State of spam

Well for the last two months the amount of spam I have been getting is on the decrease. I hope that this is a permanent trend. That said I don't think spam will be going away totally, the economics of it is too good for it to be totally eradicated. On the downside the spammers now have my Sympatico id. I have received about six spam and variants of the Nigerian scam letter. I have been letting Firefox flag these as spam and drop them into a spam folder. Later when I am bored I will go through them and purge them.

The phishing attempts have been dropping too. If you get an email that is an obvious phishing attempt check out the site that purported to send the email for an email address where you can forward it to. Why make these crooks lives easier? Have the companies and law enforcement agencies shut them down.

New Paypal phishing?

I got a new email that purports to be from PayPal on a payment for a class action lawsuit. This is a good trick as I don't have a PayPal account. I am forwarding the email to PayPal and let them figure out if it is a phishing attempt. Why do I think it is a phishing attempt?

1. I don't have a Paypal account.
2. It asks for bank account information.
3. The link does not resolve to PayPal, but, to another website.
4. None of the links in the email resolve to PayPal.

Confirmed, Paypal sent me an email that this is a phishing attempt. If you receive something similar to the image above forward it to spoof@paypal.com so they can shut down the phishing site(s) in the clickable links.

Spamming Blog

Well it finally happened. My blog got a commercial spam comment. Not even related to Linux which wouldn't upset me much if he/she was also a Linux enthusiast. The person has a commercial site selling CD's on a product which I won't name (Not porn). I enable the new option (word verification) for submitting comments. That at least will make it harder for 'bots' to spam and force an actual person to submit the word verification before putting up their spam.