Message Control
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
Here we go again. The vultures are circling, ready to take advantage of people affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill; just like they do after every disaster.
We just blocked a stack of emails purporting to offer help collecting money from the 20 billion dollar compensation fund BP is so graciously providing. In reality though, these emails are an advance-fee fraud attempt.
more »
Tags: fraud, rotten spam, scam
Posted in Email Fraud, Message Control, Spam Tactics | Comments Off
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010
If you don’t respect your online identity, nobody else will and before long your in-box will rot and fall off. At least that’s what our mother told us. She also told us to eat our vegetables that we’d go blind if we forwarded email to ourselves.
We usually take what Mom says with a grain of salt.
more »
Tags: anti-virus, email, funny, humor, malware, spam, viruses
Posted in All About Email, Message Control, Spam Tactics | Comments Off
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
While the dominant Internet email providers (Hotmail, MSN, AOL, Gmail & Yahoo) frequently talk about their commitment to fighting spam, they are actually amazingly inattentive to the rampant spam abuses allowed and enabled by their own systems.
We only occasionally point out examples of how sloppy, permissive and ineffectual these firms are in regards to spam, because thoroughly documenting the spam faults of these enterprises would be a full time job in and of itself.
That said, from time to time the abuses are just so obvious (easy to spot and catch) rampant and perpetual that we can’t help but wonder if they even deploy more than 2 or 3 high-school summer interns to their entire anti-abuse efforts.
more »
Tags: botnet, spoofing
Posted in Above The Law, Message Control, Spam Tactics | Comments Off
Friday, July 9th, 2010
If you spend much time on the Internet you’ll notice that everybody wants your email address. The reasons they give for wanting it vary but they’ll generally come down to one of these:
- They use it to identify you — Email addresses are unique by definition and therefore make good user names.
- They want to keep you up to date — In other words they want to send you marketing messages.
- They allow others to contact you — This applies to sites that publish profiles like forums and social networking sites.
- They want to sell it — Bet you didn’t know your address was worth money.
more »
Tags: disposable email address
Posted in All About Email, Message Control | Comments Off
Wednesday, July 7th, 2010
Spam is a volume business. The spammer that sends the most spam to the most addresses wins. Therefore, spammers need to continually find lots of new email addresses.
An email address collector (a.k.a. email address extractor, harvester or scraper) is a software tool used by spammers to crawl the web looking for email addresses. more »
Tags: email
Posted in All About Email, Message Control, Spam Tactics | Comments Off
Monday, June 21st, 2010
An important email safety practice is to avoid clicking on links that aren’t safe. This begs the question “How do I know if a link is safe to click?” The truth is you can never be sure, but there are ways of mitigating the risk.
A link’s presentation has two major components:
- The visible text (or image)
- The URL that the link references
more »
Tags: browsers
Posted in Message Control, Phishing Lessons | Comments Off
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010
This is priceless!
We just intercepted what might be the coolest Craigslist Phish ever. Maybe even the trickiest Phishing fraud ever — it’s definitely among the best we’ve seen.
For the sake of context, the normal Phishing and identity theft attempt goes something like this: You get an email that says something dire like “your account has been hacked/suspended/overdrawn or whatever” and then presents you with a link to a fake login page so the phisher can trick you into providing your username and password.
more »
Tags: fraud, phishing, spoofing, virus
Posted in Email Fraud, Message Control, Phishing Lessons | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010
Up until now, we haven’t really seen many “American Express” Phishing fraud emails, though we’re not really sure why.
Perhaps it is related to smaller market share, or a perception that such card holders might be slightly more sophisticated and harder to trick? Whatever the reason, based on volume of the latest campaign, it’s irrelevant now.
Emails are arriving in mass, with a wide variety of spoofed Sender variations such as:
more »
Tags: amex, fraud, phishing, spoofing
Posted in Message Control, Phishing Lessons | 2 Comments »
Friday, May 28th, 2010
We’re not really sure how to react to email fraud that targets lawyers. After all, the very nature of the legal profession requires the lawyer to keep a sharp eye out for documents and people that misrepresent themselves. Therefore, if any group should be able to spot fraud you’d think it would be those who practice law.
Apparently this is not the case.
Based on the relatively high volume of email fraud attempts aimed at lawyers, it appears that lawyers are actually worthwhile targets for scams. Otherwise, this type of fraud would be far less frequent. more »
Tags: 419 scams, debt collecting, fraud
Posted in Email Fraud, Message Control | 12 Comments »
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
Not all phishing attempts are out to gain access to your bank account. Some are after a lower profile target that can ultimately be worse: Your email account.
Many people have several email accounts so the damage incurred from handing over access to one of them can range from mildly irritating to totally devastating. If you maintain “throwaway” accounts that primarily serve as spam traps and/or places to send login info for unimportant sites, having one of them breached is not a big deal. more »
Tags: fraud, phishing, spoofing
Posted in Message Control, Spam Tactics | Comments Off
