Philip Jacob / Whirlycott » Spam

Is MAPS not dead yet?

Philip Jacob — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 01:47:11 +0000

A story posted on Slashdot today clearly highlights some of the problems with DNS-based blacklists that I outlined in my Moving Beyond RBLs paper in 2003.

Today’s post on /. clearly shows why blacklists are inherently biased against small businesses and other entities which have a small proportional value in the network.

Domain Name Nirvana and Damn Spam

Philip Jacob — Tue, 23 Nov 2004 04:32:18 +0000

Recently, I purchased a new domain name (a .org) and was pleasantly surprised to see that it had made its way into the root nameservers within a few minutes. It’s really a great thing to be able to do this. I was pleased.

I set up the site running WordPress and went to bed. I woke up the next morning to lots of blog-spam for gambling sites. I was less than pleased.

glucophage

What puzzled me is that I told nobody about the website. This same scenario happened again this week, actually. Oddly enough, this blog gets some publicity and yet no comment spam.

It’s impressive how well and how quickly spammers can take an otherwise lovely technological experience and wreck it.

Back Home Again

Philip Jacob — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 09:50:19 +0000

Back from Ireland and England…. got quite a lot of email to deal with here. coumadin toxicity
The main problem, however, is that I didn’t have my Mozilla Thunderbird mail filter since I was using webmail for the past 10 days.

Thunderbird successfully flagged about 17,000 of these messages, leaving me with approximately 1000 spams that it wasn’t able to recognize. Quelle waste of time.

As it turns out, this is about 1,800 spam messages per day… and much to my surprise, after more closely watching what Thunderbird is doing today, this seems pretty normal for me.

SpamAssassin upgraded with no trouble to 3.0 and seems to be much better than 2.6 at recognizing stuff.

Spam, Reinvented… Again: Asciispam

Philip Jacob — Mon, 26 Jul 2004 22:41:04 +0000

Just got this in my inbox. It successfully bypassed 2 Bayesian filters. Since this one arrived, I have received another as well. It’s a little tricky for the filter to catch, because the filter’s scoring engine will be somewhat fooled by the low occurrence rate of strings like “yp52″. This could get ugly.


vslm128u  1475396z      d7n47rx405      gs4v49ordg2f0n61
  548q      ma23      c705rh  ci9dg5    k2    o3xc    tv
  0h41      87z4    86w97a      yorcw9  7l    5ymc    e7
  30y7      7ue1    yp52          4zdl  8v    3u80    t5
  0z32u4rzm51m8e    81br          e66g        k7y4
  lqv9      k1bg    gob3          5gfq        0ggv
  6z30      93gv    ex57fb      mq9ozs        7o68
  s7ou      47fn      2710z0  68a880          9c56
18v5qbfg  h51l38e2      fqgd3ekmgr        90ar771svgug    

    6gt4ug3q65w4    1317174h0d9u670i    ub6g0dxm  s8hfgg20
  qlh682  8mi2zl      0f12        53      77cu01  036w89
  z8g4      52pv      yo68        9v        c7e54xokw6
  t4v286w4            18gt    38            e216oaz8ez
    8yk8812e79        z3mmkk73y8              6xi105
      ky51093041      6ixy    f0            890v65836g
  39tz      6788      re4t        4a        3i00qe1xwm
  vr8845  bez372      xeph        4r      kxfwa1  ygsyc8
  nq30m9sp564b      3wqv576q02ou08i3    9t0ht271  gllm7f4e