Social media sites are booming. The amount of personal information folks are choosing to post to them, such as photos, videos, original stories, thoughts, gossip, and so on, is exploding. Marketers are drooling at the prospect of using all that “free” information. Well, it’s really not free, folks. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘spam’
France Performing Audits To Check For Spam
Thursday, November 20th, 2008While doing some research on data protection laws in France, I found it interesting to learn that this past September the French data protection authority (CNIL) stared auditing businesses to check for unlawful spam operations.
Don’t Let Your Folks Fall For This Scary Spam
Friday, February 1st, 2008Today I got a death threat email message. This particular type of spam is not really new, but because they will be very scary for most people to get, many recipients will fall for them.
The address header and text of the message reads:
New FTC Spam & Phishing Report
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008On December 28 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) made a new report available to the public, “Spam Summit: The Next Generation of Threats and Solutions.”
The report describes the findings from a July 2007 workshop the FTC hosted, and proposes follow-up action steps to mitigate the damages caused by malicious spam and phishing.
The World is Miffed About Spam & Phishing
Thursday, October 18th, 2007Several weeks ago I got spam from an information security company about a seminar they are putting on. I did not respond; I wasn’t interested. Since that time I have received many messages, all with the same content, from various people from that organization, the tone of which really ticked me off. The following is an excerpt.
New Study: More Confirmation That Spam Costs Businesses Significant $$
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007On April 2 Nucleus Research, Inc. released a study, “Spam: The Repeat Offender” which reports that, according to a survey of 849 email users, 90% of all email going into company networks is spam, and 66% of spam gets through corporate filters.
What Businesses Need to Know About Reputation-Based Messaging Technology
Sunday, April 1st, 2007I first started hearing about reputation-based technologies used in conjunction with filtering messages a couple of years ago. What a great idea! It does make sense to analyze the characteristics of a message to help determine whether or not it is legitimate, spam, contains malware, or is likely to be some other type of message you do not want getting onto your corporate network, doesn’t it? Trying to determine the “reputation” of the message seems to be a good additional check. Banks and credit card companies have been doing similar types of activities for decades, looking at the reputation of their loan and card applicants, when generating credit scores. It seems as though this type of analysis, while not fool-proof, could also have the potential to greatly assist with keeping unwanted messages from clogging the enterprise networks and mailservers.
Addressing Image Spam
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007Have you noticed an increasingly large number of email messages coming into your inbox that have the text information imbedded within graphic images? I have, and they really bug me. I know they irritate many of my information assurance professional colleagues as well. Some of these spam messages are very creative. All clutter my already overflowing email. They waste precious storage, and also clog bandwidth on enterprise networks. This is image spam.
