Dana Blankenhorn

Fighting the E-Mail Underground

The Republican Tribes are hunkering down. Some think  going down on principle sounds nice. Others continue lying to themselves, using denial as a way to pick up the pieces later.

The most dangerous have begun a vast underground e-mail campaign aimed at seeking to de-legitimize the result before it happens and, failing that, create a counter-insurgency. 

Such tactics are difficult to fight. They won't go down by simply using the Google, as some on the left suggest. (Not that there's anything wrong with having Obama ads on Google services. Just don't over-estimate the effectiveness of Web tactics in an e-mail world.)

There are ways to fight back effectively, minimizing the number of people who believe these lies, isolating them, and keeping an eye out for any escalation.

1. Traceroute -- There are ways in which to tell where spam e-mail originates. It's worthwhile to go to the sites hosting these people, expose them, and if they don't stop know who they in fact are.
2. Treat Spam as Spam -- All the tools in the anti-spammer arsenal need to be deployed by supporters of democracy. We can know where this is originating and, in their knowing they're known put some real fear into them.
3. Reply -- Obama supporters need the tools with which to respond, in their own words, to these lies when they're confronted with them, and tools with which to seek out both lies and truth. We need to find the victims of these hoaxes and present the truth to all who will listen.
4. Understand -- While e-mail remains the most common Web activity, it's far more popular among dial-up users than those with good broadband connections. As my connectivity has improved I find myself using e-mail far less and RSS far more.
5. Database -- As important as it is to have databases of your friends, it's just as important to know who the enemy is. Anonymous enemies need to be identified, tracked, traced, and exposed for what they are, liars and cowards. Those who won't listen to reason need to be seen for what they are, potential terrorists.

Another type of spam victim

Every spam which goes out has millions of victims. (I hope those lovely people at Hormel, makers of this fine canned pork-and-ham product so beloved in Hawaii and Alaska, accept my apology for the picture or, if they wish to complain, do so to John Cleese.)

When sending out millions of spams to e-mail boxes, the spammer hopes this will become thousands of larger victims, those who respond positively to the spam. By including viruses and other malware in the spam, this "success rate" increases, as many people are infected just by downloading the spam. (I learned this after installing a new anti-viral which checks mail as it hits Mailwasher.)

But there's another type of victim, as anyone (like me) who has had the same e-mail address for some time (or worse, their own domain) will attest .

That's the from: victim.

The End of E-Mail (As We Know It)

It's time to admit that e-mail, defined strictly by a client like Outlook Express, is dead.

Over the last several months I have been losing increasing amounts of e-mail sent to my POP3 e-mail box, whose address is based on my old Web site domain.

When this e-mail comes from business associates, from companies I'm writing about, I can make a call and get it re-sent. Sometimes I have to watch it fly away from my Mailwasher screen because I neglected to whitelist it, and that's embarrassing. Sometimes I never see it at all.

Recently I had a personal e-mail, sent from someone I knew, fall through the cracks. The story involves other people so I can't detail it. But the result nearly cost our family dearly. It still threatens us. The person in question was not a friend, they did not re-send, the e-mail was not expected, and the failure of that e-mail to arrive caused enormous misunderstandings, a short time later, whose repercussions may be felt for years.

People assume when they send an e-mail that it will get through. When it doesn't, they may believe the loss was deliberate. That's the way we are. We hit send and expect results.

Evite Spam

I got my first Evite spam over the weekend.

Never seen one? Here.

As you can see, it's a straight-out scam. The sender, whose name was unfamiliar to me (which is why I waited two days to open it and checked the URL before I did) claims to be poor, claims to be needing charity, and asks for a contribution. (I really had a Clue when I got two copies of the e-mail -- my e-mail address appears twice on most commercial spam lists for some reason, so when I see two copies of anything I have a good idea what's coming.)

Yeah, right.

But as with the infamous green card spam that started it all, this is going to explode quickly, and probably take down sites such as Evite with it - unless they do something drastic.

A lot of people forget that the original Carter & Siegel spam didn't target e-mail at all, but Usenet. Anyone remember Usenet? Exactly. Usenet was an unmoderated set of forums that ran directly off the Internet backbone. Each one had its own Internet address, and was read, via an e-mail program, in its own section.

Once Usenet was polluted, the scammers went on to e-mail, destroying such things as my own e-mail newsletter, a-clue.com, in the process. (One big reason I moved it here was because the subscription list had been dropping steadily for years, as people dropped out because they couldn't filter it properly, or their corporate accounts insisted in filtering it out.)

This was followed by spam blogs -- do a search on Google's Blogsearch and you'll see tons of them. And the abuse of social networking sites like LinkedIn by scammers.

And now Evite spam.

Spam as DoS Attack

For the last few days my mailbox has been filled by a single spam.

