TechnoMagicians Weblog

SEC Suspends Trading Of 35 Companies Touted In Spam Email Campaigns

Tim A — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 19:37:54 -0400

The Securities and Exchange Commission this morning suspended trading in the securities of 35 companies that have been the subject of recent and repeated spam email campaigns (see examples). The trading suspensions - the most ever aimed at spammed companies - were ordered because of questions regarding the adequacy and accuracy of information about the companies.

Sender Address Verification considered harmful

Tim A — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 00:25:26 -0400

Excellent post by Justin on why SAV isn't that useful in fighting spam:

Some view this as a useful anti-spam technique. In my opinion, it’s not.

Spam/anti-spam is an adversarial “game”. Whenever you’re considering anti-spam techniques, it’s important to bear in mind game theory, and the possible countermeasures that spammers will respond with. Before SAV became prevalent, spam was often sent using entirely fake sender data; hence the initial attractiveness of SAV. Once SAV became worth evading, the spammers needed to find “real” sender addresses to evade it. And where’s the obvious place to find real addresses? On the list of target addresses they’re spamming!

SimpleFilter And Google Apps For Your Domain / GMail

Tim A — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 23:11:27 -0500

I've been slowly moving my various domain's email management to Google Apps For Your Domain. After a bit of success I let Brent know and he is happily also using Google Apps Gmail thingy.

One thing I noticed right away since I let things run outside of our SimpleFilter corporate service is that a ton of spam piles up that I never ever see. Now Google Apps Gmail does a very good job at moving this stuff to the spam folder but one still needs to scan a million emails to see if any false positives get through. One thing we did with SimpleFilter early on was to classify spam into LOW, MEDIUM, and HIGH probability of being spam. That way one can quickly scan through the LOW for false positives and completely ignore the MEDIUM and HIGH. In fact, SimpleFilter allows one to block the delivery of MEDIUM and HIGH to the users inbox. I've been running in that mode for years (most customers do too) and I've never had an issue with a false positive falling into either of those higher categories. It is very rare actually to get one falling into LOW as well.

This is a huge difference and I can't see how one could possibly managing their email with just Google Apps Gmail spam filtering. There is just way too many spams to scan through. With SimpleFilter in place it takes me about 5 seconds every day or two to scan for false positives.

I ran a little test and without SimpleFilter in the mix, I'd have to scan through approximately 300 emails a day. With SimpleFilter in the mix and throwing away MEDIUM and HIGH spam, I'm down to about 11 a day. Thats a huge difference.

Here is a screen capture to show the difference. Jan 17th ones go on for at least a few pages (like I said about 300 or so emails). I slipped SimpleFilter into the mix at the end of the 17th.

FBI Tracks Down Big Phish

Tim A — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 11:32:32 -0500

From Techdirt:

You would think that it wouldn't be that hard to track down phishing scammers. While they do try to hide themselves, in the end, there should be some sort of money trail leading back to them. However, for all the talk of trying to track these guys down, it seemed like no one ever got anywhere. There was a ton of hype around Microsoft catching a phishing "kingpin" until you realized that it was just some kid who set up a website and never made any money. The real problem, everyone always said, was that the real phishing kingpins operated as part of organized crime in Eastern Europe -- and that made them tough to track down. Partly due to the nature of any organized crime setup, it probably wasn't that hard to nab the small fry who were the front men -- but that was useless if you wanted to catch the big phish who actually masterminded the operation. However, that doesn't mean the authorities weren't working on it. The FBI has announced that they've brought down one phishing group, arresting at least 16 people. Up to five of those arrested are American with the rest being Polish. The FBI is still trying to track down others involved, including some in Romania. While it's definitely great to see them finally bring down a big phishing group, it should suggest how big a problem this really is that it's taken this long to nab one single group. Just imagine how many more are still out there, phishing away.

