Ajit Gaddam: TechNews and Security

This is a very popular format for the Bank of America spam email. The spammers are trying to lure you into clicking on a link to take to Bank of America’s online banking. The link you are actually clicking on which as shown in the picture of the email below is not exactly a “Click here to sign in to Bank of America Online Banking”

The link actually goes to a Click here to Sign in <h t t p ://w w w . stu d iora .ru/ boa /index.htm>  to Online Banking to reactivate your Bank account now.

Note: The URL above has spaces added

The content of the email is as follows

Read the rest of this entry »

Another one of the Pay Pal fraud emails floating around. The PayPal fraud email has a subject line of “Message from support, please confirm your information!”

The spammer doesn’t even try to obfuscate their email address with the reply email going to a @gmail.com address. Following is the content of that Pay Pal Fraud email which tries to lure a potential PayPal customer into clicking the link in the email which is a spoof of the PayPal website. Once you enter your username and password, you just gave away your PayPal account to the fraudster.

Pay Pal Fraud Email content

Dear PayPal Member,

As part of our security measures, we regularly screen activity in the PayPal system. We recently contacted you after noticing an issue on your account.We requested information from you for the following reason:

We recently received a report of unauthorized credit card use associated with this account. As a precaution, we have limited access to your PayPal account in order to protect against future unauthorized transactions.

Case ID Number: PP-392-735-806

This is a reminder to log in to PayPal as soon as possible.

Read the rest of this entry »

UK National Lottery Scam or UK Lottery Scam is gaining popularity among spammers these days who specialize in scam email and scam fraud. You might have heard about Nigerian Scammers among many others.

I have previously blogged about Microsoft Lottery Award email scam which was one of the most popular articles on my blog.

In this article I am going to share with you the generic content of the UK National Lottery Scam or the UK Lottery Scam

Uk National Lottery
PO Box 42 Peter borough
SE15 2UD
UNITED KINGDOM

Ref: BTL/491OXI/04
Batch: 12/ 25/0304

ATTENTION: Winner,

This is the official result of the UK 2007 LOTTERY PROGRAM. held on 5th. of August, 2007. Your e-mail address drew the winning lucky numbers:04, 05, 16, 19, 21, 49 & 20. You have therefore been approved to claim a total sum of
£500.000.00(G.B.P) in cash credited
To file for your claim please kindly provide the following informations and send it to our Fiduciary Agent who shall clear you as a winner

PLEASE NOTE THAT YOU ARE TO SEND THE BELOW INFORMATION REQUIRED TO CLAIM YOUR WINNING PRIZE:
1.Full Name:……………………………………………………..
2.Address:………………………………………………………..
3.Nationality:…………………………………………………….
4.Age:…………………….Date of
Birth:……………………………………
5.Occupation:…………………………………………………….
6.Phone:……………Phone 2:……………….Fax:……………..
7.State of Origin:………………….Country:……………………

contact our claims agent below.
Mr.Alen Foster
E-mail:claimsagent_alenfoster2000@yahoo.co.uk

Sincerely,
Brian Hunt
On line Coordinator
The Uk National Lottery

This is a new form of Spam Email I am seeing. In this email, apparantly a seconday email address has been added to my Paypal account. This email could definitely jump out for most people as most of us have a secondary email address which we enter when we sign up in case we forget our primary account user name which would be an email address at Paypal and/or our password. The email lacks proper formatting, etc. I have received two such emails with the same PayPal Email ID of PP025197. The email address I am supposed to reply to varied. The links used to sign in have been removed

Following is the content of this email

You’ve added an additional email address to your account.
If you don’t agree with this email orkydork2<at>hotmail.com and jrwiz4rd<at>msn.com and if you need assistance with your account,
click here and login.

To make sure you can use your PayPal account the next time you make a purchase,
all you need to do is confirm or not your email address.
If your email program has problems with hypertext links,
you may also confirm your email address by logging in to your account.

Thank you for using PayPal!
The PayPal Team
Please do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you will not receive a response. For assistance,
log in to your PayPal account and click the Help link located in the top right corner of any PayPal page.

PayPal Email ID PP025197

Read the rest of this entry »

In this Blog, I give out a lot of examples of Spam Email. The most popular discussion takes place at the Microsoft Lottery Award Spam. Spammers use many evasive tactics like using University Message boards for hosting spam and looks like their methods are being successful.

However, lets go back into the ages, May 1, 1978 to be exact to learn about the first spam email ever.

On this day, 29 years ago, Gary Thuerek, a marketer for Digital Equipment Corporation sent out the first spam email to more than 400 people with mail they did not correspond to. And yes, the email was send in all CAPITAL LETTERS ughhh!!!

