Spams in @twitter Direct Messages

I have been getting direct messages from twitter with spammy links.
Do you also get 'em?

I am not sure about this "lost message" thingy too..

-

Beware of Spam, please change your yahoo password

Started getting a lot of these lately.

These days are among those where a lot of spams are being sent specially from yahoo accounts.
Unusual to the previous cases where they wanted to send out the money from the bank of Nigeria or else, this time they are just dropping a line and putting links.
In my experience, a lot of spams are now able to make to my inbox because it is coming from legit yahoo accounts.
The spam filter can not filter those because these are the Email addresses where I did sent Emails to or received from. Moreover, we do tend to send links only in the Emails. That must be making it difficult to filter the spams.
At one point I realized that my yahoo account was also compromised when I checked my "sent" folder. There were two in drafts. Not Good!!
I think it is time to change the password.
At the moment I have only one suggestions: Do not click on the links that you are not familiar with.

Spams  Emails: how they look like.
How to detect them? that is whole another level of complicated question.

 

Another case of innovative Facebook spam App

Yesterday @aakarpost tweeted...
"फेसबुकमा मेरो फोटो को पोष्टकार्ड बनाएर ह्याप्पी तिज भन्न थाले ! अति गर्छन् यार !"
http://twitpic.com/69y1v5

I thought: well he is a star, so no wonder if people/ladies go crazy (on teez :P )!

Today, I saw similar message on my wall. 
Half dozen other friends also saw the similar post and they all "liked" them.
Having seen similar wall post before,  it clicked to me:
It is a spammy app for sure!

The trick here is to show the picture of the person looking into the app. This makes the post virtually likeable by anyone who is viewing it. No wonder other people liked it because they were thinking that the first person wished him/her.

Need to spam friend?
There is an app for that...

A Laborious Spammer: Gotcha!

Well, I have an interesting finding to share about manual spammers.
I am sure that you all are being bombarded with manual spam comments in your blog-posts. Some of these are detected by Google-blogspot-spam blockers. Some are not.
I found that there were few comments waiting for moderation.
They read something like these:

 

The comments look almost as if they were real comments. They are  off topic in this case. However, there are instances where they stay on topic and insert links on the last sentence.

 

I looked into how they got in here... 

The search trick for spammer is to type...

site:blogspot.com inurl: <keyword> 

Note how they are targeting the comments section by having them in the search item

And they are from...  New Dehli, India!


I am thinking that the spammer websites have outsourced the spammers too!!!

How social virus can spread

Social networks are often the soft target for the spammers because if it can be broken into, it can be easily infected. Once I was in a machine learning conference in New York and one of the presenter was saying that the half life of the social infection is 30 minutes.

The clicks propagate very fast. So, the maximum damage is done within 30 minutes of spreading such infection.

During last few months so many friends have been infected. A few I could remember:

"I cried after watching videos"

"Who is not following you/who unfriended me"

etc etc
The topics are made spooky so that people will be interested towards it. You click, and your walls are hacked and what not. It becomes a matter of social shame.

Mahesh shares a detailed story of how he got it and how to avoid it.

Information about How virus is spreading from facebook!

Beware, next time when you see "interesting" link to videos on the facebook. What might be little helpful is to watch where the link goes when you hover the mouse over the video and watch the link address on the status bar.

Report a fraud!

I came across a fraud attempt which appeared like paypal account update and was linked to some other location:
The site had many layers:
Index of /skins/jcc/www.paypal.com/www.paypal.com/paypal/cgi-bin/webscrcmd=_login-run/webscrcmd=_account-run

under the site:
http://vreau-site.net/skins/jcc/www.paypal.com/www.paypal.com
...
I can see how do they manage to do that!!!

I also learnt on how to Report a site:
http://www.google.com/support/firefox/bin/answer.py?answer=34799&topic=11815

look how similar it looks like in comparision to original one.
Also mind the fourth one is original one and the big green sign.

E-mail Requests for Passwords: Real or Fake?

I have a blog about all kind of SPAMs which make thru' my inbox spam filter.

Recently, I received an Email sent by the University Information Technology Services. Which I am going to put forth, as it may be informative for college students in USA or elsewhere.

Message follows:
***************************

Not quite sure if that request to "send your password or risk losing
your account" is real or fake?

Now you can compare that (phony) request with a number of phishing
samples that have been analyzed and dissected to help you identify the
characteristics of fraudulent e-mails.

I've taken a range of false messages received by University students and
staff over the past six months and created a series of web pages that
can help you understand how phishers work and how to spot them.

The samples can be found here:
http://www.albany.edu/its/security_threats_phishing_samples.htm

As always, no University employee will ask you, in any format, to
divulge your campus passwords. Passwords should always be kept
confidential and never shared with anyone. Please feel free to forward
any messages to me if you are in doubt, or would like to alert me to
their campus distribution.

(published with permission)