imagine, but people still fall for scams like this all the time.

I just got another “you won the lottery” spam e-mails.

 This one was supposedly from “MICROSOFT CORPORATIONS”(sic), and contained the following message:

You have been awarded the sum of £1,625,000.00GBP in the MICROSOFT EMAIL PROMOTI
ON AWARD 2010.Cont  Mr Mark Anderson with your names,address,phone and Country to
[elided]@w.cn.cn or call +4470-[elided] for moreinformation on t
his award.

With the exception of removing the username part of the e-mail address, and the rest of the phone number, that is the exact contents of the e-mail, spelling and line breaks as-is.

With so many obvious “this isn’t real” warning signs, I find it hard to imagine that people still fall for this. Yet they do.

Continue reading ‘Do people really fall for this?’ »

A recent article in eWeek tells how the FBI has indicted 3 people in a $100 million rogue antivirus scam.  While it’s only an indictment, and not an arrest or conviction, at least it’s a start.

Three men have been indicted in what the FBI described as an international cybercrime operation that sold $100 million in rogue antivirus software to victims in more than 60 countries.

us bank ach department

Can cialis you imagine the number of victims, and the number of infected systems, from $100 million in sales?

Remember, if you get a popup from a program you don’t remember installing, with a link to buy a program to clean the infection, it’s probably a scam.  Don’t click on the link!

Oh well.  Kristina did well at Challenge of Champions XXVIII, but not enough to earn a trophy.

She went up against two high-brown belts (the highest belt before black), and beat the first one.  And, while she defended herself quite well against the buy cialis second, getting out of several near-submissions, it wasn’t enough to win.

She’s looking forward to December’s tournament.

http://www.ChallengeOfChampions.com

You’ve probably seen the ads.  ”My name is Todd Davis.  This is my Social Security Number…”  It’s from the CEO of LifeLock, a company that offers “identity theft protection”.  The service must be pretty darn good if the CEO is announcing his Social Security Number to the world, with a “just try to steal my identity” arrogance.

Well, you’d be wrong.

Continue reading ‘Identity theft “protection” — does it work?’ »

Just a reminder that there is no BlogTalkRadio order cialis show this week for the Memorial Day weekend, nor next week, due to Kristina’s competition at the Challenge of Champions.