The Ashimmy Blog

Friday notes from the spam trap

I found this one in my junk mail folder today. Hard to believe that with everything Ben Bernanke has going on with getting reappointed and all, he had the time to send me this note. He probably was so rushed that he didn’t have time to proof read and fix the grammar :-)

 

NEW YORK.
ATTENTION:
CONTRACT FUND CREDIT FROM FEDERAL RESERVE BANK BOARD USA We received the instruction letter to credit $10.5million to your account .

We wish to let you know that all difficulties has been remove for the success of this contract fund to be credited into the your personal account.

Your response is required to enable us credit your account without further delay and you are also require to get back to us with the reconfirmation of your banking information for us to know whether what we have in our files is correct .This is to avoid crediting your fund into wrong account.

Kindly get back to me today also with the requested information below so that we can proceed on this matter as soon as possible.

1) Your full Name ,Bank, and Account number.
2) Phone, fax and mobile #.
3) Company name, position and address.
4) Profession, age and marital status.
5) Copy of int'l passport, driver’s license, or any valid ID card via e-mail attachment.

CONGRATULATION FOR YOUR CONTRACT FUND.
Please be fast on this matter.
Thanks and God bless you.
Regards,

Ben S. Bernanke.
Chairman Federal Reserve Bank New York,

Have a great weekend everyone!

A stroll through my junk mail folder

I like to go through my junk mail folder every few days to make sure nothing that I needed to see was spam canned.  I just finished looking over the last two days of junk mail (about 50 mails only). The good news is there was nothing in there that didn’t belong there and I didn’t have to move anything out or set up to always mail from the sender.  But what was in there was just ridiculous.  Let me share some of the highlights:

1. First of all, Mr. J Uddin, of the British Airways Authority wanted to let me know that a box had been received at Heathrow Airport with my name on it. Mr. Uddin was nice enough to inspect the box and discover that it contains 5.5 million dollars (US) in cash! Before handing it over to the customs officials he wanted to reach out to me. The box and cash are in safekeeping with the UK Treasury Insurance Authority (that makes sense) and I need to reach out to Uddin at his private email (juddinn@sify.com) for instructions to contact the clearance/releasing officer.

Mr. Uddin is very worried that I receive this notice, so he sent it to me 4 times in the last two days.  Thanks Mr. Uddin!

2. Next Mr Maxwell Brooks from the Chartered Finance & Securities wanted to let me know that the “UNITED NATIONS in Central Bank in conjuction with the WORLD BANK GROUP OF THE UNITED STATE OF AMERICA” has set aside $500,00.00 to pay scam victims like me. I just need to contact Scott Williams with the scam victims code they sent me with my contact info to receive the money. Oh yeah he wanted to tell me up front that it would cost me $155 to process my payment. If I am not interested in doing this to get the 500k don’t contact Mr Williams. 

Mr Brooks, of course I would lay out the 155 bucks to get the half a million dollars, thanks!

3. Then, Mr Scott Williams himself sent me this note,

“Attn: Beneficiary , This is to acknowledge the receipt of this email honourable office and the contents there in were well noted. How are you today? I hope you are doing fine healthwise and as well as your beloved ones and as well as your job and business. Be informed that we have received your details of your winning claims of $500,000 USD Thousand and has been Well confirmed all you just have to do is to come up with the sum of $155 to ensure your funds deliver to your deliver located address you are requested to send the sum of $155 to the address below: HERE IS THE PAYMENT INFORMATION OF THE SUM OF ($155) You are requested to send the fee VIA WESTERN UNION or MONEY GRAM by today Sender Name: sender Address: Reciever Name: Dele Charles Reciever Address: Abuja Nigeria Text Question: In God Text Answer: We Trust Amount to be sent: $155 Mtcn (Western Union): ............. Refrence Number (Money Gram): ..................”

H’mm the same $155.I guess Scott likes that amount. Maybe that is what it will cost him for English writing lessons.

4. Now, Mr Karim Ahmed the manager Audit & Accounts dept. in the African Development Bank of Burkina faso (A.D.B) wants my help in getting 25 million, two hundred thousand (nice touch adding the two hundred thousand, so it is not just an unbelievable round number) out of the bank.The money belonged to some poor Jordanian person who died in a plane crash.  Mr Ahmed will split the money 60-40 with me if I can get him my personal contact info.

Now that is the kind of phishing I am used to! Mr Ahmed you are going to have to be more creative than that.

