December 11th, 2009
It started innocently enough. A client, whom I’ll refer to as BigCo, asked a question about the success that one of their divisions was having with a different search consulting company. I wasn’t familiar with the company, so I asked a few questions and then started to investigate them. What I found disturbed me.
It was breathtakingly clear that the secret to success was blatant black hat spamming techniques. This wasn’t some kind of borderline “it depends on how you interpret it” situation. No, BigCo was being assisted by companies paying for links and even posting references of other companies it had “helped” right on its website. At this point, I knew what I had to do.
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November 25th, 2009
As far as Internet business goes it would be hard to imagine someone having a worse year than Sanford Wallace. Who you ask? Mr. Wallace is the Spam King who had a judgment made against him last year in a suit filed by MySpace for $234 million. Now add Facebook to the list of people who basically own Mr. Sanford, Facebook. Just so you know, while I say he is having a bad year it doesn’t mean I am not thrilled to see this kind of Internet low-life get what he deserves. Mashable tells a little more about Mr. Wallace and how deep he is into this now.
Today Facebook reported they’ve been awarded $711 million in damages by a San Jose, CA court against Sanford Wallace, the notorious “Spam King” that MySpace also successfully went after last year to the tune of a $234 million judgment.
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November 13th, 2009
Most of us at least look at our spam queues on our systems on a semi-regular basis, what is always interesting is to see the variances in tactics that spammers are using to try to get their stuff into your system. This time it is all about jokes, ones my kids would like.
There is nothing wrong with a good joke – and spammers seem to have caught onto the idea that burying their ads under jokes might just work – odds are also highly likely that it does.
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October 28th, 2009
Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) is an ISP group who’s goal is to help fight spam and malicious messaging practices, specifically email. The MAAWG conducts a study every quarter where they study the frequency of spam email. They draw their statistics from ISPs, who in turn gathers data from 500 million email boxes, and 200 billion message.
At the end of 2008, the study showed one of the highest rates of spam at 94.2 percent. The good news is that the percentage of spam has decreased marginally in 2009. The first quarter of 09 showed 90.4 percent, and the number dropped even further in Q2 with 89 percent. Read More…
October 16th, 2009
Do you hate spam? Do you hate Twitter spam in particular? Had it with spam? Well, Twitter feels your pain. I get almost teary eyed thinking about their concern for our well being in the Twitterverse. Here’s their blog post to let you know they are thinking of you.
Folks can now help us conquer spam by calling our attention to a profile they find questionable. Click the “Report as spam” button under the Actions section of a profile’s sidebar and our Trust and Safety team will check it out to see what needs to be done. No automated action will be taken as a result of reporting a user as spam (in other words, it can’t be used to incite an angry mob against an account you don’t like.) And once you report a profile it will automatically be blocked from following or replying to you. You nailed it!
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