Mail-from: DEC-MARLBORO rcvd at 3-May-78 0955-PDT
Date:  1 May 1978 1233-EDT
From: THUERK at DEC-MARLBORO
Subject: ADRIAN@SRI-KL
To:   DDAY at SRI-KL, DAY at SRI-KL, DEBOER at UCLA-CCN,
To:   WASHDC at SRI-KL, LOGICON at USC-ISI, SDAC at USC-ISI,
To:   DELDO at USC-ISI, DELEOT at USC-ISI, DELFINO at USC-ISI,
To:   DENICOFF at USC-ISI, DESPAIN at USC-ISI, DEUTSCH at SRI-KL,
To:   DEUTSCH at PARC-MAXC, EMY at CCA-TENEX, DIETER at USC-ISIB,
To:   DINES at AMES-67, MERADCON at SRI-KL, EPG-SPEC at SRI-KA,
To:   DIVELY at SRI-KL, DODD at USC-ISI, DONCHIN at USC-ISIC,
To:   JED at LLL-COMP, DORIN at CCA-TENEX, NYU at SRI-KA,
To:   DOUGHERTY at USC-ISI, PACOMJ6 at USC-ISI,
To:   DEBBY at UCLA-SECURITY, BELL at SRI-KL, JHANNON at SRI-KA,
To:   DUBOIS at USC-ISI, DUDA at SRI-KL, POH at USC-ISI,
To:   LES at SU-AI, EAST at BBN-TENEX, DEASTMAN at USC-ECL,

……

YEH@LLL-COMP
YONKE@USC-ISIB
YOUNGBERG@SRI-KA
ZEGERS@SRI-KL
ZOLOTOW@SRI-KL
ZOSEL@LLL-COMP
DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE
DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T.  THE
DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY OF COMPUTERS HAS EVOLVED FROM THE TENEX OPERATING SYSTEM
AND THE DECSYSTEM-10 <PDP-10> COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE.  BOTH THE DECSYSTEM-2060T
AND 2020T OFFER FULL ARPANET SUPPORT UNDER THE TOPS-20 OPERATING SYSTEM.
THE DECSYSTEM-2060 IS AN UPWARD EXTENSION OF THE CURRENT DECSYSTEM 2040
AND 2050 FAMILY. THE DECSYSTEM-2020 IS A NEW LOW END MEMBER OF THE
DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AND FULLY SOFTWARE COMPATIBLE WITH ALL OF THE OTHER
DECSYSTEM-20 MODELS.

Read the rest of this entry »

Spam comes in a variety of forms, including fraudulent messages. This mass-messaging is called ’spoofing’ or ‘password phishing.’

Such fraudulent practices involve messages that appear to be from a legitimate source, or the creation of an official-looking webpage that asks you to provide your username and password or other personal information. Such messages or pages could ask for your Social Security number, bank account number, PIN number, credit card number, mother’s maiden name, or birthday.

Spammers often ask for this information in an attempt to steal your email account, your money, your credit, or your identity.

Many email clients including Google, Yahoo and MSN provide services which identify a phishing email. Besides that, when using Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox as your browsers, they actively monitor the sites you visit and flag them if you visit a suspected phishing site. 

Most email client’s phishing alerts operate automatically, much like spam filtering. A spam filters automatically divert smessages that are suspected of being unwanted messages into ‘Spam’. Similarly, phishing alerts automatically display warnings with messages that are suspected of being phishing attacks so that users know to take care before providing any personal information as shown in the image below

You should always be wary of any message that asks for your personal information, or messages that refer you to a webpage asking for personal information.

Here’s what you can do to protect yourself and stop fraudsters:

    * Make sure the URL domain on the given page is correct, and click on any images and links to verify that you are directed to proper pages within the site. For example, the URL is http://yourbankname.com/ or, for even more security, https://yourbankname.com/. Although some links may appear to contain ‘yourbankname.com,’ you may be redirected to another site after entering such addresses into your browser.
Read the rest of this entry »

Sweet… I just got my first comment spam in Russian.

Apparantly, they are promoting a site selling MP3 songs. Here is the translation of the Russian in the above comment spam to English. Google Translate did a pretty good job…

The latest site with MP3 songs. Here you will be able to download different mp3 free. Our site is updated every day and filled the best player. There is a different directory mp3, albums and performers. Please http:/ / www. cdmp3 .ru

This email definitely takes the Outstanding spam email award in my opinion so far… so far.

