If you own a website that uses stock images or even images you’ve taken yourself, beware a scam floating around that tries to trick you into putting links to another site on your pages.

I recently received a phony “DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice” run by a scammer attempting to get backlinks to a site called KnowYourSins, a sex site run by two ( Read more... )

First up in today’s game of “who fed it and who ate it:” Artificial Intelligence.

AI is everywhere. AI chatbots! AI image generators! And now, AI code assistants, that help developers write computer programs!

Only here’s the thing: AI doesn’t know anything. A lot of folks think these AI systems are, like, some sort of huge database of facts or ( Read more... )

Back in March 2016, eight years and one day ago, I published an analysis of a spam ring advertising phony pay-for-play scam “dating sites.” This particular group was responsible for about 90% of the “Hot Lady Wants to F*ck You” spam in circulation. The spam contained links to hacked sites that the spammers placed malicious redirectors on, that ( Read more... )

[Edit 11-Jan-2023] I’ve received a reply from Fly.io; see end of this entry

Ah, a new year has come. Out with the old, in with the new...strategies for phish and malware sites, that is.

And what would phish and malware sites be without complicit webhosts and web service providers?

So today I'm going to dive into an enormous quantity of SMS text ( Read more... )

“The street finds its own uses for things.”
         -William Gibson, Burning Chrome

Last year, my wife, my co-author, and I launched a new podcast, The Skeptical Pervert. We talk about sex...and more specifically, we talk about sex through a lens of empiricism and rationality.


( Read more... )

A few days ago, I leveled a Horde frost mage to max level in World of Warcraft. Anyone familiar with the game knows exactly what happens next: the mad scramble to gear up a new Level 60 to be able to run mythics and raids, so that you can get even more loot to run higher-level mythics and raids...thus does the MMO hamster wheel go ’round and ’round ( Read more... )

So lately, I've seen a thing in my inbox. Well, I mean, I see a lot of things in my inbox, but this is an annoying thing: 419 scams inside Google Forms invites.

I'm getting a ton of these:


( Read more... )

As regular readers of this blog know, I am an amateur infosec researcher, and I track spam and malware as a hobby. And, as many of you know, there are certain names--ISPs, people, affiliate networks, content delivery networks--that tend to come up again and again whenever you do a deep dive into the seedy, twisted world of spam and malware ( Read more... )

Right now, I am in the remote cabin in the woods where we wrote More Than Two, working on two new books: a nonfiction book called Love More, Be Awesome and a novel called Black IronThe cabin has very limited Internet access that's approximately the same speed as old-fashioned dialup, so fetching email is always a bit dicey. Imagine my ( Read more... )

Stop me if you've heard this one before ( Read more... )