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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
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...