Google today updated its Inside Search site, its homepage for all things search, with a handful of educational and interactive features that explain in layman’s terms how Google’s Search works. Did you know the web had over 30 trillion pages, by the way? Or that Google supports over 100 billion searches every month? Or that Google’s index is over 100 million gigabytes? If you find factoids like… → Read More
ENISA, the European Network and Information Security Agency, today called out drive-by exploits as the biggest, most increasing threat of the moment in the Internet landscape, amongst a sea of other all-too-familiar issues like worms, phishing and botnets. Spam, one of the oldest and most annoying aspects of being online, is the only threat that is on the wane, according to ENISA’s Threat… → Read More
Last week, Pinterest began curtailing the number of spammers and fake accounts on its system, in an effort to clear its platform off unwanted elements. At the time, the company noted that this latest big sweep would mainly affect those with larger follower counts, or those who had purchased fake followers. The majority (99 percent) of users would lose fewer than 10 followers, Pinterest said. → Read More
According to a report by The Next Web, there’s a hack making its way through some prominent Tumblr blogs, including The Verge and CNET.
Along with the spam on the pages itself, users are getting a popup message that would scare anyone’s mom. Trust me, we get these calls all of the time: “Should I click this?” In a word…NO. → Read More
Today Acquia, the company co-founded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert to commercialize the open source content management system, acquired Mollom, a spam filtering service also co-founded by Buytaert. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Acquia CEO Tom Erickson tells me the Mollom service will continue to be available for non-Drupal users and pricing will remain unchanged. → Read More
Looks like Google Play is growing up, combing its hair and trying to move away from its Wild West image: Android’s app store team has sent out a letter to its tens of thousands of developers informing them that it is making several changes to tighten its developer app policies. Areas that are covered include naming apps, app icons, payments, privacy, spam and advertising — effectively, a set of… → Read More
Several weeks ago, reports started to trickle out that a number of Dropbox users were under attack from spam. Since then, Dropbox has been investigating those attacks (with some help from a third-party) and today gave the first update on the progress, saying that some accounts were indeed accessed by hackers, but that it is now adding two-factor authentication and other security features to… → Read More
Notice anything weird about your email inbox? If you said there wasn’t as much spam lately that’s because researchers at FireEye and the venerable SpamHaus have essentially shut down the Grum botnet by marking and banning IP addresses. The botnet was responsible for 18% of the world’s spam and had lassoed 560,000 to 840,000 computers using a rootkit. → Read More
The spam attack and related possible address leak over at Dropbox may be even more serious than we originally thought. According to a message posted by the company over on its forums, they’ve now brought in “an outside team of experts” to assist Dropbox’s own security team in the investigation.
As of now, Dropbox says it hasn’t had any reports of unauthorized activity on user accounts, and it… → Read More
Some Dropbox users have begun reporting that their accounts are under attack from spam, but what’s more troubling is that, in select cases, the spam is hitting accounts where users claim their email address is only used on Dropbox and not elsewhere on the web. In other words, it’s a unique and private email address, which means there’s an increased possibility that the spam may be related to an… → Read More
Shame on you, WriteThat.Name. After more than one personal recommendation, not to mention glowing reviews around the web, I finally got around to signing up for WriteThat.Name, a service which automatically updates your Gmail address book with your contacts’ current information, which it pulls from their email signature lines. To be clear, the service is not new – we covered its $1.55 million seed… → Read More
Recently I tried to do a Google search for a wine to pair with swordfish, and it was pretty much a disaster (first world problems, I know, but still.) The problem is, web search results for certain topics are just overloaded with “search engine optimized” (SEO) content, which is very often just spam meant to attract people to dummy websites overloaded with ads. Of course, search engines work… → Read More
A warning: You can only spam Twitter so much before it brings in the law. As Twitter grows — the company now claims to have 140 million active users — naturally, it’s become an attractive target for spammers, which have collectively made their drek a familiar part of the social network’s user experience. Now Twitter is officially putting its foot down and enlisting the help of the federal… → Read More
Some 15 companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, PayPal plan to jointly work on a standard for blocking phishing e-mails by verifying that they come from legitimate companies. It seems obvious that trusted, legitimate companies could come together to do this, but it’s only started happening in the last 18 months.
DMARC.org – or the Domain-based Message Authentication… → Read More
Is Tumblr facing a growing spam problem? For many regular users of the blogging platform, the answer is “yes.” Although Tumblr hasn’t taken to its own blog to provide a public update on its progress in fighting spam, it did recently address the concerns of a high-profile Tumblr user – the associate producer of NPR’s Fresh Air, Melody Kramer, who maintains a blog for the popular program hosted on… → Read More
New figures from Facebook reveal how often the social networking site’s users are hacked. In the blog post announcing the forthcoming “Trusted Friends” feature, Facebook also an included infographic detailing Facebook’s security measures. One figure in particular jumped out at security researchers: every day, “only .06%” of Facebook’s 1 billion logins are compromised. Or, to put it another way… → Read More
“Did you see this photo of you?” “Look on your face in this pix is priceless!” “LMAO this video of you is funny!”
