Spams and Scams

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Phishing and Cory Doctorow

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Interesting article by Cory Doctorow about how he got caught in a phisher’s net through the perfect alignment of a series of circumstances. It’s a good warning about how even the most sophisticated of users can get caught. It makes me wonder how much more vulnerable ordinary users are.
Via The Consumerist

A new twist on the Nigerian scam

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

Oh this one is nasty. A scam letter informing you that other letters were a scam, but this one is genuine and you should contact this guy to get your money. I’m reproducing it here, minus email address:
Hello,
I’m Ms. Elizabeth Park Fowler of Tampa, FL 33629., I’m a US citizen, I’m 51yrs Old. I’m […]

How to spot a scammy email

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Just got this email. I was amused by the very poor attempt at photoshopping “e-cards” into the top menu bar. Kind of surprising, since Hallmark does have “e-cards” in its menu bar. Maybe it just didn’t appear at the right place?
The hyperlink didn’t go to Hallmark, and the link was to an executable file (.exe).
And […]

Still more on Twitter: companies read and respond

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

Well, now that was interesting.
I twittered yesterday about what I thought might be a phishing attempt using Six Apart’s TypePad blogging system. Basically I got an invitation to join the beta version of TypePad which sounded phishy (get it? phishy, because it’s a phishing attempt? oh I amuse me) to me. First, i had never […]

I hate spammers sooooo much

Monday, August 25th, 2008

Argh! The latest trick that the spammers have come upon? Include pornographic pictures of celebrities, mostly, it would seem, of Paris Hilton.
So every morning while I clean out my inbox, I am bombarded with dirty images of this person.
I do not particularly like this person (although I will admit that I was mildly amused by […]

Sophisticated phising

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

Ah, it looks like people’s increased awareness of phishing is leading the crooks to become more sophisticated in their phishing attempts. I just got an email from a bank I have dealings with. Wait, no, scratch that, it’s from someone purporting to be said bank.
It’s usually quite easy to spot the phishing attempts as the […]

When spam isn’t spam

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

I don’t understand the mechanics behind the application that stamps our incoming email as spam or not here at work. Sure, usually, it works, although the algorithm that tags everything that comes from a Yahoo address as spam is highly annoying. Since I’m in a couple of Yahoo groups, I cannot simply flush everything marked […]

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