Chameleon stalking.
I think the next phase will be personalized spoofed emails from friends/family describing how great a new product they tried was, written in their natural voice. Anything for a buck.

Oh wow! I'm jealous! I want personalized spam!!!

rotff :D

I got an email from the site administrator at my airline the other day. Warning me about trojan.exe files showing up in my email desguised as official email from above.

Said it would come from the titles of "Administration, Chief Pilot, Management, or Human Resources".

I replied that since I have worked here, I routinely delete without reading any and all emails from any of those addresses so I wasn't too worried.


My reply made the comapny newsletter.

Michael (Director of Operations.....)

There seems to be a pandemic of bogus, virus-infected emails making the rounds. My box has been getting several everyday for the last month. More a nuisance than anything else...for now.

The new spam-generating programs create random subject lines and random text in the message body in order to defeat Bayesion spam filters. (like Spam Assassin) Bayesian filters 'score' an email based on words and phrases to arrive at a spam probability factor. For instance, the words "Viagra" or "beastiality" would have higher scores than "brakes" or "engine". This dilutes the overall score and allows the message to get thru. The spam generator programs create a multi-part MIME-encoded message, with the spam message ("Enlarge your p3n!s!") in the first part, and the garbage text in the 2nd part. Many times they bastardize the headers so your email reader doesn't even see the 2nd part. I got one the other day with the text %RAND% repeated something like 200 times!

Internet worms have moved beyond being simply annoying; now the worm writers are leasing them out to be distributed spam distribution network. The new worms also have expiration dates, which belies their economic intent. Basically, advertisers will be able to rent a worm in the way they're able to rent a phone or mailing list now.

All of these unsecured home PC's with a broadband connection are being used much more efectively than any open SMTP relay could ever be. At the very least, you should install something like
ZoneAlarm so you can control your inbound and outbound traffic.

this is why I run NetNewsWire and am moving increasing to RSS feeds for getting and putting out my information.

Wayne, you should consider publishing xml feeds from your site(s). You could have "just added" products, "hottest sellers", and also tie in latest posts at the bbs.

For a great example of RSS feeds, check out:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/MRSS/rssGenerator

And here is a custom generated feed displayed on a remote site (ie mine):

http://nostatic.com

Also, that homepage has RSS feeds from two weblogs, and they are automatically updated when new information is generated. Amazon is moving to RSS feeds for their catalog info.

It's the wave of the future...and next generation versions like Atom will enable more interesting applications. It could largely replace email as a communication/collaboration tool. At this point, you can't spam RSS since you choose what you want to aggregate...

mine spam at work has subjects: "hot wet bitc.....es"
i am so fired....
i hate people.

Using Linux, the viruses don't even faze me. Using Mozilla, I don't see the spam. Life is good :)

id10t stole my thunder. ;)

so even if I have the Norton 2004..
I should use which Zone prod for home cable PC

Just deleted the damn things...and don't use your work email address for anything other than work. Simple, right? Wrong.

waaah hah hah! :D you sir are a card. :)