If you’re a regular Twitter user, you’ve probably see tweets like those come through as @replies or direct messages at some point. And you probably know not to click on the accompanying link. After all, there is no picture of you behind it, only a malicious web page set up by a… → Read More
The world is getting a first look at Impermium, a new startup that aims to help sites fight growing user generated spam – spammy comments, hacked accounts and (my personal favorite) fraudulent registrations.
Sounds like a useful service. And the team behind it just makes it more compelling. CEO Mark Risher was known as Yahoo’s “Spam Czar” until he left in June 2010. Joining him from Yahoo are… → Read More
There’s has been much discussion in the past couple of days about how Quora can handle its recent explosive growth, avoid becoming a Yahoo Answers (i.e. full of nonsense and spam) and scale with grace.
As further evidence of a growing success problem, Google’s Head Spam Avenger Matt Cutts points us to the above evidence of Quora fraud through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Ironically the above Human… → Read More
Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post of Internet memes, today wins the “more meta than thou” award for making “An Infographic Backlash Infographic” inspired by the tragic tale of a guy whose job it was to game Digg back when Digg had enough traffic to make it worth gaming.
Okay Buzzfeed, just because you understand recursion, doesn’t mean you have to rub it in our face all the time. Aside from the … → Read More
Project Honeypot has announced that they’ve collected one billion spam messages since they started in 2004. They have a pretty remarkable rundown of the trends for spammers in the last couple of years, including a look at the volume of product spam (V1AGRA, etc) versus fraud spam (419, etc). The majority of spam is still largely fire-and-forget, and only a relatively small percentage of spam is… → Read More
With the flood of “Hello my dear” and “YOU ARE WINNER” emails in my inbox every morning, I’m actually beginning to tire of the never-ending variety presented by spam. But it’s mail like this that renews my faith in the bots and non-native speakers variating these strange messages. The best part is trying to figure out how the scam works; it’s not your… → Read More
This may come as no surprise to you, but don’t think that spam is going away anytime soon. In fact, according to a recent Microsoft study, more more than 97 percent of all sent e-mail is spam. Ninety-seven percent! Granted, most of that stuff will never hit your inbox, thanks to improved filtering, but still! All that wasted bandwidth. → Read More
We’ve got three crazy comments from Andy Gowen touting the magic of Clear dot com’s fascination USB modem package which, for $50 a month, offers you a WiMAX connection (??) wherever you go and may or may not cause infertility in rats. Andy, please stop. We’re sure your service is amazing but we’re moderating you and I’ve taken the liberty of changing your comments to reflect our opinions more… → Read More
A group of Internet providers have essentially shut down California hosting service, McColo, yesterday and total spam production dropped considerably. The provider, notorious for their low-down ways, was producing 2/3 of the spam in the U.S. Other providers saw a drop from about 40 spam messages per second to 10 per second – a major victory for those whose m3mb3rz are already rock solid. → Read More
Usually I think claims like this are just shrill alarmists who can’t deal with the sexy wilderness that is the internet. In this case, however, I think they have a point. Skype porn spam is unavoidable, and there is no measure that can be taken to prevent complete strangers from hitting you with an dirty-talk contact request accompanied by an explicit picture. The Windows client, at least… → Read More
http://cdn.episodic.com/player/EpisodicPlayer.swf?config=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn.episodic.com%2Fshows%2F21%2F226%2F10%2Fconfig.xml John Hodgman recreates spam emails verbatim and reads them in his best small-midwestern-college poetry reading voice. Does Apple know he’s doing this? Can’t they make him sign an NDA or sue him? → Read More
Yesterday, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled the state’s anti-spam law unconstitutional. Good news to the ears of Jeremy Jaynes who gets a free pass. The spammer was previously convicted as the first felony spammer in the country in a 2004 trial. He had been sentenced to nine years. Ugh. It’s still morning here on the West Coast. → Read More
I totally fell for this because once I left the keys in my son and he almost got stolen. → Read More
Those dumb captchas may actually serve a purpose now. A gentleman by the name of Luis von Ahn at Carnegie Mellon University (Biggs went there!) has devised a system whereby software-unreadable words are sent to captcha providers. Since the software is unable to discern what the words are, captchas then step in, and we humans get to identify them when logging into our favorite sites. As people… → Read More
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