5.  Following that were about a half dozen penile enlargements and Viagra stuff (how did they know), lets skip them.

6. Mr John Simmons wrote me next. He must work with Mr Brooks. He also represents a fund for scam victims and they have one million dollars for me! Not to worry Mr Simmons informs me, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is involved in this, so everything is on the up and up.

Whew, that makes me feel better. I just need to send over to Mr Simmons personal Yahoo email all of my contact information and bank info. Well since the FBI is guaranteeing it?

I do give this one extra points though. Taking the usual I have money for you to the next level, acknowledging that perhaps you were already a victim.

7. The last ones I want to tell you about is a group of 3 I received, all from nice ladies over in Africa. Two were young daughters of wealthy men who died and one was a widow.  They would all like my help in transferring their fathers monies out of the country.  They all call me dear and ask that I not be shocked that they contacted me.

They just want my phone number and will give me further instructions.Sounds innocent enough.

Geez, not one porn spam in the there, I am disappointed.

Happy Friday and Happy Chanukah to those celebrating!

There is only one answer to the Spam problem

I have noticed in line with reports that Spam in my inbox is starting to pick up again. Most of what I am getting is the ever popular Canadian Pharmacy stuff. It claims to be coming from mailboxes in the StillSecure domain and from Microsoft.  I haven't done any tracking on it yet or sent it over to the StillSecure SAT team to see what what the story is.  But does it really matter? 

The Spam problem won't go away until the money is let out of the balloon for the spammers.  When the rate of return for what it costs them to deliver this garbage is not enough to justify the cost, Spam will go away.  It really is an economic problem.  As long as some people are stupid enough to click on this crap and buy it, they will continue sending it.  Yes we can build better mouse traps, yes we can shut down hosts that host the spammers, yes we can try to block the botnets that are at work.  But all of that is reactive and perpetuates the status quo.  We need to educate people that to stop the spam, they need to stop clicking on it! That is something I see very little on.  Educating people that even if these deals seem too good to be true (they are), clicking on them hurts us all.  Stop spam by stop clicking on it. If you don't like all of this Viagra, credit repair, porn and the other sundry crap that clogs your mailbox, stop clicking on it.  Just say no to Spam.  Some sort of public awareness of what drives Spam would go a long way towards taking the money out of it for the spammers.  With no money the Spammers will shrivel up and die.

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Better turn up your spam filters, political spam is on the way

Well it looks like our presidential campaign is about to take a turn to the gutter. First John McCain spoke about taking off the gloves and now that hockey mom with lipstick says its  "now the heels are on, the gloves come off'". That was before she accused Barak Obama of "palling around with terrorists".  Hey I guess desperate times call for desperate measures. But if the top of the ticket is pulling out all of the stops, can you imagine what some of their minions and the swift boat crowd are going to be up to!

I am sure we will all start getting forwarded emails making wild claims that Osama and Obama are related, Barak was sworn in on a Koran, etc. etc..  I would set my spam filters right now to start taking some of the more obvious of this stuff out of the way, before it clogs your inbox. 

Oh boy politics, you gotta luv it!

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How to make a bad first impression

Blogging is a fairly new medium.  I have seen many PR people who just are befuddled about how to leverage blogs for their clients.  There is no book of blogging etiquette for them to study.  Even companies who hold themselves out as "marketing and relationship" experts just don't know squat about the blogging world.  So when they venture out without a safety net, invariably they screw it up.  A case in point is a rookie mistake that a Joshua Lewis of a company called Twelve Horses committed today. 

Joshua left a long comment on one of my recent articles today trying to flatter me about how in doing research he stumbled across my blog was so impressed, yada, yada, yada.  He then told me about how a company he is working with Solera Networks may be interesting to me. He proceeded to write a commercial for Solera Networks. That would be bad enough if that was all he did.

Joshua had no idea that many security bloggers talk to each other pretty regularly too.  It seems that our boy Josh was pretty busy running around to a bunch of security blogs, spouting similar comments about how he loved them best and touting Solera.  Well that about sealed it for me.  I have deleted his comment as spam.  Deleting comments is something I seldom if ever do by the way.  But this kind of behavior needs to be dealt with.  These kinds of shenanigans are not acceptable.

So Josh, not only is your comment touting Solera now gone, but I am calling out what exactly you were up too.  I am pretty sure you have done Solera more harm than any good you could have done.  Maybe next time before you think you are going to game the system, you should learn how to play the game.

Political cartoon with an anti-spam edge

Looks like Ben Sargent has received his share of Nigerian Lottery spam!

