p2pnet - rss feed: Season’s Greetings and Spam
p2pnet.net news view:- A Reuters article discusses the seasonal increase in SPAM. It also talks about some of the tricks being used.
In the past, SPAM was delivered through regular mail servers misconfigured to be mail relays. These days, the Virus and SPAM businesses have joined and SPAM is delivered from compromised PCs. Checking the source IP address doesn’t help like it did in the past given the ISPs can’t easily differentiate messages coming from their customers which are legitimate and those which are SPAM.
Not mentioned in the article is all the plain-text that you can see in many messages that look legitimate and if you look closely the “topic” of the otherwise random looking text, it’s likely to relate to something of interest to you.
I receive a lot of SPAM with paragraphs about copyright and Linux, which suggests to me that SPAM-bots are analysing the full contents of messages stored on compromised machines.
The major source of new email addresses was once public web sites, but evidence now suggests messages stored on compromised PCs are far more likely. It’s much harder to not share your email address with anyone running Microsoft Windows (most of which are likely to be compromised according to various reports) than it is to not place an email address on a website.
People who’ve never had their email address on any website are still receiving SPAM, probably because some friend they’ve sent an email to has been compromised.
This is starting to have a “second hand smoke” effect where one computer being compromised harms other people. It may be that this will in the future force some level of liability on people who aren’t taking adequate steps to keep their machines clean, which might put further pressure on vendors.
There are many “features” in existing software that may appear convenient (like automatic ‘viewing’ of attachments in email) that should be removed by vendors.
Will we also see a time in the relatively near future where people running older operating systems won’t be allowed on the Internet at all, with any Microsoft OS less than 64-bit Vista only offered accounts behind strict firewalls?
Russell McOrmond - p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He’s also the CLUE policy coordinator.]
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
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December 21st, 2006 at 5:35 pm
I fix PCs for a living. You wouldn’t believe the amount of people who are still running Windows 98 or ME. Most of the time, it’s because their PCs are not fast enough to run XP. And of course people running 98 don’t have access to the full range of protection like it is available in XP. And of course most of these PC wouldn’t even be able to run most of the good protection software. Anybody ever try to install a recent version of Norton on a Win 98. Man, talk about a hog.