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AOL Names Top Spam Subjects For 2005
JamesAlfaro writes "Donald Trump and "penis patch" were the most popular subject lines used by spammers this year, as the fraudsters grew more sophisticated in trying to trick consumers, America Online said Wednesday in its third annual Top 10 Spam List. Six out of the 10 top subject lines this year fell into what experts call "special-order spam," which pretend to be from a friend, or part of a legitimate, customer-driven transaction."
The topics/products that they are using must be effective because they keep the spammers in business. It's horrible, but since these spammers are in business, a LOT of people must be falling for them.
... you know, something really simple that would help the war on spam.
1) Clean up your 20 year old database of it's unused usernames
2)Blacklist any server/ip/whatever that sends email to x amount of disabled accounts (I would say x ==5 but any value really would work)
3) Publish said blacklist
There is no way a spammer could avoid an AOL address. Start doing this with hotmail, yahoo mail, netscape mail, whatever mail, and I think we would be able to lock off the "bad" senders a lot faster than projects such as spews.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I am suprised that paypal pfishing didn't make the article. I get these every day.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
You don't need to find the lusrs with pwned boxen. They, after all, are only doing what they've been told to do by us technical elitey types.
You just need to realize that the broadband providers are capable of stopping this problem by themselves, with their existing equipment, and the only reason they don't do it is because it would impact their revenue stream (well, that and the high correlation of greed with stupidity).
With Comcast's resources at my disposal, I could stop all spam and virus propagation from their networks in a month or less. But a certain number of customers (mostly spammers and other criminals) would stop paying their monthly bill as a result, and thus Comcast has a simple ROI equation: Screw you over, and get paid, do the Right Thing, and don't get paid.
Easy decision for them, because WE are letting them get away with it. Write your congresscritter, make Comcast (and their ilk) liable for running worm farms.
Strange. Where's Doctor's "The Ultimate Online Pharmaceutical" or Vanessa J. Smith's "Software"? I know I'm not the only one who gets those. And the repetition of the same subject in their respective e-mails should make them show up on the list somewhere. The Rolex and Xbox 360 spams tend to change their subject lines...
Would it really be that much trouble to make one phonecall?
Example: Comcast (or other huge ISP) blocks port 25 by default. To unblock your port 25, call the 1-800 number and make the request. The End.
Yes it will add another hoop to jump through, and will undoubtedly complicate things for n00bs trying to setup whatever flavor of e-mail client they want/need to use, but the vast majority of subscribers aren't using this port.
For companies like Comcast, this is just another added line to the papers they stuff into your self-install kit.
just my 2 cents
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
...so they read the e-mails of their clients?
...so is this either "Top 10 Reported spam subject lines" or are they invading our privacy?
Let's say I get some great real-estate offers in my email account. I choose to report it as spam, once. AOL or anyone else gets this mail and they can analyze it or do anything they want with it.
The next day I get an identical mail and it gets sent to the SPAM folder. Do they have the ability to see this one as well? What if one that isn't spam gets marked as such, but contains sensetive and personal information?
What this will do is prevent zombie networks from sending out spam.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
where does aol fall on this list again?
You do realize that they send unwanted advertisements to their own customers right?
Its not as if they are related to AOL services either. For the right price your ad can be sent by AOL to an AOL subscriber FROM AOL
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