Spam anybody?

[jaymags]

Me thinks there's spammer amongst us again going under the names of wupearls? or am I seeing things?

[Nik]

Yep reported it about 10 minutes ago, waiting for one of the mods to take the messages off.

[jaymags]

Jolly good, I hate spam.

[DavidS]

Jolly good, I hate spam.

Don't we all!

Reporting spam is done by clicking on the red and white triange at the top right hand corner of the post, and filling in the short form that appears.

This notification is then sent to the personal email addresses of all the moderators, and Admin Herself.

This one, WhoopdePoop, and the other one, tsilibilli or whoever, have now been disintegrated!

[DavidS]

Further news on Spam, just received this (non-spam) email from a site moderators use to check if we have a spammer posting....

Dear David:

On Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 06:20 (GMT), Project Honey Pot achieved a
milestone: receiving its 1 billionth spam message. The billionth message
was
an United States Internal Revenue Service phishing scam sent to an email
address that had been harvested more than two years ago. More than just a
single spam email, the billionth message represents the collective work of
you and tens of thousands of other web and email administrators like you in
more than 170 countries around the world. Together we have built Project
Honey Pot into the largest community tracking online fraud and abuse.

To celebrate this milestone, we sifted through five years of data to learn
more about spam and the spammers who send it. As a small token of thanks
for
your help, we wanted to share some of our more interesting preliminary
findings. Click the following link for the Full Report:

1 Billion Spammers Served | Deep Insights into Spam | Project Honey Pot

Highlights include:

- Monday is the busiest day of the week for email spam, Saturday is the
quietest
- 12:00 (GMT) is the busiest hour of the day for spam, 23:00 (GMT) is the
quietest
- Malicious bots have increased at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of
378% since Project Honey Pot started
- Over the last five years, you'd have been 9 times more likely to get a
phishing message for Chase Bank than Bank of America, however Facebook is
rapidly becoming the most phished organization online
- Finland has some of the best computer security in the world, China some
of the worst
- It takes the average spammer 2 and a half weeks from when they first
harvest your email address to when they send you your first spam message,
but that's twice as fast as they were five years ago
- Every time your email address is harvested from a website, you can expect
to receive more than 850 spam messages
- Spammers take holidays too: spam volumes drop nearly 21% on Christmas Day
and 32% on New Year's Day
- And much more.....

We have published it under the Creative Commons Attribution license, so
don't hesitate to share anything you find interesting. In the end, we
couldn't have gathered this data without you.

Thank you for all your help over the last five years. Here's to wishing you
happy holidays and a relatively spam-free New Year.

Sincerely,
The Project Honey Pot Team

so, keep posting those email addresses online!!

[Pharmanaut]

Further news on Spam, just received this (non-spam) email from a site moderators use to check if we have a spammer posting....



so, keep posting those email addresses online!!

Well, If I had a pound for every spam message sent...
I'd have a billion.

[DavidS]

A new spammer was on the forum today. This one wasn't well-known, although his ip address was on "stop forum spam" once, and he was reporting as English from an Indian host.

He hadn't posted any spam as such, just four long and very rambling posts, so I suspect that he had decided to wait a week and then modify his posts, or use a spam signature (which would appear on all his old posts).

The giveaway for me was that all four of his long posts were posted, and without edits, within a couple of minutes, standard for spambots but much faster than humans. So that's something for eagle-eyed forum contributors to watch for when considering whether to report posts. They are getting more and more sophisticated, but so are we!