The reason I saw i saw its outstanding is because of the effort that went into creating this spam email. I have checked a couple of Lotteries and the Ref File number, the batch number etc are all pretty well laid out and detailed. There are no spelling mistakes, atleast from my dictioniononary and unlike addressed to any Respected Sir/Madam/Blah, this spam email is addressed to me! Also, they have people signing off on this “lottery winner notification”. Another impressive thing is the lottery numbers in pictures.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most popular articles on my blog continues to be the “I won the Microsoft Lottery Award” article. Another popular spam email doing the rounds these days in the Coca Cola Company Promotion Prize Award.

This spam email comes from a certain Mrs. Kate Hudson of the Coca Cola Company.  This spam email is primarily targetted to those living in the United Kingdom as all the variants I have seen of this spam email have their destination addresses in the UK.

The email informs me that I am one the lucky 20 winners where I won a prize money of £1,000,000 or One Million Pound Sterlings. One of the first red flags comes here. If you notice carefully, it just says £1,000.000. Notice the period after thousand instead of a comma denoting 1 million. This Coca Cola promotion award it seems was held in conjunction with the British American Tobacco Worldwide Promotion.

The following is the full text of the spam email

THE COCA COLA COMPANY
PROMOTION/PRIZE AWARD
DEPTCOCA COLA AVENUE
STAMFORD BRIDGE LONDON.
SW1V 3DW UNITED KINGDOM

THE COCA COLA COMPANY OFFICIAL PRIZE NOTIFICATION 2007

We are pleased to inform you of the result of the just concluded annual final draws held on the (24th of March, 2007) by Coca-Cola in conjunction with the British American Tobacco Worldwide Promotion, your email was among the 20 Lucky winners who won £1,000.000 (One million Great Britain Pound Sterlings) each on the THE COCA’COLA COMPANY PROMOTION However the results were released on the (26th of March, 2007) and your email was attached to ticket number (7PWYZ2006) and ballot number (BT:12052006/20) The online draws was conducted by a random selection of email addresses from an exclusive list of 30,031 E-mail addresses of individuals and corporate bodies picked by an advanced automated random computer search from the internet. However, no tickets were sold but all email addresses were assigned to different ticket numbers for representation and privacy.

The selection process was carried out through random selection in our computerized email selection machine (TOPAZ) from a database of over 250,000 email addresses drawn from all the continents of the world.

This Lottery is approved by the British Gaming Board and also Licensed by the The International Association of Gaming Regulators (IAGR).This lottery is the 3rd of its kind and we intend to sensitize the public.
 
To claim your price contact your claim agent.
 
CONTACT PERSON: MR. DAVID JACKSON
POSITION: FINANCE DIRECTOR,HSBC FINANCE CORPORATION
2700 SANDERS ROAD PROSPECT HEIGHTS LONDON
UNITED KINGDOM.
DIRECT PHONE NUMBER: +44 703 190 9886. 
EMAIL ADDRESS: jackson_david0009@yahoo.com
 
 
 
Kindly send the following information to your claim agent:
Ticket Number:____________________________
Ballot  Numbers: _______________________ Tel/Fax Number: ________________
Full Name: _____________________________ Age: _________________________
Sex: _____________________ Company Name: ____________________________
Full Address: ________________________ Occupation:______________________
Amount Won: _______________________ Country: _________________________
 
Please you are adviced to complete the form and send it immediately to your claim agent through email for prompt collection of your fund.

You are to keep all lotto information away from the general public especially your ticket number and ballot number. (This is important as a case of double claims will not be entertained).

*Staff of CocaCola and the British American Tobacco Company are not to partake in this Lottery.

Accept my hearty congratulations once again!

Yours faithfully,
Mrs.Kate Hudson
Cordinator

As I blogged earlier, Akismet has passed a huge milestone today. It has crossed 1 Billion Comment Spam blocked a few hours ago.

Besides me, a lot of people have been guessing on when this milestone would be reached and as guessed, it was reached over the weekend. As outlined in the picture below, two stats stand out below the chart. One is Total Spam blocked which at the point of this screenshot stood at 1,024,961,562 and the other stat is Total Ham which stood at 54,169,936. What this statistic reveals is that an alarming 95% of all the comments and trackbacks to blogs such as this one are spam. So with a Billion spams blocked, there are just 54 million genuine comments (genuine comments or total ham are those which are not identified by Akismet as spam)

The only sure way right now to avoid spam is to not allow any form of commenting or connection to your blog from any other site on the internet. Which would defeat one of the primary benefits of a blog: connecting with other people.

I wouldn’t do that. So I rely on Akismet as the first line of spam defence and it does a very good job.