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What Happens When You Reply To ALL of Your Spam
bednarz writes "For Tracy Mooney, a married mother of three in Naperville, Ill., the decision to abandon cyber-sense and invite e-mail spam into her life for a month by participating in a McAfee experiment was a bit of a lark. The idea of the Spammed Persistently All Month (S.P.A.M.) experiment — which fittingly started on April Fool's Day — was to have 50 volunteers from around the world answer every spam message and pop-up ad they got. Mooney was game, especially since McAfee was giving a free PC to all participants. She told her story to Network World."
Since the point of the experiment wasn't to test the operating system, why give the test subjects the operating system currently most affected by malaware? Why not a Mac or presetup Linux box?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Sentences like this sort of nails it: "It's all snake oil. I'm amazed at what true junk is out there when you're clicking through on e-mail."
It tells a sad tale about the people these spam messages are targeted at. You really don't have to be computer literate to figure out that all this is pure crap. Judging by the dumploads of messages that hits my spam filter every day there must be too many fools with computers and internet access waiting to be parted from their money. Some times I wonder if I should start spamming, we really don't have harsh sentences in Norway...
On a slightly offtopic note, she looks kinda M.I.L.F.!
Dvorak on Doomtech
... would the address of your local waste recycling center.
Electronic spam is bad because the sender pays almost nothing (just bounces it through zombies).
But if the spammer is paying for PAPER to be delivered ... send more! Drive up their costs and drive them out of business.
My first reaction to the story was, "Good PR stunt...otherwise pointless"...until I RTFA and found this quote from the Naperville soccer mom regarding what she found in her in-box:
Apparently people are less informed about spam than I thought, and this little one month 'contest' really is raising awareness and educating people...
Thank you Dave Raggett
How does 245x + 243y + 241z = 2500, when x, y, and z are all positive integers?
There are lots of ways to interpret this, including that English speakers are idiots, but whatever else the spammers aren't being politically correct. They're using English because that is the way to reach people, and for the most part it doesn't pay to translate the same message into another language, even though that can't be very expensive.
I also find it amusing as hell that she's a realtor by profession. I realize that a realtor can be helpful in an individual real estate transaction (mine sure was, recently) but AS A WHOLE I find their entire profession to be a leech on society, driving up housing values by 6% and engaging in incredibly anticompetitive behavior to try to keep the "Realtors' monopoly" on real estate transactions.
Her calling SPAM "snake oil" strikes me as vaguely ironic, considering her profession.
I reply to spam automagically.
Whenever an e-mail arrives that doesn't fit any of several criteria, an automatic response is sent asking them to please encrypt their e-mail with my publically available PGP key. Their e-mail is then deleted and I never see it.
The criteria to receive the e-mail:
1) the e-mail is encrypted with my PGP key
2) the e-mail is signed with their PGP key
3) the source e-mail address is whitelisted
4) the IP address of the source of the e-mail is whitelisted (local e-mail permitted)
5) the destination e-mail address is whitelisted. For example, if me@example.com was my e-mail address, I might whitelist me+red_cat@example.com and me+silent_trombone@example.com, each of which would be given to exactly one person. If I start receiving spam at that address, it is unwhitelisted.
It seems that the Nigerian spammers really respond to this. They don't encrypt it, but they pass the address around to each other. The last time I checked the logs, the numbers of Nigerian spams were really up.
Sounds like the pot calling the kettle black. The woman doing the surfing is a "realtor", (they're now more commonly known as realtwhores, not "realtors" or "real estate agents"), and anti-virus vendors are helping continue the Windows near-monopoly. They need Microsoft, and Microsoft needs them. One of them (Symantec) sent me I don't know how many spams offering to protect my "Windows PC" - to which I replied "What Windows PC, you f*ckheads - stop spamming me!" They didn't. I ended up abandoning the account.
