Spam is Back With A Vengence 510
Ant writes "The Red Tape Chronicles reports that just last December (2006), the FTC published an optimistic state-of-spam report. It cites research indicating spam had leveled off or even dropped during the previous year. It now appears spammers had simply gone back to the drawing board. There's more spam now than ever before.
In fact, there's twice as much spam now as opposed to this time last year. And the messages themselves are causing more trouble. About half of all spam sent now is "image spam," containing server-clogging pictures that are up to 10 times the size of traditional text spam. And most image spam is stock-related, pump-and-dump scams which can harm investors who don't even use e-mail. About one-third of all spam is stock spam now."
Re:The solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Spam spam spam spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spa (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe I think about this stuff too much.
new spam methods (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,206027
Most admins were able to find ways to eliminate that eventually: http://blog.fastmail.fm/?p=580 [fastmail.fm]
but now I notice a new trend. Some spammers are actually putting news headlines in the subject field.
On top of that the black hats are now finding ways to spam emule search results.
Every search you make in Emule will return a fake hit... something like *_using_emule_multimedia_toolbar.exe. If you exectute that program your machine will be infected with a virus.
block .gif images? (Score:3, Insightful)
What I just don't get.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It simply makes no sense to me. As long as people remain so completely clueless that they will fall for spam, there will be spam.
Re:Stock Spam (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The solution (Score:5, Insightful)
What I think would help is ISPs taking confirmed zombie machines offline. It's done in Sweden by some ISPs, and most people don't seem to have a problem with that.
Re:What I just don't get.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently, plenty. It only takes a few suckers to justify the time and effort to set up a spam campaign. I'd like to think that some day everyone will be aware enough that pump-and-dumps, nigeria scams, and the myriad other flavors of spam simply won't work any more because nobody will fall for them. Unfortunately, I do not believe that is a likely outcome [wikiquote.org].
Re:1p per email (Score:2, Insightful)
I can go one better. 1-Charge the $0.01 (or $0.005 or whatever) per piece of email, prepaid.
2-When the email reaches the other end monies are returned to the sender. However, at the recipients discretion the postage return can be stopped.
The end result would hopefully be that spammers pay, optimally through the nose, and compliant users still get to use the system for free or next to free.
Failure Notice (Moderation Sub-System) (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Satire: Perhaps the most confounding form of humor, note the subtle reference to the discussion embedded in a story about something else. This wasn't flaming slashdot, it was about how spam that appears to originate from your domain (but doesn't) can get you blacklisted by site admins as clueless as the moderators who flagged the parent as flamebait. Here is a good example of satire:
For further reading, see the wiki [wikipedia.org].
2. Obligatory references to The Simpsons [wikipedia.org]:
Hint to poster: Next time, just go with the "overlords" joke.
3. Relevancy: Recent news stories highlight that most spam is coming from botnets under the control of Eastern European and Russian criminal organizations. Had you bothered to read anything on /. about spam prior to moderating just now, you'd probably know this. Hence the following is, in fact, funny:
Thank you for moderating today! We hope you enjoyed your crack!
Re:Moo (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds to me like your pricing scheme is part of the problem.
Re:Stock scam spams - 3n14rge yur SC0X ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Old fashioned 'pump and dump' scams were fairly easy to track, as they would go after the brokers who pushed the stock, and then it was a simple task to just follow the money. As we all know emails can be awfully hard to trace back to their creator.
I used to wonder why people would fall for such scams, 'how could they fall for these things time and time again?'. Well, a couple of years back I was having a conversation with a woman who was distressed that an 'old friend' of her husband had contacted him again. Apparently, this guy has sold (taken) her husband on a variety of pyramid schemes, 'mlm's, and many other 'get rich quick plans. Later, ss nicely as possible I confronted him on 'why' he let this happen. He was a little angry with me, but without any hesitation, he told me that 'one day it will pay off' That day I learned a little something about some people's nature. He knew that these were scams, but he worked them anyways. To the best of my knowledge, he wasn't a crook, and he never approached me with those affairs. So I'm guess that he had hoped that if he just participated, someone else would do the dirty work which would make him rich.
I suspect that the reason why these latest 'pump-and-dump' scams seem to work (otherwise why would you be seeing so much of it), is not action by those easily duped, but by those who hope that they could exploit the 'opportunity'.
Re:The solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yep, I don't get it either (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes. The fact that modern spam is unreadable garbage is a huge win for us, the good guys. It means that to run an effective spam campaign you now need to to spend say 10 million spams instead of only one. The success rate is way, way lower so you have to bump up the volume to get the same hit. If it weren't for botnets, spam would probably be on the decline by now because simply delivering the quantity of mail needed would be impractical. Unfortunately we do have botnets, so all we see is the same amount of spam, but more nonsensical. Still, if one day we can solve the botnet problem, it means the spam problem will largely be solved at the same time.