SimpleFilter Under Attack

Tim A — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 17:04:46 -0400

It looks as though our SimpleFilter service has come under attack today. We seem to be weathering the storm and delivering email as we normally do.

Noticed that a majority of the attack seems to be coming from an IP owned by Affinity Internet. Considering they are an online marketing service company I wouldn't doubt if they are generating some sort of spam campaign.

I've done a bit of google searching on these guys. What I'm finding is a lot of bogus looking press releases from a number of bogus looking domains and websites/blogs so I've come to the conclusion that they are some sort of spam business (even though they look like a legitimate business). I'll update this post if I'm incorrect but I've done enough investigation at this point to lead me down that road.

I've attempted to contact them by phone but was waiting on hold for too long so I gave up. They can contact me through this post if they like.

Blue Security Ceases Anti-Spam Operations

Tim A — Wed, 17 May 2006 11:44:58 -0400

I'm not sure what to think of this yet.

Bill Gates Hasn't Stopped Spam Yet

Tim A — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 13:00:44 -0400

Good thing I didn't hold my breath as I pointed out here!!

From TechDirt:

Early last year, Bill Gates announced that he was concentrating on the spam problem and had a few ideas on how to stop the problem. Of course, all of those ideas sounded like ideas that others were already trying -- and there was still plenty of spam. It's now been a year since Bill Gates said that his methods could get rid of spam in two years and it's not clear if his efforts have done very much. Certainly, Microsoft has been suing spammers, and some claim that the overall amount of spam has been decreasing a bit. However, we're still quite a long way from getting rid of spam -- which means the special department at Microsoft whose only job is to manage Bill Gates' spam (even if it's not as much as we were originally told) will probably still have plenty of work to do a year from now.

Ipsos-Reid Says Canadian Inboxes Are Clearing Up

Tim A — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 14:22:49 -0500

An Ipsos-Reid survey concluded that "the average weekly number of spam e-mail messages dropped from 68 per cent in 2003 to 49 per cent last year".

I'd have to dissagree because we do not see that sort of pattern whatsoever at SimpleFilter.

Here is an article and a post on the Ipsos-Reid survey.

Anti-spam Spending Set To Exceed $1.7 Billion in 2008

Tim A — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 15:22:48 -0500

From TechWeb News I think:

By 2008, the Framingham, Mass.-based research firm forecasted, worldwide revenues of anti-spam solutions -- software and hosted services -- will run to $1.7 billion. In 2003, the last full year for which hard numbers are available, anti-spam spending was only $300 million.

GFI BitDefender Deletes All Email

Tim A — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 15:07:09 -0500

Well, this certainly should be an eye opener to any spam solutions that delete email.

From ZDNet:

"We were pretty surprised this morning to find that all of the email which arrived overnight had been deleted," wrote Jeremy Whiteley, chief executive officer at Promarketing Gear. "Even more troubling was the fact that, according to GFI's US sales manager, they released this update without testing it! I guess they expect me and my IT staff to play the role of tester, regardless of the cost to my business…We're reconsidering our reliance on GFI going forward."

I think they should just drop GFI altogether and go with SimpleFilter. Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of SimpleFilter.

Spam To Cost Businesses $50 Billion

Tim A — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 14:32:28 -0500

From TechWeb:

Spam will cost the world $50 billion in lost productivity and other expenses a research firm said Wednesday, with more than a third of that -- $17 billion -- wasted by U.S. firms.

According to San Francisco-based Ferris Research's newest report, spam's cost is primarily in lost worker time as employees filter spam, deal with false positives, and query corporate help desks for assistance with the plague.

Verizon's Spam Policy Criticized

Tim A — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 18:09:46 -0500

ISP typically take the way too aggressive approach as Verizon seems to be doing. This certainly doesn't surprise me.

From this article:

Since mid-December, users have complained on Internet message boards and to Verizon customer service centers that they are not receiving legitimate inbound e-mail from Europe and Asia. Verizon, they say, has taken the unusual step of blocking nearly all mail from certain geographic areas because some networks in those regions are used by spammers.

