1 Billion Spammers Served | Deep Insights into Spam. Our 1 Billionth Spam Message On Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 06:20 (GMT) Project Honey Pot received its billionth email spam message. The message, a picture of which is displayed below, was a United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) phishing scam. The spam email was sent by a bot running on a compromised machine in India (122.167.68.1).
The spamtrap address to which the message was sent was originally harvested on November 4, 2007 by a particularly nasty harvester (74.53.249.34) that is responsible for 53,022,293 other spam messages that have been received by Project Honey Pot. Every time Project Honey Pot receives a message we estimate that another 125,000 are sent to real victims. Our billionth message represents approximately 125 trillion spam messages that have been sent since Project Honey Pot started in 2004.
At this milestone, we wanted to take a second to report some of our findings. Who Are These Spammers? How Do They Operate? Whom Do They Target? The Future of Spam. Microsoft dirty tricks that were never revealed - Technology Evangelist. « iChat AV - The best unusable video and voice chat program | Main | Microsoft dirty tricks, part two » Microsoft dirty tricks that were never revealed Microsoft settled today its anti-trust case with the people of Iowa, which may well be the last anti-trust case against the world’s largest software company, at least in this cycle.
Iowa was all that remained of the original 18 states and the District of Columbia that sued Redmond several years ago. Now that the case is settled I’d like to write a little bit about something that happened in an earlier case – Burst v. Microsoft – but was never revealed. I’ve written before about Burst v. Now, as they say, for the rest of the story….. Months after the Microsoft/Burst settlement I received e-mail from a former Microsoft contractor: “Now that Burst v. “Several months after all of the tapes were gathered, MS legal started asking for restores of any pst files captured, the tapes “mysteriously” went missing. This is Bob, back again. TrackBack 2. 3. Undercover Researchers Expose Chinese Internet Water Army. In China, paid posters are known as the Internet Water Army because they are ready and willing to ‘flood’ the internet for whoever is willing to pay. The flood can consist of comments, gossip and information (or disinformation) and there seems to be plenty of demand for this army’s services.
This is an insidious tide. Positive recommendations can make a huge difference to a product’s sales but can equally drive a competitor out of the market. When companies spend millions launching new goods and services, it’s easy to understand why they might want to use every tool at their disposal to achieve success. The loser in all this is the consumer who is conned into making a purchase decision based on false premises. And for the moment, consumers have little legal redress or even ways to spot the practice. Paid posting is a well-managed activity involving thousands of individuals and tens of thousands of different online IDs.
What’s more, the content they post is measurably different. [1111.4297] Battling the Internet Water Army: Detection of Hidden Paid Posters. Hidden Industry Dupes Social Media Users. A trawl of Chinese crowdsourcing websites—where people can earn a few pennies for small jobs such as labeling images—has uncovered a multimillion-dollar industry that pays hundreds of thousands of people to distort interactions in social networks and to post spam. The report’s authors, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, also found evidence that crowdsourcing sites in the U.S. are similarly dominated by ethically questionable jobs. They conclude that the rapid growth of this way of making money will make paid shills a serious security problem for websites and those who use them around the world. A paper describing their results is available on the Arxiv pre-print server.
Ben Zhao, an associate professor of computer science at UCSB (and a TR35 winner in 2006), started looking into the largely uncharted crowdsourcing industry in China after working closely with RenRen, a social network that is sometimes called the “Facebook of China,” to track malicious activity on the site. Threat Level - Privacy, Crime and Security Online.