Enough Already FTD!
by admin on May.05, 2011, under Spammer
FTD, of course in advance of Mother’s Day, is sending out spam or having spam sent on their behalf at a dizzying rate! Before reporting this abuse here, I verified that the spam I am receiving is in fact linked to FTD. Sometimes, spam looking like it’s coming from a company is not actually going to a site that is promoting their product or service. To check this, use a proxy server that will hide your IP from the linked site in the email.
I use an email service from Register4Less.com, and their greylisting feature for email has been fantastic at reducing the amount of spam that gets through to my inbox. Even with this service, FTD spam is coming in at a rate of about one email per hour! Can’t imagine how much spam I’d be getting if I turned off greylisting!
If you’re seeing the same thing, I encourage you to first not shop with FTD. Choose another florist that’s not affiliated with FTD. Second, report the spammer. Check the header of the email to locate the IP address of the originating service, and check the IP of the website linked in the spam email. Then look up the ISP associated with those IP addresses and report the abuse to their abuse department.
Things You Can Do to Combat SPAM
by admin on Apr.12, 2011, under Uncategorized
First, protect yourself
When you receive spam, never click on any links within the email. If you don’t know and trust the sender, don’t click anything within the email. Sometimes your friend’s computer can be compromized, making mail from them a threat as well. If you’re not sure, don’t click.
Report the Spammer
By verifying the headers of the spam you have received, and looking up the IPs of the company or companies being spamversized, you can look up the IP address and determine who the ISP is providing email or hosting service for the site/company. Usually, ISPs will have within their ARIN IP record the email address to report abuse. Sending your complaint to this address, along with the email & headers can help.
Vote with your Checkbook
One of the best things we can all do is not buy products and services from spammers. If you’re a webmaster or website designed, buy your domain name registration and web hosting service from a registrar that is reputable, and upholds their Acceptable Usage Policy. If you’re getting spammed by a certain restaurant, choose to support their competitor!
Who’s Spamming You?
by admin on Apr.11, 2011, under General Information
One thing that we here at reportspam.com have not seen discussed is the link between spam & reputable companies. We’ve come to expect spam from the sellers of erectile disfunction pills, poker sites, and Nigerian scammers. Just from my own personal inbox today is a flood of spam from national chain companies like FTD Florists, ADT Security, Gold’s Gym, and restaurants like McDonalds, Olive Garden, KFC, Outback Steakhouse, and Chilies. Companies that we’re used to seeing use more traditional TV, radio & print media for advertising now seem to be “complementing” these campaigns with good old spam.
These spam campaigns typically get around normal spam reporting channels by using a third party email (or fake email) and an intermediary URL to link to within the spam email.
Using a third party or fake email to send from prevents recipients from being able to report the sender effectively. Typically if a real address, the address is a temporary throw away address. This way if the ISP shuts down service to the email, the spammer simply moves onto a new one. The email address won’t have link with the product being “spamversized”.
Similarly, the body of the spam will link to a intermediate URL which will then forward onto the spamversized site or offer. This intermediate URL may be used to distribute malware, and is certainly tracking the email addresses of those recipients who connect.
What I’d like to do here is open a discussion about what companies are now using this kind of spam practice. So, who’s spamming you?
Man quits job, makes living suing e-mail spammers
by admin on Dec.27, 2010, under General Information
This Associated Press story is making the rounds on many technology sites, including Slashdot and Digg. Eight years ago, Daniel Balsam of San Francisco, CA received one too many enhance your insert organ name here emails, and decided to do something about it. Daniel quit his job (ironically a marketing job), created a website called Danhatesspam.com, and decided to go to law school and has since been taking spammers to court. Click here to read the full article.
Types of spam
by admin on Sep.25, 2010, under General Information
Spam will generally be sent by one of two ways. One is for a spammer to use an email service with a web hosting company. With the account, they will set up a mailing program, obtain one or more mailing lists, configure the program with this and get blasting. This type of spammer is often easier to identify and shut down, since all of the spam is coming from one source, one ISP, and it’s likely the ISP will start to receive multiple complaints once they start spamming.
The other is a little more difficult to fight. The more sophisticated spammer, no, let’s call him/her more evil spammer, is to use a “botnet”. This is a network of PCs that have been compromised , and allows the spammers to control the machine remotely and use the PC to send out spam on their behalf. Botnets can also be used to other malicious tasks, like Distributed Denial Of Service attacks (DDOS). One of the larger botnets Storm, used 230,000 active members per 24 hour period.
Spam from a botnet will be coming from different computers on different networks, so there is not one common source of spam for our reports to target. There is, however, one common purpose, and that will be the product, service, or erectile disfunction pill, being spamversised. And that’s where we can fight back against botnet spam. With botnet spam, the best approach is to use our same techniques in finding out the IP address of the ISP hosting the spamversised website, and send the report to that ISP.
Reporting Spam, Intro.
by admin on Sep.23, 2010, under General Information
If you have an email account that’s more than a couple of days old, chances are you’re getting spammed. No, not chances are, you’re getting spammed!
Unfortunately, spam is an unavoidable part of life online, but there is something you can do. You can fight back! Spam is evil. But we can use spam we receive and do something good with it!
In order to report spam, you will need to be able to open up the full headers of the spam you’ve received, learn how to “parse them” (don’t worry, we’ll teach you how to do this), find the IP address of the server the spam came from, and then lookup the abuse email address for the ISP that is hosting the email account the spam came from. Depending on the nature of what you’ve received, you may also want to look at another way of reporting, but we’ll get into that. We’ll also have a look at the dangers spam can bring to your computer.
Join the fight against spammers. Use this site, learn how to identify the right authority to report to, and take action.
