Category: SPAM SPAM

Do you get a lot of SPAM lately?

By SPAM SPAM

I don’t know what happened, but in the last month or so I’ve got tons of SPAM. It has gone above my mild annoyance level and now it really piss me off.


In the past I just ignored it, or I marked some emails as SPAM, or I filtered out few email addresses, but in the last month or so I’ve been bombarded with spam emails,  content spam on forum and blogs and who knows how many dodgy robots harvested my email addresses and definitely I have been called on my published phone numbers by countless ‘cold calls marketers’ from +91 country.


Fine Print Note: The thing is, you publish you phone to get some business and end up getting ONLY SPAM – and ‘they’ say that AU has a good anti SPAM security…


I’ve studied the spammers tops and  stats for a while now and are pretty conclusive – lots of spammers from only a few countries.







































Source of the stats – Project Honey Pot


What can we do to stop the spammers?


Well, under SPAM acts or legislations, SPAM is illegal in many countries – and Australia is ranked as having a good law and good anti-spam security (imagine how bad could be in other countries).


In Australia, anti-spam legislation - the Spam Act 2003 - covers email, instant messaging, SMS (text messages) and MMS (image-based mobile phone messaging) messages of a commercial nature. It does not cover faxes, internet pop-ups or voice telemarketing. Telemarketing calls are covered by the Do Not Call Register.

ACMA – and   Spam Act 2003 – says that is illegal to send, or cause to be sent, unsolicited commercial electronic messages – email, instant messaging, SMS and MMS.
The ACMA is responsible for enforcing the Spam Act and actively works to fight spam in Australia.
ACMA has posted on their Site info about current SPAM activities and  and they bring down as many spammer as they could, I suppose.


They encourage anybody to report SPAM, SPAM emails by forwarding it to report@submit.spam.acma.gov.au, or Spam SMS, a service to allows you to quickly and easily report SMS you suspect may breach Australia’s spam laws.


What else can you do fighting international SPAM?


An interesting project is:


Project Honey Pot


“Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.”


They offer for FREE few nice features/services:

  • IP Data – a broad collection of malicious IPs, harvesters, spam servers, directory attackers, comment spammers – plus lookup IP
  • stats – per countries, useragents, usernames, spamvertised
  • HTTP blacklist, Monitor your IP Space
  • Plus they send real time their SPAM FEEDS to anti-spam filter developers and companies assessing reputation of IP addresses
  • the project organizers also help various law enforcement agencies combat private and commercial unsolicited bulk mailing offenses and overall work to help reduce the amount of spam being sent and received on the Internet
You can also install on your site a ‘Honey Pot’ scripts that will ‘entrap’ the spammers helping cleaning up the WEB.
They also thought about bloggers:
 
“Some people who want to participate in Project Honey Pot don’t have their own servers. To allow these folks to help out, we have created a QuickLinks program where they can drive harvester traffic to existing Honey Pots. Sharing your Honey Pot will increase the number of harvesters that it catches, allow more people to participate in the Project, and, we think, generally increase your karmic goodness”
 
Give them a try – it’s free, useful and with good intentions.

 









and you will get your own stats and tops:





Fight the SPAM – is annoying and makes the WEB insecure place. Plus, remember all these dodgy guys want to steal your money.


Cheers,
Nick