Awhile back, I started getting emails from SourceForge. A lot of them, all of a sudden. All manner of Trac tickets and commits and suchlike. Huh, I sez to myself, I must be monitoring a project that just woke up. I was half right. I wasn't monitoring anything, but a project had woken up (or rather, newly moved to SourceForge).

Many, but not all, ( Read more... )

The only spam I get these days, what with the greylisting, is 419 scams. Occasionally they get my attention.

"My name is Mr.BENARD MADOFF, I am the CEO OF WALL STREET NEWYORK,the highest stock exchange and finance firm in the
world,I do not know if you might have heard the recent problem going on here in WALL STREET."
I might have gotten some hints ( Read more... )

Seriously, Yahoo, how difficult is it to scan outbound "address change" mails for 419 scams?

Aside: Once again, I'm ahead of the curve.

So, continuing my recent spam theme: I got a 419 spam, about the only kind I see these days with greylisting on my personal account. Apparently Nigerian-scammers can't afford botnets. They're rare enough sometimes I read them, just to keep up on the state of that particular art.

This is a new variant: it ( Read more... )

Not too long ago, the moderation queue for the managers list at the Phoenyx filled up with dozens of backscatter posts. This was, far as I could tell, from a spam campaign that randomized the sending address as well as the recipient address out of its database of target addresses. Most places that reject the spam (like us) do so properly (at SMTP ( Read more... )

202.86.221.60, for their phishing spam informing me that someone has made "[5] suspicious attemps" [sic] to access my ebay account, from address 202.86.221.60, so would I please verify myself by entering my eBay information into the web page at (wait for it) http ://202.86.221.60/ws/etc., etc.

So I'm making one of my spot-checks on the spam folder before consigning it to /dev/null, and I run across the following subject. I've seen the pattern before, but this permutation caught my attention:

My enormous organ Loretta

And my first thought is... "Dude, you named it LORETTA?!"

I got a challenge-reponse system's challenge, as backscatter from a spam with a forged Phoenyx webmaster address.

I responded affirmatively to it.

Hey, that's what happens when you pester random strangers to do your spam filtering for you. To keep things in balance, I don't respond to challenges to messages I've actually sent.

I just hope *our* mail server isn't dumb enough to accept mail like this (these are *their* headers, forwarded in a backscatter message ( Read more... )