At SimpleFilter the decision to block email that is either low, medium or high probably of being spam is entirely up to the customer.

I have to admit that we've been tempted to globally block all mail from Asia but we have other measures in place to deal with it efficiently.

Judge Awards ISP $1 Billion in damages

Tim A — Mon, 03 Jan 2005 15:38:36 -0500

Missed this over the holidays:

Judge Awards ISP $1 Billion in damages (source Network World Fusion)

Challenge / Response Is Spam

Tim A — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 18:32:27 -0500

I've always considered challenge / response spam. I typically turf any challenge's I get and give up trying to send that person an email.

While so-called challenge-response anti-spam systems have grown in popularity, they still seem like the wrong approach to spam. If you think about it, they basically assume all mail is spam, until someone proves otherwise. That sounds like they have a serious false-positive problem. All email is considered spam. For some, that's fine, but it can lead to other problems. Seriously overhyped challenge-response startup Mailblocks is discovering just some of those problems. It turns out that major ISPs, including AOL and Earthlink, are automatically treating Mailblocks' challenges as spam. In some ways, it's only fair. Mailblocks considers all mail spam until proven otherwise, so why shouldn't other ISPs consider their mail spam? Of course, what this means is that anyone who sends a mailblocks user an email from one of these ISPs doesn't know that his or her message hasn't been received and assumes it has been. Meanwhile, Mailblocks users have no idea that the person has emailed them either. Of course, what's most amusing about all of this is that Mailblocks is owned by AOL. Yes, that's right, AOL is blocking its own challenge-response emails as spam. (source: TechDirt)

You gotta love how intelligent those AOL folks are!!!

Spam Attack

Tim A — Sun, 17 Oct 2004 00:08:34 -0400

Over at SimpleFilter we've been under a massive spam attack for the past day or so. In a way I'm happy that we have the spammers thinking they are getting ahead of the game but really all it managed to do was take some of the stuff that Brent and I had on the backburner to implement sometime soon and move it up the priority scale.

So, some of the new items we've implemented over the past day have allowed the servers to run much more efficiently than before.

Instead of adding more and more servers to handle the load it looks like we can probably cut back on our plans to expand the number of servers in the farm!!

Thanks spammers, bring it on, we appreciate the opportunity to make SimpleFilter even better than it already is sooner than we had planned.

Mail Cruncher is a bit crunchy

Tim A — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 23:24:10 -0400

This news is a bit old because I haven't been following the spam industry as close as I normally do lately.

Anyway, it seems Mail Cruncher's internation team has taken 3 years to come up with what looks very similar to techniques already in use for some time to fight spam. To base their whole offering on this seems dangerous to me.

I'm getting tired of saying it but SimpleFilter has been using something very similar for a very long time. And of course it is only a very small piece of everything we use in the fight against spam.

The press release is here along with a quote:

Spammers tend to hide and move; legitimate business senders tend to be stable and clearly identifiable. This common-sense observation was the basis for work done by an international team over the past three years. Led by Ms. Lorenzen, the team's work culminated in the creation of a business trust rating database for email called the Outbound Index.

Doc Going Postal

Tim A — Sun, 26 Sep 2004 22:47:43 -0400

It bothers me when I read entries like this one from Doc Searls about spam problems. There are solutions out there that work including SimpleFilter.

Spam has not been an issue in my life for quiet some time thanks to SimpleFilter so its tough when I hear people still having issues out there but doing nothing about it.

The offer is out there for folks like Doc and Dave Winer (who have complained from time to time that he is getting buried by spam) to give SimpleFilter a try. The POP3 version has always had a free trial but I'll extend a free trial of the SMTP version to those looking to give it a try as well.

Just contact us over at SimpleFilter.

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of SimpleFilter.

