Spam Filtering: August 2006 Archives

Tired of getting phishing emails "from" Bank of Ireland? Not to fear - the phishers have moved onto a new target - Permanent TSB. As happens so often the email itself is grammatically incorrect:

Dear Valued Customer, Financial institutions around the world have always been subject to attempts by criminals to try and defraud money from them and their customers. These attempts can occur in a number of ways (eg credit card fraud, telephone banking or Internet scams). As a part of our ongoing commitment to provide the "Best Possible" service to all our Members, we are now requiring each member to validate their accounts once per month. To validate your account, follow the link. Sign in to Secured Online Banking . (Remember Failure to verify your account details may lead to account been Frozen for security Reasons) Thank you. Online Banking Security Team Permanent TSB Online (OPEN 24) . © 2006 All Rights Reserved Permanent TSB Permanent TSB is a trading name of Irish Life & Permanent plc which is regulated by the Financial Regulator.

Note the incorrect use of the past participle. You should also note the odd capitalisation. Funnily enough the phish site includes a nice prominent link to the TSB's security warning about phishers :)

Earlier this year I mentioned the Microsoft /MSN initiative to help ISPs track their users' spam. Since I last logged in they've added several new features including the possibility of adding your entire AS number. Excellent! No more worrying about network segments. I'd simply throw in any AS we manage and be covered! WRONG! MS, in their wisdom, haven't set up their system properly. Instead of running: whois ASxxxx -h whois.ripe.net - or whatever the windows equivalent is, they are querying ARIN so the only contact returned is abuse@ripe.net! Gah!

Dear Google Please stop making life easy for spammers... Thanks to your rather inane redirector spammers are able to send us all links to URIs that blacklists would otherwise block And you wonder why gmail is constantly blacklisted?