As Long As People Keep Buying, Scams (and Spam) Will Keep On Coming
from the pt-barnum dept
It looks like if anything is going to be able to effectively stop spam, it might be pressure on spammers' profit margins that makes spamming a less attractive line of work. But that still seems a ways off, as long as enough people continue to buy the stuff being sold in spam messages. Spammers know if they can reach a high enough volume, they'll find enough suckers to make it worthwhile. Scareware, too, is a volume business: a new report looked at a recent scam in which users were sent to booby-trapped web sites which said their computers had a virus. They were then directed to a site selling them some $50 "anti-virus" software. While a small percentage of people actually ponied up the cash, enough did to allow the scammers to pay more than $10,000 per day to the people who used SEO techniques on keyword typos to drive marks into the scam. It's easy to say that people shouldn't be so stupid and fall for the scams, but at the same time, perhaps a bigger issue lurks for the legitimate security software industry: if people can't distinguish between legitimate warnings from their products and scams, it could be a problem for them.
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Yes, there's one born every minute.
Use your head people and you'll be fine.
Oh, and about the ransomware in the article...get a backup program and an external hard drive. If you ever become infected, just restore from your external drive. Problem solved.
Excuse me while I go beat my head against the wall over there because someone...somewhere just clicked on the kitten video. ARRRRGGGG!
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Spam is a result of one of the most massive security holes in the world, and one that every ISP perpetuates by handing new users an email account. It would be much safer to point them to hotmail and call it a day.
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Strangely I've been using gmail for over 4 years now and I don't have a problem with spam. I guess they have a good enough filter.
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and that would be what exactly?
Harold, you make no sense at all.
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As it relates to spam/fraudulent e-mail, it's the lack of provable authenticity that's the biggest problem. It's trivial to spoof a return address, and many ISPs are set up poorly and will let you use their outgoing mail servers to send a message, even if you don't have an account with them. If there were mechanisms in place to unambiguously associate an e-mail with its sender, we'd have a lot fewer e-mail scams.
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Re: Re: Re: one of the most massive security holes in the world,
AC -> From a security standpoint,
You guys are talking about different things, or not using proper terminology.
I suppose that WH could've been referring to the operator as the security hole ...
A security hole (at least it used to) refers to an unintentional or unpublicized means by which unauthorized access is obtained to a platform or device.
You can spoof an email addr - so what. Does this compromise the platform?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: one of the most massive security holes in the world,
Standard "out of the box" e-mail doesn't have provisions for any of the three. There have been add-on extensions to the e-mail standard that help, such as encryption and digital signatures, but they're neither required nor widespread.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: one of the most massive security holes in the world,
Scott,
Look up "security hole" as that was the term in question - in addition, please read the prior postings
Thx
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Unnecessary, and contrary to the open nature of the web.
Spam still makes money, but *much less* than it used to, due to the effectiveness of today's antispam filters. If we can just drive up the price a bit more we can get a handle on it. Charge everybody a cent to send emails (with all the major players auto-rejecting mails that weren't 'paid for') and spam'll *stop*. ^_^
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Tips To Avoid SEO Scams
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Re: Tips To Avoid SEO Scams
Nice try. You don't honestly expect us to click on that link, do you? ;)
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People Never Learn
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Re: People Never Learn
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i had them call the credit card company and file a fraudulent charge notice. the credit card company retracted the charge without dispute. then it was a matter of directing them through the reformat.
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NoScript extension for Firefox - free
Adblock Plus extension for Firefox - free
CookieSafe extension for Firefox - free
Never seeing the "You just won a free iPod!!!!!" ads that lead to malware sites - priceless
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