2005 April

New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has sued online marketing company Intermix, claiming that Intermix has been distributing spyware to unsuspecting users, and that users visiting the Intermix site would end up with ad-serving pop-ups displayed on their computers, or having their computers redirected to another website, often without th user’s knowledge.

Reader Mark H. shares the following information about a phishing scam he received:
Dear Aunty:
Below you’ll find an email that was mailed to me that appears to be a con. I don’t have anything, not that I know of anyway, with Associated Card Online. Since I don’t recognize this service as being one of […]

Ok, now that you know to avoid the virus which deletes MP3s, here is some happy news. Did you know that Amazon offers free downloads of songs in MP3 format? Yep, it’s true!

Security firm Secunia has issued a “highly critical” advisory for a security flaw in Netscape. The highly critical flaw was discovered earlier this week, and is known to affect at least Netscape versions 6.2.3 and 7.2. It may also affect other 6.x and 7.x versions of Netscape.

A St. Petersburg, Florida veterinarian nailed a wardriver he caught parked outside his home, jacked into his Internet connection. Realizing that there was someone surreptitiously using his Internet connection, the unnamed veterinarian called St. Petersburg police, who quickly came and arrested

There has been a lot about DNS poisoning, also known as DNS cache poisoning, in the news lately. But what exactly is DNS poisoning? Put simply, DNS cache poisoning is when a DNS server is made to tell your computer that a domain resides at a naughty IP address belonging to a bad […]

[Courtesy of Mick C. at Whizardries]
One way that the unscrupulous have of gaining access to your personal information is to use “social engineering” to trick you into clicking on a link that will take you to a different website than the one you think you should be going to. If you get those emails that […]

[Contributed by Mick C. of Whizardries]
Symantec said Wednesday that it has been granted a $3.1 million default judgment in its California lawsuit against an accused software pirate.
In April of 2004, Symantec charged that Sam Jain and several co-defendants created fake pop-up ads telling consumers that their Symantec software was preparing to expire and needed to […]

If you have a blog, read a blog, or heck, have even heard of a blog, then you are probably familiar with blog spam. Blog spam is where the spammer posts spam, usually containing links to their websites, to someone’s blog using either the comment feature or the trackback feature.

What’s that old line about “who’s watching the watchers?”? America Online (AOL) actually pays people to watch over their chat rooms, to make sure that nothing untoward happens to any of the underaged who like to hang out in the chat rooms and..you know..chat. This is all part of AOL’s efforts to […]

From the fine people who first brought you Geocities comes Goowy mail. Goowy mail is, so far as Aunty knows, the first commercial scale web-based email application built on Flash. This allows Goowy to offer a free webmail service, which you can access from any Internet connection with a web […]

Gevalia Coffee has been known for years in the anti-spam community as the poster child for bad spamming practices. Gevalia’s efforts to deflect spam accusations to their affiliates and hired spam guns have made far more of a name for Gevalia among anti-spammers than their coffee could ever hope to.

Last week Aunty reported that California Attorney General Bill Lockyer’s office, through Deputy Attorney General Ian Sweedler, had teamed up with the FTC to nail spammers Rick Yang and Peonie Pui Ting Chen, operating out of Los Angeles as Optin Global, Inc. and Vision Media Limited Corp..

Whether it’s the world’s largest auction house, Paypal, or the world’s most believed and mourned pontiff, Pope John Paul II, spammers and scammers are not above invoking their name in an effort to relieve you of your money.
Even before Pope John Paul II’s body was laid to its final rest, spammers spamming online scams were […]

As Aunty wrote recently, top spammer Jeremy Jaynes was sentenced to 9 years in prison last week. The sentence which Jeremy Jaynes received, under Virginia law, is thought to be the toughest sentence yet handed down to a spammer (those must have been some ticked off jurors). Jaynes is free on bail, […]

[Contributed by Mickey C. of Whizardries]
In the first criminal prosecution under Virginia’s tough anti-spam law, Jeremy Jaynes, a/k/a Gavin Stubberfield, has been sentenced to nine (9) years in prison.
The case was filed just two weeks after the effective date of the 2003 expansion of Virginia’s law and came about due to the massive amounts of […]

Some of you may recall the trial of notorious spammer Jeremy Jaynes in Novemver of last year. Jeremy Jaynes was considered to be one of the most prolific spammers around, pumping out an incredible 10million pieces of spam a day from his suburban Raleigh, North Carolina home.

Internet provider ComCast experienced a widespread outage today, knocking countless Comcast customers off the Internet for the duration. The notice on the Comcast website is short and to the point, acknowledging the outage by saying “Connection to the Internet is currently unavailable. Our technicians are aware of the situation and are working to resolve […]

Aunty’s dear readers will remember the story of Eliazar Velasquez, the high school student who caught his principal smoking - on camera - and posted the evidence to the Internet.

The state of Florida, through Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist, and with Microsoft’s assistance, has sued two prolific spammers, Scott Filary and Donald Townsend, whom are accused of sending at least 65,000 pieces of spam, some 48,000 of which were sent after the passage of Florida’s new anti-spam law last year.