Tag: SPAM

Security firm F-Secure has shared some interesting information regarding spam. It's no secret that Facebook has become a popular platform for spammers and poisoned links (URLs that lead to malware). What you might not realize is how successful spammers are on Facebook. F-Secure reports click rates as high as 40%. That's insane. Email spam isn't even in the same solar system percentage-wise. ...

Facebook is working on a new feature that would make "likes" more like Pages, allowing for info to be posted on the walls of anybody who "likes" a particular thing. Currently, this only works one way: if you post about something you like, your post goes on the wall of the Facebook page for that thing. Under the new version, any page with a like button will be able to do this in reverse, leaving ...

It's a story that beggars belief, a true case of Goliath smothering David with his voluminous backside, but believe it or not... it's true! Get this: a group of ingenious spammers are being sued by Microsoft for abusing Hotmail's Junk Mail Reporting Program and Smart Network Data Services. The lawsuit claims that the defendants used millions of Hotmail accounts to label spam messages as 'not ...

Look, Twitter, I know you're busy taking care of things like possible revenue streams and performance glitches, but do you think we could maybe take some time and do something about all the malicious link spam crudding up the joint? When the site redesign was launched a while back, the inclusion of the public stream and trending topics seemed like a good way to show potential Twitter initiates ...

Less than a month ago, Microsoft's Hotmail went through a well-received reboot, but our own Lee Mathews delivered an epic rant about the taglines in the footers of messages anyway. "FAIL!" he cried! How can we use these email addresses for professional purposes when they're still tacking on ads at the bottoms of our messages? That's so early-90s AOL (yes, we're allowed to do that... )! ...

If you thought Facebook ruled your social life before, wait until you see the new options for event and app invites. It prompts you to select Facebook friends, and then to import the email addresses of your friends who don't have Facebook. That means your friends might be inviting you to all kinds of stupid stuff via email, even if you're not on Facebook. The new contact import feature can get ...

If you run a WordPress blog (or more than one!) and use Google Chrome, you might be interested in a handy new extension called WordPress Checker. It keeps track of unmoderated and spam comments, so you can approve or delete them. It puts a little WordPress icon next to your search bar, with a badge for the number of comments you currently have to deal with. There's another, slightly more ...

Chatroulette is home to an eclectic mix of pervs, cops, random people wearing odd costumes and (reportedly) one or two bored teenage girls. And now you can add Travelocity to the mix, in the form of their garden gnome, each time carrying a different "quirky" handwritten message. This one says, "this would be more fun if we were in Rio". How delightful! Travelocity's reasoning here is that ...

Just when you think the Facebook privacy debate has reached its peak, the popular social network drops another privacy-related bomb. This time, Facebook has said it will allow apps to demand users' email addresses. Currently, apps communicate with you via the red-flag "updates" tab in the bottom-right corner of the site. On the plus side, Facebook is taking that annoyance away. On the "oh my ...

Despite the recent shenanigans overseas involving Google, China has at least taken steps to help cut down on the amount of spam in our inboxes. Symantec's Samir Patil reports that their company has observed a major drop in spam originating from .CN domains. Back in December, the CNNIC announced that they would be enacting new rules about domain name registrations "in order to further enhance ...

In a case of a good-defence-is-a-good-offence, a team of nerds led by a researcher from security company FireEye has just brought down the Mega-D botnet. This particular botnet accounted for some 12 percent of all spam email and was controlled by servers in Israel, Turkey, and the U.S. A botnet, if you're not down with script-kiddie hax0r lingo, is a 'bot network'. A bot is a robot -- though ...

Have you ever actually clicked on any of Twitter's trending topics? I don't want to sound like the old guy telling whippersnappers to get off his lawn, but trying to read almost any Twitter trend gives me a headache. There's so much spam with popular hashtags attached that even people who care about the trends aren't getting a great user experience. Twitter realizes this, and they're going to do ...

Facebook's making some big changes around its application platform, particularly concerning how much access apps have to a user's activity stream and notifications. If you're a Facebook user who hates app spam, that's good news for you. It's terrible news for developers, though, because getting their links in front of you is how they spread virally and pick up more users. This doesn't mean that ...

If you didn't ask to have your Facebook password reset, think twice before opening an email that looks like it's from Facebook's support team. A lot of these fake password-reset emails have been going out lately, and the attachments they contain can take over your computer and add it to the Bredolab botnet, according to ZDnet. Your first clue that these emails are sketchy is that they contain a ...

The head honchos at Twitter have decided to take action against the site's growing problem with spam accounts by giving users some new options to file spam reports. You'll see a new "Report as spam" link on the sidebar of each user's Twitter page, and a "Report as spam" action available from your followers and following lists. Clicking on either of those links will give you a chance to decide if ...