'Tis the season - for spam

Barracuda Networks released a new survey they did on spam today. According to this survey between 90% and 95% of all email sent is spam.  I knew the number was high but that is just staggering.  Also of interest was that business executives view spam as the worst junk advertising.  Spam far out paced junk postal mail and telemarketing. I don't know but I think telemarketing calls are the worst, even worse than spam. Also with the holiday season, we are seeing a pick up in holiday theme related spam.  Also according to the survey, expect a flood of New Years related spam around new years resolutions. 

If nothing else spammers are resourceful and persistent. What I could never for the life of me understand is who clicks on these emails and buys the things the spammers sell?  If no one did, there would be no spam.  So I guess one mans spam is another mans great find.  Anyway here is hoping your own spam filters are in place and sparing you from the deluge!

How not to do marketing

God knows that when another company does some stupid marketing, I am the first one to jump up and down and call them on it.  Some companies and former friends have gotten upset with me for doing it, but I call them as I see them.  So it is with some regret that I have to stand up and say that we at StillSecure did some stupid marketing, that I have to apologize to my blogging brethren for.  It seems our PR folks, realizing the tremendous influence security bloggers exert (hey don't forget the most influential people in IT Security list), thought the best way to reach them was to send out a story pitch to all the people on our blogrolls. This is the same way they do to it in pitching to the traditional media. WRONG!  That's what makes blogging, blogging.  It was not cool, a mistake and we are all sorry here.  We will make sure that does not happen again.  Lesson learned and now on with the show.

A new take on the Nigerian bank scam - Kelly's Heroes

I am sure you have all received the usual email story of the bank or government officer from some African country that is looking for help in moving millions of dollars out of the country.  It is sometimes the widow or relative of a disposed leader or some other such thing.  Though I never respond, I frankly enjoy reading the stories and wonder how anyone would be stupid enough to get involved.  Do you really think there are 10 million dollars (american) waiting and these people would be kind enough to give you a 30% or better fee to help them?  If you respond to that stuff, you deserve what you get. 

Today, though I saw for the first time a new wrinkle on this one.  Showing that the bad guys know how to use current events, I call this one Kelly's Heroes, named after the Clint Eastwood movie about a bunch of American GI's taking stolen Nazi gold out of Europe at the end of WWII.  In this scam it is some British soldiers looking to ship out dollars from Iraq.  I publish it here for your amusement:

Hello,

I am Major Ralph Harland, I am a British officer attached to UN peace Keeping force in Iraq, I am the commanding officer of the First Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment, as you may know everyday, there are several cases of insurgent’s attacks and suicide bombs going on here.

We managed to Move funds belonging to some demised persons who were attacked and killed through insurgent attacks. The total amount is US$9.5 Million dollars in cash. We want to move this money to you, so that you may keep our share for us until when we shall come over to meet you.

We will take 60%, my partner and I. You take 40%. No strings attached, just help us move it out of Iraq, Iraq is a war zone.

We plan on using Diplomatic courier and shipping the money out in two large metallic boxes, using diplomatic immunity. If you are interested I will send you the full details; my aim is to find a good partner that we can trust and assist us can you be trusted?

When you receive this letter, kindly send me an e-mail here  ralpharland@yahoo.co.uk , or majorralpharland@aol.co.uk signifying your interest including your most confidential telephone/fax numbers for quick communication and also your contact details.

This business is 100% risk free.

Respectfully,

Major Ralph Harland

Hey Computerworld, whats with the cheap pop up ads

I was reading a post by Douglas Schweitzer on compromised credit cards and referred to another ComputerWorld article by Jaikumar Vijayan.  I read ComputerWorld alot.  Some of my blogging friends have blogs on ComputerWorld and usually the stories are pretty good.  Today though, when I clicked on the link to Vijayan's story, I was instead taken to a full page ad.  You know the type, up on the right corner is a link to skip this ad.  I really didn't find it too bothersome. I skipped the ad (I usually do), and the article loaded. I was about 3 words into it when another ad popped up on screen. This was one of those that you would normally see if you hit the "scroll over to expand" type thing.  It was blinging and loud.  Before I even had a chance to close that one, another smaller one started up.  I finally closed them both and was able to read the first page of the article.  At the end of the page I hit next page link. On the next page of the story, same exact thing.  Except this time there were three of the popping ads!  I just decided not to read the rest of the story, rather than put up with the adware at that point.

My experience made me feel like I was at some sleazy, third rate site trying too hard to push a mortgage refinance down my throat.  ComputerWorld should be better than that.  I am not against advertising and usually look at ads on the page of the story, but when they make it too hard to read the story because the ads are too intrusive, I just won't read the story or go to the web site.  Come on ComputerWorld, stop this!