Gmail Spam Detection

Tim A — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 20:53:21 -0400

I've been using GMail for the last few months for all my mailing lists. I find it incredible with its auto-threading of subjects which makes it useful with mailing lists. I used to have all my mailing lists come in as feeds into Bloglines but not since I discovered GMail.

However, today I noticed that there were an extremely unnacceptable amount of false positives in the spam folder. Not a single one of them actually was. Whatever GMail is doing for spam filtering is totally horrendous.

I wish I could turn off there spam filtering but I see no option for doing that. If I wanted to I would pass the mail through SimpleFilter first and then onto GMail and I've have no problems.

CRTC Looks At Voice Mail Spam

Tim A — Tue, 07 Sep 2004 12:23:35 -0400

Looks like the CRTC in Canada may finally do something about this or at least they are having a hearing about this coming up. Its about bloody time.

Of course, Bell Canada could take some measures to thwart this pretty easily. They could have an option allowing me to set that I do not want to receive voice messages from people who don't actually ring through the phone number. I don't need anyone leaving me a message without trying to call me. Just make this an option and along with call blocking this is pretty much the end of it. Unfortunately that would require people with clues working at the phone company.

Also, the article mentions Infolink Communications Ltd but I've had voice messages from a number of companies.

UseBestMail Sounds Useless To Me

Tim A — Wed, 14 Jul 2004 16:27:10 -0400

Maybe I'm just thick but I don't see how UseBestMail helps anyone in the fight against spam. All it does is prevent myself from sending spam from my own email client. Unless of course everyone on the planet is using UseBestMail and all SMTP servers are validating stamps which just isn't going to happen.

The Long And Short of It UseBestMail relies on a remote computer we operate to issue stamps that attach to and validate the email you send out and receive from others. To get free stamps your email software has to pause after sending each email. To send stamped email without the pause, one has to purchase stamps. Most people will use the service free of charge, since the pause between emails is small, not even noticeable for small volumes of mail. Large volume mailers, however, will find the delays are a problem. They will purchase stamps as a means of avoiding the delay and sending their email through a spam-free channel. Spammers are defeated because the cost of stamps makes their business unprofitable and the delay (that increases as the volume of mail sent increases) makes sending large amounts of mail impractical. This is the Delay or Pay system.

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of SimpleFilter.

Cormack and Lynam's study on supervised spam detection

Tim A — Mon, 05 Jul 2004 15:29:06 -0400

Justin Mason sums up the timeline on this paper and various responses between the authors and the DSPAM developer. I'd put Cormack in the top 3 professors who taught computer science when I attended Waterloo.

Spam: or, 'SlashDot spam drama'. So, a few days ago, I forwarded a link to a paper I'd been sent -- it's a great paper, and I'm not just saying that because SpamAssassin did well -- it really tests some of the popular open-source spam filters comprehensively, and correctly. (The authors have 24 years of information retrieval research between them.)

The results have been pretty incendiary. ;) Here's a timeline with links, in case you were wondering where we are right now:

I forward A Study of Supervised Spam Detection Applied to Eight Months of Personal Email, Gordon Cormack and Thomas Lynam, to the SpamAssassin-dev mailing list for some quiet review. ;)

it hit Slashdot (that was quick) entitled 'Spamassassin Beats CRM-114 In Anti-Spam Shootout'. A bit over-the-top, but that's Slashdot for ya.

The DSPAM author responds with a SlashDot post entitled Response to Gordon Cormack's Study of Spam Detection, linking to 'an appropriate response to Cormack's technical errors' -- with a few errors of its own.

Some follow-ups: Henry Stern's, my own, and Lynam and Cormack's.

Gates Issues Antispam Progress Report

Tim A — Mon, 05 Jul 2004 12:11:03 -0400

I wouldn't hold your breath for Microsoft to actually follow through on this or anything else worthwhile. I'm still waiting for them to halt all development and work on security issues as they said they would do in 2002. I haven't seen anything change since then on security so why would Gates do anything useful about SPAM??