I love to do that, too! I've noticed, though, that nowadays a lot of companies have individually printed business reply mail that contains a serial number that probably maps to my name and address (how did they know that my parents, Mr. & Mrs. Resident, named me Current?). If I send it back, they'll know exactly who did it. Technically, that should tell them to stop sending to me since they're just wasting their time, but it proves that I'm reading their ads (rather than just dumping the junk mail), and I would much rather they get the feedback that "the generic recipient" is pissed off at their mass mailing, rather than any one particular person.
(On a side note: yes, I did try once specifically respond to a charity organization to take me off their list. I said that I would no longer contribute (I had contributed once) and could they please save my sanity --as well as their costs-- by taking me off the list. I kept getting more and more physical junk mail, almost as if they were being encouraged by my entreaties to stop. I threatened to diss them for wasting their income from donations, and I am making good on that threat with this post.)
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Yeah, my web host actually sold on the admin email I gave them to spammers. Thing is it was a unique address traceable to them. Wonder how much they were paid and by whom. They're quite a big outfit too.
Can't name them as still migrating one account away.
Taxes.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Note how the url for the "print" version of the page includes the full file system path location of the html. http://www.networkworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x.cgi?pagetosend=/export/home/httpd/htdocs/news/2008/070108-mcafee-spam-experiment.html&pagename=/news/2008/070108-mcafee-spam-experiment.html&pageurl=http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/070108-mcafee-spam-experiment.html&site=security This, on the Network World SECURITY page.
the five U.S. participants received the most spam: 23,233 messages over the course of the month.
I have one of the older private domains on the Internet, and for many years it was running a BBS gatewayed to Usenet, and then providing shell accounts. All the email addresses and Usenet Message IDs sat there like a ticking bomb until spammers started harvesting them. At one point I was getting so much spam I had to block China, Brazil, Argentina, and several ISPs in countries like Spain and Italy because the amount of spam I was getting was putting me over my colo's traffic cap to the tune of $750 a month.
Looking at my current logs, yesterday, 17197 delivery attempts were blocked by RBL, 24561 attempts by greylisting, and almost 2000 were blocked by content filtering after receipt. And the only users on this box are myself and my family, who got a total of 81 legitimate messages actually delivered.
That's more messages in one day than they're getting in one month.
I wish it was only as bad as it was in 1997.
One time my wife got so sick of spam that she clicked the unsubscribe link on all the spams she received. Of course, this only told the spamming sites that there was someone on the other end... Now she gets a ton more a day. And she's crazy about deleting it, even when it's in her spam folder. I currently have like 7000 spams in my gmail spam folder and it ticks her off so much to see a number that large.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
I'm surprised she only ended up with 23,000 spam at the end of the month, when purposely giving out her address. Ever since getting Gmail in 2004, I have been completely careless about giving out my address, but never gave it to spammers on purpose. I now have 7,742 messages in my Spam folder, which deletes messages after 30 days, so that's what I get in a month. I only see 1 or 2 of those 7k each month :-)
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
Whay aren't the feds doing this then prosecuting the people who send the snail-mail for spamming?
No sig today...
"Overall, the most obvious result of the S.P.A.M. experiment was that the PC that McAfee had provided for the project noticeably slowed down, clogged up with spyware, Mooney says."
It wasn't the PC that slowed down but the operating system. It would have been interesting to conduct that experiment with people using several differen operating systems and then look at the amount of damage and spyware found.
1) While we joke about it, Nigerian scheme has a real life consequence and there are several people who has been kidnapped, threatened with a real gun, found themselves in a plot which a countries government involved. There is nothing technical about it, there are no MCafee products to stop a guy showing up your door with a real gun as they got your home address.
2) Worms/Viruses are all mafia type things run by real criminals who also has support from their governments and police. There is also terror network worm possibility. Your unprotected PC can be hosting the Al Queda sites for that month or some big pedophile network.
Will MCafee give these people some legal protection? Did they instruct these people well? Did they tell about the funny looking Nigerian mails background and what kind of people runs those schemes?