Aunty Spam

dentity theft is one of the worst problems on the world wide web today, and it hits banks and customers of banks particularly hard. Bank of America, for example, has experienced dozens of phishing efforts in the Bank of America name, aimed at Bank of America customers, mimicking the Bank of America website, in […]

Internet service providers, Level3, Cogent, peering

According to a site with the rather unlikely and cumbersome name of “dating-webhosting.com”, as many as 60% of all webhosting sites do not deliver what they promise. Indeed, according to dating-webhosting.com, they may take your money and not deliver at all.

The new proposed TLD (top level domain), .XXX, has run into fierce opposition from President Bush and his administration, along with conservative groups and even governments around the world.
The .XXX top level domain, which has already been preliminarily approved by ICANN, is to be reserved for adult content, and while some suggest that providing a […]

As I believe I’ve made abundantly clear before, I’m not big fan of Blue Security’s Blue Frog. Just like the Lycos ‘Make Love not Spam’ DDOSing screensaver, and the bandwidth-stealing Mugu Marauder, Blog Frog is founded on the concept that DDOSing is ok if you’re doing it to someone you don’t like.

The scandal over the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas so-called “Hot Coffee mod” continues to have a ripple effect on the gaming industry, and not necessarily all as negative as the lawsuit by the grandmother who bought GTA:SA for her 14-year old grandson.
For example, the International Game Developer’s Association has announced this week that […]

Perfect 10, an online and offline publisher of adult content, has filed a lawsuit against Google and Amazon, claiming that by turning up images of Perfect 10’s… um… “models”… in searches for, oh, who knows, maybe “nekkid women”, Google and Amazon’s A9 are violating Perfect 10’s copyright.

Will people never learn? Apparently not, as California’s Blue Security brings us Blue Frog, YADDASP (Yet Another DDOSing Anti-Spam Program).

The good folks over at AuditMyPC.com have a very interesting idea.
Spammers are of course known for harvesting email addresses from websites, and then using those email addresses to build email lists, which they then sell to other spammers.
Odds are that spammers are crawling all over your website right now, looking for email addresses for just […]

Blood Diagonostics, a South Carolina biopharmaceutical firm, has sued Health Coalition Inc. (”HCI”), claiming that HCI has used Blood Diagonostics’ name in meta tags on the HCI Web site. Blood Diagnostics claims that the use was a calculated act on the part of HCI intended to harm Blood Diagnostics’ business.
According to an article at Law.com, […]

Perhaps you are familiar with the Web site ForSaleByOwner.com. Essentially it is a Web site that allows users to list their property for sale, and also publishes useful information related to real estate.
In short, it doesn’t do anything a whole lot different than does the real estate section of your local newspaper.
So you can imagine […]

Want to really astound and amaze (and possibly startle and scare off) visitors to your website?
Then consider using a new service called “Timpani”, being offered by LivePerson.com
According to an Article in Call Center Magazine, “Timpani’s analytics engine allows you to track customers’ movements on every page of your company’s Web site enabling you to proactively […]

Dear Gentle Readers,
Aunty has been enjoying writing for you, keeping you up-to-date on who is trying to assault your computers, what they are trying to do, and where you can find the fix for it, and judging by your feedback, you have been enjoying it too. Thank you!
So it gives Aunty great pleasure to […]

A new phishing tactic discovered by Internet security company SurfControl allows the phisher to take advantage of a weakness in a targeted company’s website, permitting them to use the company’s real URL, while serving up bogus look-alike content.
According to Susan Larson of SurfControl, “This is definitely one of the most sophisticated phishing techniques we have […]

As more and more users renounce the security-risk beleagured Internet Explorer, and move to open source web browsers such as Firefox, Microsoft is starting to feel the pinch.
As a result, Explorer has slipped from a previous lofty 95% marketshare to below 93%. While this may seem like a tiny change in percentage, it means that […]

Internet domain registrar eNom is in hot water for reportedly
attempting to grab as many as 950,000 (that’s “nine-hundred-fifty-thousand”)
.info domain names for domains that already exist as .com domains.
According to a report by Netcraft, eNom registered the domains through
Sipence, which, interestingly enough, shares a street address with
eNom. […]

Those good folks over at the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy have a really nifty idea to get back at those pesky spoofers - people who use your domain as the “from” address in their spam.
ISIPP is offering a new service with which it will help you to register your domain name for […]

By Anne P. Mitchell
In a move which surely can’t make Microsoft happy, no less an authority than US-CERT (the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team) has recommended that one way to deal with the security holes in IE is to “use a different Web browser.” In its notice, published this week, CERT observes that there […]