It's an investment scam, labeled "Investment Strategy," and carrying a variety of made-up names in the "from" field. Gamekeeper I. Dishrag. Hairsplitting D. Liken. Thunderclap K. Cacaphonies.

Here's the start:

Are you looking for a simple investment strategy that beats more than 90% of all mutual funds and investment newsletters?

It takes as little as 15 minutes a month to get these results using the Vega Stock Forecast

It ends with a throwaway URL.

So far, pretty standard. But here's the thing....

 

CATPCHA

We've been hit bad by comment spam the last few weeks.

Each time we get a good discussion thread going, it seems the comment spam bots flood in. I usually try to erase these when I find them, but we were losing a lot of good discussion.

So I've taken action. I've implemented CAPTCHA on the comments here. That's a "Turing test" which requires you to type a random set of letters, which are displayed in a funky way.

I don't like CAPTCHA. I do piss-and-moan about it when I find it on other blogs. But I now know it's necessary, and I apologize to all for that.

On Right and Wrong, and Business Models

Everyone wants to stop spam. Most people want unfettered access to Internet resources. Some people want the rest of us to only have fettered access.

But because the last group has a more powerful business model, we're still being hit with spam, and most of us don't have unfettered access to the Internet.

The problem with spam is simple. Spammers have more powerful business models than anti-spammers. Most of those engaged in the anti-spam fight are volunteers. Steve Linford of Spamhaus is not getting rich off fighting spam.

Spammers, on the other hand, are still getting rich.

There are a host of illegal, immoral, and black market goods out there which, even with spam's spammic reputation, will still pay spammers to hit you.  We're talking here of gambling sites, porn sites, drug knock-offs, stock scams, phony contests, even multi-level marketing of legal products. Spammers also have "new products," like Googlebombing, adware viruses and comment spam, to get these goods in front of consumers no matter what.

By contrast, Linford and Spamhaus has been "rolling up" the anti-spam space because, frankly, there is not much money in it. That's why he acquired SPEWS, to survive.  Linford described some of the problems quite frankly two years ago.

And it's tough to fight crime, because crime fights back. Spammers have called Linford a terrorist, they have targeted him in a child porn ring, they have targeted him with viruses.  Most recently they have sued Spamhaus in a U.S. court (whose jurisdiction he doesn't recognize) and tried to take his domain name.

These are not nice little Spamfords, folks. These are dangerous criminals. Russian mafia. The same bastards who got Anna Politkovskaya. I would not put an assassination attempt on Linford past these people. I would not be surprised to learn there is a contract out on him right now.

 

Another Free Ad For Mailwasher

My spam file is growing again.

A few months ago I was getting roughly 500 spams a day. Now it's closer to 700.

The news on the spam front is bad as well. A spammer won a declarative judgement against the leading anti-spam activist, Spamhaus, because Spamhaus refused to pay for a lawyer and contest the suit. The FTC continues to enforce a phony "CAN-SPAM" law that defines a lot of things I consider spam as non-spam, so my gmail box, for instance, keeps filling up with Amazon spam since I have bought stuff from them.

It's a bother, but not enough of a bother that I change my e-mail address or put any speedbumps (answer this question, prove you're not a robot) between myself and my correspondents.

Instead, I use Mailwasher.

The Rise of Spam Blogs

Given the broad reach of this blog, I hope this item gets a wide audience, despite the fact that, for techies, it's inside-baseball and pretty obvious.

A spam blog is a page created with blog software that is designed to attract traffic to a related page created by a spammer or other crook.

I recently got a taste of this while writing for another blog.

The topic was Amy Tuck. Ms. Tuck is the Lt. Governor of Mississippi. She has decided not to run for re-election. She is, in terms of this topic, a completely innocent bystander – as is any other newsmaker.

I wanted to get a taste of what the blogosphere was thinking about Ms. Tuck's decision, who might replace her and what she might do next, when I came upon the following via Blogsearch:

The Politics of E-Mail

Nothing illustrates better the disconnect between Washington and the wired world than issues involving e-mail.

It’s not just Congress which is willfully ignorant. The lobbies and even the so-called  “public interest” people are either dim or playing games at our expense.

The problems lie on both the sending and receiving side:

• Congress has been careful to exempt itself, and political campaigns, from anti-spam laws.
• Congress has been placing increasingly high hurdles in front of citizens who want to e-mail folks.

Notice the contradiction. They can spam you, but you have to fill out math problems to e-mail them. They want to protect themselves from “Astroturf,” sponsored by corporations, unions, issue groups or the organized blogocracy, while at the same time they seem to think that political spam is going to  influence how you vote.

Spam will impact how people vote. It already has. Those politicians who spam lose. This doesn’t seem to get through their skulls.