Slashdot Mirror
Spammers Establish Fake URL-Shortening Services
Orome1 writes "Spammers are establishing their own fake URL-shortening services to perform URL redirection, according to Symantec. This new spamming activity has contributed to this month's increase in spam by 2.9 percentage points, a rise that was also expected following the Rustock botnet takedown in March. Under this scheme, shortened links created on these fake URL-shortening sites are not included directly in spam messages. Instead, the spam emails contain shortened URLs created on legitimate URL-shortening sites. These shortened URLs lead to a shortened-URL on the spammer's fake URL-shortening Web site, which in turn redirects to the spammer's own Web site."
I've never trusted ANY of the URL shortening services. in this age of cut-and-paste, for the most part (except for twitter) *I* really don't see the need for them. (note, I said "*I* don't see any need for them...it's an opinion...don't flame me for an opinion) :-)
I've been goatse.cx-ed on Slashdot too many times, I guess!
when I see a short URL (even those short valid ones from Reddit's imgur.com), red flags go off in my brain. (yeah that hurts)
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
That should really be the default setting.
The problem is that nearly every computer user clicks on random links. The people who actually know how to use a computer are a very small amount of the total computer users.
Can't tell if trolling or just stupid.
My gmail account (about a year old, very odd spelling, probably not randomly targeted) gets around 100 per day, 99 of them get filtered
My work email (firstinitial.lastname@) gets around 500 per day, filter manages to take out almost all of them.
Yet I am still a spam victim, and so are you.
Our corporate mail server only serves about 300 non-alias email addresses. Some of our sales people and executives get upwards of 2000 spam messages a day, and though we are able to filter fairly effectively, thus mitigating the immediate impact to our users; the cost of fighting the spam, upkeep on the filters (1 false positive is worse than 100 spam getting into the inbox) the cost of the appliances, the cost of the rack space, cooling, electricity, etc....
The secondary cost of spam is MASSIVE.
For you it causes higher prices for internet, but it also causes the entire internet to run slower. WAY slower. Because while 100 spam messages would download to me in a few seconds and take a few more seconds to delete (or less because it got filtered) the approximately 55 BILLION spam messages that are sent each day comprise 70-80% of emails sent per day.
Hell, go ahead and take it to the PER USER level on costs. Just like text messages, my phone's internet is cost per unit. A spam email uses some quantity of that unit. Thus a spammer sending me a spam email (that makes it through the filter) costs me that money directly.
Also, as has been said many times before: Spam is not passive, it's active.
IT COSTS ME MONEY EVERY TIME I GET SPAM.
My two choices are "Pay for the spam" or "Don't use any email ever".
If I gave you the choice of paying me 5 pence every time I call you (even if you don't answer) or never again using any form of electronic voice communication (so as to catch any type of VoIP) you'd want me charged with extortion.
tl;dr -
spam uses data -> you pay for data used -> you're a spam victim.
spam costs me money against my will, without being a government agency (they take my money all the damn time) = THEFT