Colby Tipton
From:
Crosby, Texas, USA
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Posted 14 Jan 2007 10:39 am |
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Is anyone getting spam mail trying to sale Stock? I can only dream about what kind of scam to rip people off it is.
I get them about 3 or 4 times a week now. I just delete them without opening.
You would think that they would figure it out and quit sending the same spam after a while, but no they just never stop.
Someone needs to come up with a program that will send back to them and lock thier whole spam system up and maybe that would stop some of this.
Any good programers around?
Colby |
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Wiz Feinberg
From:
Mid-Michigan, USA
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Posted 14 Jan 2007 12:30 pm Re: Stock Broker Spam
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| Colby Tipton wrote: |
Is anyone getting spam mail trying to sale Stock? I can only dream about what kind of scam to rip people off it is.
I get them about 3 or 4 times a week now. I just delete them without opening.
You would think that they would figure it out and quit sending the same spam after a while, but no they just never stop.
Someone needs to come up with a program that will send back to them and lock thier whole spam system up and maybe that would stop some of this.
Any good programers around?
Colby |
Colby;
I am a member of the anti-spam community and I am going to answer your questions to the best of my knowledge.
First of all, you are doing the right thing by deleting spam without replying to it, because, 1; the reply to and from addresses are forged, and 2; you will only discourage spam by not replying to it, ever.
The reason there is so much spam is because some people are duped into responding and purchasing spamvertised items or stocks. Enough fools that spammers are getting richer by the day.
The stock spam you are referring to has been flooding inboxes since this fall. It is all sent by Russian spammers through compromised/infected home or office computers, drafted into zombie botnets. These computers have had email proxies installed without the owners' knowledge and upon remote control commands, send out a few thousand spam messages at a time. Each machine receives it's own set of email addresses to send spam to, and each message has a random subject, From and Reply To address.
Because all of these messages are sent from personal computers in zombie botnets, and there is no website listed anywhere in the body, there is no way for spam recipients to get back at the spammer who owns that botnet. But there are people and organizations who do have the means to interfer with them. The US SEC recently froze the assets of one of the Russian spammers who is behind most of the pump and dump stock spams you are seeing today. Read about it on eWeek.
As to a program that can intercept spam and deal with it according to your wishes, I use and recommend MailWasher Pro. It recognizes spam through a combination of means, including a Bayesian Learning Filter and custom rules that you can write yourself. I have created a large set of such rules that intercept and automatically delete 100% of the image spams for stocks, plus just about every other common type of spam I have seen. This program takes some work to use effectively, especially if you use filter rules, but it is worth it to me.
Also, MailWasher Pro offers a checkbox when a message is flagged as known or possible spam, to submit it to SpamCop, for reporting. There is a procedure that must be followed to accomplish this, beginning with you getting a free SpamCop reporting account, at http://www.spamcop.net . When you report spams that are sent from botnets to SpamCop they notify the ISP through which it was sent and that ISP can then deal with their customer as they see fit (or not). Lists of zombie computers and their IP addresses are also reported to organizations that post "blocklists" used by many email servers. When an ISP is notified that it's customers are sending spam, and does nothing about it, they will find their entire IP range on universal blocklists until they do stop the flood of spam from those members. Other members will find that their legitimate emails are being blocked because of their association with a spam friendly ISP and will complain. Smart ISPs respond by terminating or suspending the accounts of of customers who are not prudent enough to keep spam relays off their computers.
Enuf for now. I hope this helps you to understand the nature of the flood of stocks spams.
_________________
"Wiz" Feinberg, Moderator SGF Computers Forum
Security Consultant
Twitter: @Wizcrafts
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