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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."
From the article:
How can anyone possibly fall for these ? I have the worst memory of anyone I know (or remember ;), and I have no trouble remembering if I have any bending applications or e-mail conversations.
Or are these things trying to make people think that they've accidentally gotten someone elses mail and might profit by playing along - are these messages trying to tempt people into trying to commit fraud in order to defraud them ? That would be ironic, and essentially the same tactic that Nigerian letters used - could the senders of Nigerian spam claim patent violation ?-)
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I'm wondering if the spammers are changing tactics. I used to get one spam message at a time but now I get up to a dozen messages from the same slimeball, all with the same subject line. I can't figure out why they do this because it makes spam filtering easy, more than one message with the same subject line and into the bit bucket you go.
Anyone know why this is happening?
Ed Almos
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
There is a better idea: do this locally.
.sig, whatever.
Set up two accounts on your mail server (example.org): aaron@example.org and zeke@example.org -- any two names that sound legitimate and sort very early/very late. Then, make sure these two names are well-published; you may put them on your webpage, include them in
When anything hits one of these mailboxes, just block the relevant traffic -- autolearn the piece of spam, _temp_ block the IP and/or bump its score.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Adn essentially, I imagine a LOT of people do this locally. But AOL is in a unique position, that they are the largest target for spam, and have the EASIEST way of detecting it (by flagging excessive mail to unused accounts). Have that list for the general public to suck down and everyones spam from said places would drop dramatically. The response time could be multitudes faster and more effective than spews
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
For some time, I have been closely tracking levels of mortgage/lending/credit spam received on several email accounts. I am doing this because I am interested in the lending business and hope to see levels of spam correlate with activity in the industry.
Anyway you can find my data here:
http://www.perpetualbull.com/mortgage-spam/
Various regex are used to locate spams of this topic. Not 100% accurate but pretty good
While I'd prefer an approach that puts the burden on the infected PC owners rather than on people who actually have a clue, I'd be willing to make the phonecall.
And your method would be simple enough that even Comcast might conceivably be competent enough to implement it. Maybe. Unfortunately I am a customer, so I'm kind of pessimistic on that front.
As someone who knows the mail system at AOL, I can attest that we block an average of over 2 BILLION mails a day as SPAM, and allow a trickle of 350 million or so per day to our members.
This blocking occurs because we maintain blacklists, whitelists, use SPF and incredibly sophisticated processing to detect the SPAM before it can reach our members mailboxes. After that, the member themselves can teach their own personal SPAM filters what they think is SPAM.
I could tell you how all this stuff works, but then I'd have to kill you. Part of it is NOT letting the bad guys know the contents of your white/black lists, or how you determine what is and is not SPAM.
SPAM is no longer an issue to AOL members. Sure the occasional bit of crap gets through the gauntlet, but it is nothing like the old days. Most of the SPAM comes from hijacked accounts or zombie PCs. If someone could get Microsoft to clean up their act the level of SPAM would drop to practically nil.
I dont know about other ISPs, but Comcast *does* block port 25, when the system autodetects spam.
:)
Usually it results in "my emails aren't going out what is wrong", and then an explanation of zombie botnets and how people like them are sending the spam they are getting in their mailbox.
Usually they get their computer cleaned out, send an email to an email address with the MAC of their cable modem, and they can send emails again.
Posted anonymously so I dont get this pinned on me at work
Better than a blanket blocking of Port25, and pretty effective.