JohnGrahamCumming - Slashdot User

Submission + - Strip mining spams: very clever use of animation

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Monday October 16, 2006 @05:51AM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "The ingenuity of spammers never ceases to amaze me. The latest attempt to evade smart spam filters is the use of an animated, transparent GIF that builds slowly to reveal its message. By cutting the image up the spammer hopes to evade spam filters that understand images; they've even thrown in random noise and frames that never get displayed to throw off filters."

Submission + - A simple service to overcome the Slashdot effect

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Thursday October 05, 2006 @05:04AM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "If the web page you want is overloaded because its Slashdotted, or it's just NSFW but you don't want to forget about it, the free service l8tr will send you an email reminder when the web page becomes available. Now if the site is Slashdotted, of course, it can't remind you of its own existence!"

Submission + - Doing research by borrowing from a blog post?

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Tuesday September 12, 2006 @05:02AM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "Last Monday my blog post on subliminal spam messages was posted on Slashdot's front page. In the days that followed three anti-spam firms reported the discovery of subliminal spam as their own work with no mention of my blog or Slashdot. One even appears to have lifted the examples straight from my blog without attribution. Is this how research is done, or was it just three coincidences?"

Submission + - Digg effect 1/3 of Slashdot effect

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Wednesday September 06, 2006 @04:17PM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "On Monday a blog entry on 'Subliminal spam GIFs' from my site appeared on the front page of Slashdot. On Tuesday the same story appeared on the front page of Digg. This gave me a chance to measure the Slashdot effect and Digg effect. The result: Slashdot brought 3.5x as many visitors as Digg."

Submission + - The first subliminal spam using animated GIFs

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Monday September 04, 2006 @11:13AM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "Everyone's noticed the recent flood of image spam (including the SpamAssassin developers who are working on an OCR-extension to beat it), but take a look at this spam containing a subliminal message flashed every 17seconds to try to entice you to buy the stock being pumped. Does this work? Warning: link shows the actual spam; don't blame me if you lose money on this stock!"

Submission + - AT&T crack was done by phishers

Submitted by

JohnGrahamCumming

on Friday September 01, 2006 @01:22PM

JohnGrahamCumming writes: "According to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle the AT&T store crack was the prelude to a very sophisticated phishing operation. The phishers were aiming to use the information from the store to fool existing customers into divulging SSNs and other personal information."

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