On Message with Ben Gross

Link roundup for New Types of Spam

March 26th, 2008

419 scams hidden in Google and Yahoo calendar messages: There is a piece on the Commtouch blog about spam arriving in the form of .ics calendar invites. I have received a number of these myself. Users who have their calendar application such as Outlook, Google Calendar, and Yahoo Calendar set to automatically accept calendar invitations may begin to see these entries show up in their calendar.

Is Twitter About to Have a Big Spam Problem?: Also over at Mashable, Adam Ostrow writes about the problem of followers in Twitter that appear to come from automatically generated requests made to thousands of Twitter users at once. Unless a Twitter profile is marked as private, or a user has explicitly been explicitly blocked, anyone is allowed to become a follower of anyone else. There is no CAPTCHA required to follow another user lending itself to easy automation and potential spamming. Twitter could easily resolve this problem by requiring a CAPTCHA.

Advertising Sent To Cellphones Opens New Front In War on Spam - washingtonpost.com: The Washington Post has an update on the continuing problem of SMS spam and discusses the problem from the point of users, carriers, and other services such as Facebook.

Link roundup for 11/24/07 TinyURL Outage Illustrates the Service's Risks: TinyURL is one of the most well known services that provide short URL redirection services. It is popular with u ...

Google Releases Web-based Chat Module Today Google released a Flash based Google Talk gadget. Overall the user experience is smooth and the tabs for individual chats are handled well. Links from You ...

CEAS 2007 Live Spam Challenge The Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS) invites participation in the CEAS Live Spam Challenge. Participants will compete in filtering a live 24-hour e-mail ...