Viagra, and its competitors Cialis and Levitra, are all prescription drugs. Presumably, a lot of people either want to use them but don't actually need them, or are too embarassed to go to their doctor and admit they can't get it up. Buying online is anonymous and there's no risk of anybody finding out. You can't buy them from legit sites because they are prescription, so spammers mop up the black market. We could probably halve the volume of spam tomorrow by making Viagra non-prescription.
As to why people buy penny stocks on the advice of spam, well, I guess they are just morons.
Re:The solution (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Filtering is wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
The biggie for me is sender verification (in postfix, probably in other MTA's too) - the MTA looks up the MX for the sending domain and basically says 'do you know who cheapviagra@foo.com is?'. This catches over 80% of spam before it even reaches the server (only a few headers are sent). Spamassassin mops up the rest.
Even that has false positives (cisco for example send out emails from bogus email addresses). There's no perfect system..
Greylisting is intrusive; unknown fp rate (Score:4, Insightful)
We have no way of knowing how many legitimate delivery failures are caused by greylisting. That's because, as the parent points out, messages are rejected a priori and there's no quarantine to check. If you reject and for whatever reason it is not retransmitted, your mail is lost. Maybe this "shouldn't" happen but it does, and it happens often enough that it is not entirely obvious that its false positive rate is less than that of a spam filter.
It is also trivial for a spammer to defeat greylisting. Perhaps they don't at this time, but at any moment they could flip a switch and render your approach useless. Contrary to popular belief, state-of-the-art spam filters aren't so easily defeated.
Blacklisting doesn't suffer from the immediacy problem of greylisting, but it shares the problem of an unknown false positive rate, and mediocre false negative rate.
Re:The solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Consumer grade DSL is much faster than the servers that used to run ISP email systems just a few years ago - there's really no need to pay for expensive hosting unless you're a company needing 99.9% uptime. I do have hosts for some stuff but only that for which the bandwidth requirements exceed what DSL can provide.
Re:The solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The solution (Score:1, Insightful)
I know of no good ISP that bans such servers. Nor would I use any that did - that's retarded... I'm paying for the bandwidth and it's mine to use.
If ISPs had outbound port 25 blocked by deafult but allowed users who wanted it to turn it on zombie spam would be substantially reduced.
stock pump-n-dump (Score:3, Insightful)
Or maybe mail servers will just start rejecting all binary attachments.
Re:The solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Or you can simply block all outbound port 25 except to very specific mail servers. Cox does this. At first I was a little miffed but then I realized it makes sense. You can still send mail to anywhere you just need to go through their mail server. So if you are running your own SMTP you simply set (for example) smtp.east.cox.net as your smart host and be done with it.
This way you stop most of the mass mailing trojans because they'd have to be smart enough to use the right smart host. Then, even if they do get smart enough to do that cox still has their mail server's log so they can easily show what went out.
The only wrinkle in this is a road warrior who wants to authenticate to his company's mail server so the mail appears to be coming from there. That is simple actually. Simply run a mail submission agent (MSA) on port 587 and reconfigure the clients to use port 587. An MSA only accepts authenticated connections.
Re:block .gif images? (Score:1, Insightful)
The highest level queue (e.g., ascii only and in the local native natural languages) would deliver immediately. It could rate-limit ascii+HTML mail to n/sec, rate-limit HTML only mail to another rate, and only OCR images when the system load is low enough.
SpamAssassin/filters only part. Need callerid/DKIM (Score:3, Insightful)
before we blame ISP's for not doing it by default we must (those people who read slashdot) ask out hosts to do it
make sure we have done it for our domains
ANTISPAM NEEDS YOU
simple
if you send mail from a domain make sure it has a callerid and if possible use DKIM
ISP's who sell domains and put a MX record in by default Without at least a callerid record are wrong... lets correct ours and then ask them to correct theirs
spamassassin can check SPF and DKIM so enable it NOW !
regards
John Jones
p.s. setup yous now
Microsoft callerID and exchange/outlook resources [microsoft.com]
Kerio CallerID check to help chek your setup [kerio.com]
yahoo resources on Domain Keys and setup for various MTA's [yahoo.com]
Re:Spam filters can still cope (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes. The key point is that there aren't that many spammers left. The number of different spams, and especially the number of different stock spams, is quite small.
What's needed is to push on the SEC to find out who's behind the stock spams. They can do it. The number of people buying those penny stocks before the spam started is tiny, and following the money will eventually lead to the spammer. Yes, they may be working through intermediaries, but that's what FinCen and the money-laundering people trace all the time.
For the SEC, this is a low priority. They have scams in the billion dollar range, like Enron, WorldCom, etc. to deal with. The typical stock spam makes the spammer a few thousand dollars. The problem is the collateral damage from the spams, not the investment fraud.
Single user spam filters are too limited. (Score:4, Insightful)
A big problem with most spam filters, especially the open source ones, is that they're single user. They're trying to work out from the content what's spam. Systems like gmail (and Spamcop before IronPort bought it) look at spam addressed to a large number of addresses. When roughly similar material starts showing up at a few hundred different addresses, the probability that it's spam is very high.
Here's a thought. Mail servers should, on receiving an SMTP connection from an IP address, probe that IP address to see if it's a Microsoft consumer-grade operating system. If so, reject the connection. That would put a dent in the zombie problem.
