Posts Tagged spam
Spam Comments
Posted by Bloggylife in technology on April 20, 2010
Spam is an unwanted message, whether be it electronic or hard copy. It can be in the form of mails, emails, messages, comments, video links, etc.
No matter the ways out there to prevent such unwanted and sometimes harmful messages, they do get smarter and more and more measures need to be tweaked and added to detect them.
Usually when I get a Pending or sometimes an Approved comment on my blog that happens to be spam, I don’t delete it, I mark it as Spam. This helps whatever system or people behind the system define how this spam managed to get around its detection method and hopefully provide more understanding so that detecting techniques can be improved.
People often refuse to contribute in reporting incidents, when windows crashes for example you can send a report to Microsoft, well in this case one can understand why they are reluctant to participate 
Some may fear that they are not fully aware of the information they are allowing to be included in the report, it might not be only technical.
The interesting new spam comments I noticed, are ones using sentences in legitimate comments mentioned in the post and creating a spam comment with the spam URL that you’ll be directed when you click on the author. So these comments were flagged and went into the pending queue and not the spam queue. I manually identified them as spam. Click to enlarge the picture below.
Image Spam
Posted by Bloggylife in technology on May 5, 2009
Of all the emails we receive within 24 hours, around 95 % is spam! Of course we deploy a mail filter to go through all these emails and pass the legitimate ones only.
Now we are introduced to some emails that are clearly spam but get through, you’ll see the email with an image attachment of Viagra products for example.
If your filter box is text based, it won’t detect this kind of spam, the image spam. A brief overall description, of how a message is considered valid or spam, is it goes through several tests, based on the overall score, the verdict is issued.
The email can be blocked based on a number of things other than the email content, you can block all emails with images except coming from your whitelist for example, but this is not acceptable, especially if you have what I like to call the “Friends Spam”, employees using their work account as personal mailing account.
Your filter needs to include a special image filtering feature, that goes, even if not quite efficiently, through the image and detects text. I don’t think it understands the image itself, because we are still advancing in that arena.
What you can do, is add the sender’s address or domain to your blocked list.
On a lighter note, if there is a small little tiny chance that a spam message passes through, your main mail filter appliance and the end user’s email scanner, which employee’s inbox will it end up in ?????
Read More on Email Spam: Link
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