My Gmail 30-day spam count was relatively steady, up just 7 to 312 spam emails for a 2% increase.
My second Gmail account, the one getting the phishing email, picked up one more phishing email to bring the total to 9.
Comment spam (including trackback spam) continues to climb at The OS Quest. There were 2,036 spam attempts during the week for an average of 291/day. This is up from last week’s 274/day average. The total now sits are 7,026 spam attempts. Two trackback spams made it through bringing the total to 13.
The Spam Chronicles saw a drop by almost 50% in comment spam this past week with 16 attempts (down from last week’s 31), all of which were stopped. The total now stands at 197 for the life of the site.
I switched the anti-spam plugin being used by both The OS Quest and Spam Chronicles. Akismet has been replaced with Spam Karma 2. The main reason for the change was that trackback spam that was getting through Akismet. While the number was small, it was still annoying. So far, SK2 has stopped 757 comment spams without letting anything through. Akismet takes a “black box” approach to anti-spam where the analysis is done by their servers and there’s no local configuration. SK2 does the processing locally so can provide greater detail about what it flagged something as spam. As the name suggests, it assigns a “karma” value for spam-like or non-spam like behavior. It has numerous configuration options, although I’m using the defaults.
News
Items in the news that caught my attention this week were:
Spyware was used to steal municple funds from Carson, CA. They stole almost $450K with IDs/passwords obtained with key-logging spyware. All but $45K was recovered. From the article:
Avilla said she still dosn’t know how her computer was targeted. She said she doubts it had the latest security software patch protections — something sheriff’s detectives and bank investigators told her is essential in safeguarding her computer.
The CIO website has an article on how hard it is to find and nab online criminals, even harder than actually catching them. In what may be a clue to one way the spyware could get on Carson’s computer this article mentions:
He learned, for example, that an aquarium employee had downloaded an audio file while eating a sandwich on her lunch break. He learned that when she played the song, a rootkit hidden inside the song installed itself on her computer.
Slashdot had a posting about addresses provided to AmeriTrade (for accounts) being used as a source of spam. Rather than a network security breach it’s likely someone within AmeriTrade is leaking the email addresses to spammers. AmeriTrade attributes the spam to bot-nets and the past loss of customer data On a backup tape). They ignore the fact that people set up email addresses dedicated to AmeriTrade after the breach. This is something I do, set up dedicated email addresses with financial related accounts. This helps identify phishing emails and can be used to identify data leaks as in this case.