Re:Filtering is wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
But you are practicing "security thru obscurity". As soon as such goes mainstream, spammers will experiment and adjust. They can work all day on the problem because it is their "job", you cannot.
In fact, they probably hire armies of engineers who work for peanuts in Timbuktoo. The same forces that are offshoring techie jobs is making spam practical.
Re:Stock scam spams - 3n14rge yur SC0X ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Last I checked, spammers didn't pay to rent the bandwidth and processor time on each zombie machine they use.
You have to have limits. There have to be rules.
However, those limits shouldn't put a stop on legitimate activity. Just because _you_ do not have a legitimate reason to be running a mail server doesn't mean no one else does.
I'm all for ISPs cracking down on spammers, but not in a way that prevents people legitimately using the service.
(For the record, the great-great-great grandparent cited NTL as an example, who unfortunately have a history of _not_ dealing with abuse of their service, even when the recipient of the attack reports the abuse and supplies logging proving the source of the attack.)
Riding a fictional pump'n'dump (Score:3, Insightful)
An underlying assumption is that these stock schemes are pump'n'dumps fostered by someone who has actually risked money on buying the stock. I don't think that's generally the case.
Whether a pump'n'dump succeeds or not, the broker handling the transactions will take his commission. Anyhting that increases a broker's transaction volume will increase his earnings, including shorts; he always takes his cut. A "shrewd" broker, like the ones known for calling nursing home residents to encourage them to day trade their life savings, don't need to do an actual pump'n'dump scheme; all they need to do is make it look like one is happening and wait for the suckers who want to take a ride on it. It doesn't matter whether the stocks go up or down, either way they collect when these are bought, and collect again when they are sold.
I think most of these stock scams are coming from sleazy brokers rather than stock speculators. Paying a few bucks a month to a spammer who is getting the same amount from a bunch of other brokers would be more than worthwhile when it increases the monthly transaction volume for all of them. Tracking the transactions he sees for the stocks the spammer decides to use is a simple way of checking whether the subscription to the spammer's service has been worthwhile.
Doing it this way, no one would actually have to work at researching pump'n'dump possibilities or risk any of their own money in a speculative buy. Also, there would be no way to trace back from the stock to the crooks, since the crooks never touched the stock itself. For con artists, this is a perfect deal. The marks suckered into it aren't going to talk about it: who is going to admit that they lost money trying to beat a pump'n'dump scheme?
Of course no one who reads slashdot would be dumb enough to fall for this scheme, right?
Re:The solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, a spam solution is almost certainly going to involve a modification to the SMTP protocol. The devil is in the details.
For my tastes, I'd be content to start with rejecting emails immediately rather than sending out "your email was rejected" messages. The number of valid "rejected" messages has got to be infinitesimal compared to the amount of address-guessing spam in the universe. About 1/3 of the spam I get comes from somebody's server rejecting somebody else's spam and telling me about it to no useful effect.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Greylisting is intrusive; unknown fp rate (Score:4, Insightful)
Whoever sold your email as a realtime medium clearly has no idea what he was talking about. Or he did and you fell for it. Want to buy a bridge?
Re:Stock scam spams - 3n14rge yur SC0X ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? are you sure? First of all, the MCSE tests have virtually NOTHING to do with email servers, SMTP, or POP (unless it's changed significantly over the last 10 years). Secondly, if you have ever set up an mail server you would know how easy it is to mis configure one as an open relay (it used to be the default). Third, if you have read Slashdot for more than a week you would know about the zombie networks and their tendencies to be used for spam.
Why? No the 'perp' doesn't have to have a financial connection. Sure, old fashioned 'pump-and-dumps' like the Boiler Room [imdb.com] involved dozens if not hundred of people, large capitol outlays, and for it to be worthwhile they needed to control a relatively large chunk of a small company's stock. Thanks to the internet that has changed, now all you need to do is to contact a zombie network operator (I hear it's fairly easy on some IRC servers), pay them some money. Hopefully a few hours later that under performing stock which you've held for too long is picking up steam. Some might even stage the email so that a couple of marks hit the stock first, just so that they look like a fool who got lucky and sold early.
Yes, I'm sure that you have bet real money on it. As any examination of my postings will tell one, I am not a 'fan' of the current administration, but there really isn't much they can do about this problem. I am sorry if you've lost money to them, but anyone who trades in stock based on obvious spam is really getting what they deserve.
Re:Stock scam spams - 3n14rge yur SC0X ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Junk faxing actually predates email spam, and we got laws prohibiting it quite a while ago. You're entitled to something like $200 per fax
Re:Stock scam spams - 3n14rge yur SC0X ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd rather get one 200k message that I can identity with near 100% certainty as spam - than 200 1k messages with a 98% detection rate.
Re:Stock scam spams - 3n14rge yur SC0X ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The stock market can fix stock spam. (Score:3, Insightful)
How could that possibly help? Or were you just planning to pump-n-dump Microsoft from a Panera Bread the day after this law hit the books?