You are better off just using SimpeFilter.

Commtouch Reports Spam Trends For First Half of 2004

Tim A — Mon, 05 Jul 2004 11:53:36 -0400

Commtouch Reports Spam Trends For First Half of 2004 - see the full article here. If you are having SPAM difficulties checkout SimpleFilter. Also reproduced here:

Do Not Spam List Will Not Work According to FTC

Tim A — Wed, 16 Jun 2004 09:10:52 -0400

Wow, someone must have a clue there:

A government-run "Do Not Spam" registry would only generate more unwanted e-mail because unscrupulous marketers would simply treat it as a source of leads, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said on Tuesday. (source: Yahoo! News - 'Do Not Spam' List Will Not Work - FTC)

Microsoft Exchange 2003 Adds RBL Checking

Tim A — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 18:53:55 -0400

From SpamBlogging:

There is a feature in Exchange 2003 that is "new" (meaning that it wasn't in Exchange prior to this release). Under the "connection filtering" you can set it up to check messages against RBL servers and then toss them if they don't pass ...

I'll post this here because I'll hear from a number of people contemplating using SimpleFilter in place of spam filtering in Microsoft Exchange. They'll say something like "look, Microsoft is doing this so I don't need SimpleFilter".

The short answer to this goes as follows. This is a new feature of Microsoft Exchange. We've been using it for well over a year. RBL's are changing regularly and results from them change over time as well. Unless one is monitoring them continuously like we do for SimpleFilter you're asking for trouble. Also, a hit from an RBL should never be considered black or white. It seems that is your only choice with Microsoft. We have great flexibilty with the results we get from an RBL and those are honed in real-time.

I should mention that people typically use RBL when they really mean DNS Block Lists which is what is talked about above. We've moved well beyond DNS Block Lists and various other types of block lists as well. It probably won't be till late 2005 that Microsoft discovers some of the other block lists that we've already moved on from.

I should also mention that DNS Block Lists and other Block Lists that we use are a very small piece of the overall methods we use for SimpleFilter that in total help to determine the likelihood that an email is spam.

Annual Cost Of Spam Reaches $1934

Tim A — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 16:01:57 -0400

According to a report by Nucleus Research the cost of spam on average is $1934 / year / employee.

They don't provide proper links to their news releases or the report so I've just stored a copy here

If you don't want spam to be an issue in your life any longer checkout SimpleFilter (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder).

Comprehensive anti-spam system, method, and computer program product for filtering unwanted e-mail messages

Tim A — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 16:47:14 -0400

Well, this patent (#6,732,157) certainly won't hold up. Too much prior art. We were doing this at SimpleFilter before they even filed their patent in 2002.

Network Associates is granted broad anti-spam patent Network Associates Inc. (NAI) has been granted a broad U.S. patent for technology covering "various computer program products, systems and methods" for filtering unwanted e-mail messages, it said Tuesday.

It is about as useful as patent #6,373,244 ("Apparatus for scraping a surface indicating elements located inwardly of the surface"). Or in laymans terms, transverse asswiping.

Spasm free here with SimpleFilter

Tim A — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 22:47:37 -0400

Practically spasm free here with SimpleFilter. The tens of hundreds of email never make it to my inbox anymore.

A Japanese friend of many years has changed his email address and explains why: I had to do this change to avoid tens of hundreds of spasms and unsolicited emails I receive every day. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Source: ongoing · Spasms

MailHurdle getting over last years hurdles

Tim A — Thu, 27 May 2004 09:33:17 -0400

Mirapoint claims "A new mail-filtering approach from Mirapoint aims to sort the wheat from the spam". Other links here and here.

First, lets get one thing straight. This is nothing new. Any decent anti-spam service employed at the SMTP level is already doing this or should be doing this. This seems to be their whole anti-spam solution.

This is a very small part of the overall methods we use at SimpleFilter.