Posts Tagged ‘Spam’

Are you a “malware” mule?

May 2nd, 2010

Someone’s using you to carry their stuff and you’re not even getting paid!
If your friends complain that they are receiving strange emails from you, you have probably been converted into a ‘malware mule’, meaning you are now an animal who distributes advertising and other ‘bad’ emails on the web. You are one of thousands of ‘malware mules’ whose e-mail account details and passwords are available on the black market for between $1 and $20.

Online address book
Payment of this trifling sum gives anyone access to your entire online address book and thus the opportunity to send out messages masquerading as friendly communiqués from some sexy sounding woman that begin with the words “Hello Dear” before immediately segueing into a sales pitch for a popular brand of training shoe, pills, pirated software and may other products. The evil masterminds behind all this presume, quite rightly, that we’re more likely to open messages from people who are embedded within our address books – even if the subject lines of their e-mails are suspiciously reminiscent of spam, eg, “you’ll be the super lover”.

Spam filters
Not only that, the message is far less likely to be rejected in the first place by spam filters, which are, thankfully, getting better at rejecting random missives from non-existent humans advising us of tempting ways to boost our flagging sexual appeal.

Spam
This hijacking of e-mail accounts is just one contributory factor towards the ever-increasing level of spam that mail servers have to deal with: up six percent in the first three months of this year, over the same period in 2009.

More than addresses
Spam is only one of the problems faced by the malware mules. We store all kinds of personal information in our webmail. Login details to various websites, including online banking and credit card sites, can get lodged in online inboxes without us even thinking; perhaps we’ve sent them to a trusted friend so we can access said sites on their computer, or just e-mailed them to ourselves as a reminder. But once we’ve done that, they sit on the e-mail server for perpetuity – unless we delete them – and the only barrier to their being accessed is the guessing of one password.

Passwords
A recent analysis of breached passwords showed that hundreds of thousands of people worldwide still consider the password “123456″ to be a pretty clever security device. It isn’t. Security software firm Symantec has just highlighted this issue in one of its regular Internet Security Threat Reports.

Lucrative trade
Cyber crime has recently overtaken the international drug trade as the most lucrative illegal global business, we’d do well to take Symantec’s advice, change our passwords, and stop using our e-mail accounts as pathetically insecure filing cabinets. Another example of malfunctioning security was exposed last week, when Apple inadvertently revealed its new iPhone model about three months early, thanks to an employee who went out for the night and left it on a bar stool. Anything can happen.

Tags: Lucrative Trade, Malware, Spam, Spam Filters, Web
Posted in Personal / Internet | No Comments »

No more writing blogs for me – I just received $8,300,000!

February 9th, 2010

All I have to do is to collect the money

This very official email sailed into my inbox sometime during the night where it was immediately diverted to the junk mail box. I fished it out from there to see what it is all about and found 8.3 million dollars waiting for me. E-mails like these usually come from Nigeria – this one comes direct from:

THE UNITED NATIONS ORGANISATION

LONDON UNITED KINGDOM

It’s definitely mine!

The letter contains my reference numbers, a release code, a Payment Approval No., White House Approved No: WH44CV, Reference No.-35460021, Allocation No: 674632 Password No: 339331, Pin Code No: 55674 and a Certificate of Merit Payment No. 103. It’s definitely mine – I recognize the numbers!

It’s official

To show that the payment is genuine, the letter quotes: In reference to the meeting held by the UN Ad-Hoc Executive Committee on Grant Award Payment in collaboration with US Government, which comprises of 10  adjudicators Teams, headed by the UN Executive Secretary, Ban Ki Moon, UN President Mr. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, Federal Reserve Bank Chairman, Ben Bernanke, Representative of Office of Citizen Services and Communications, U.S. General Services Administration Director Scott D. Burford , Central Intelligence Agency CIA, represented by the Office of the Public Affairs Mark Mansfield, The representatives of Federal Bureau Investigation FBI, Amy Gutmann, The United Nation US envoy and the International Monetary Fund IMF New York officials, The Interpol President and Secretary Ronald Noble and the Citi Bank Plc, London, United Kingdom.

I have to call

I am advised to call Rev. Kenneth Brown of International Monetary Fund Office in New York today on Phone: 1-718-663-7789 for the immediate release of my fund valued at US$8,300,000.00. I am required to Deal and Communicate only with REV. KENNETH BROWN, INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND NEW YORK, the official Monitoring partner.

The Signatories to the Decision to award me the money are:

Susan Rice: United States Mission to the United Nations

Hillary Rodham Clinton:  US Secretary of State

Timothy Geithner: US Secretary of the Treasury

Janet Napolitano: Secretary of Homeland Security

Eric Holder: Department of Justice Attorney General

What they need

1) My full name:

2) Address, city, state and country.

3) Phone, fax and mobile

4) Company name (if any) position and address

5) Bank details, bank names, account no, routing no, swift code, bank address.

6) Profession, age and marital status

7) Copy of my int’l passport/drivers license.

The scam

Of course the temptation to call one of the numbers listed at the bottom of the letter is almost overwhelming. What if, you think, the letter is only 10 percent honest? Maybe I can yell at someone and squeeze a couple of thousand out of him; after all, they started it! I wonder how many responses they actually get and if they raise any money at all. But if you send out a million and the hit rate is only one percent?

Tags: Email scams, Fraudulent mail, Junk mail, Nigeria, Spam
Posted in Personal / Internet | No Comments »

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