Thursday, November 14, 2013

Spammers have a new method!?

The latest round of Spam has demonstrated that Spammers are now using more sophisticated techniques to gather email addresses. Emails I created for specific organisations, like boxnet"at"s-mail.me.uk are now being spammed.

There are three possible techniques I have envisaged
1) They are monitoring the outbound traffic of the 1and1 smtp servers, I transmit to these servers securely, but they send emails in the clear.
(This would mean that they have sniffers on 1and1 servers, or at least in their network, not good)
Have been monitoring the news 1and1 have not publically admitted this as far as I can tell.

 2) They have compromised the Google Mail servers in some way, I forward all my emails to googlemail as a backup

 3) Less likely, they have compromised a lot of individuals personal mail boxes, including mine

Either way they are successfully targeting a lot more email accounts, the practise though simply increases the frustration with SPAM reducing the likelihood for there clients message to be read. So the folks from www.hotvegascash.com are going to be out of luck! url no longer found on DNS.

So folks apologies if you start getting emails purportedly from Jamie_Oliver"at"s-mail.me.uk

Just know that that was Jamie's email for me, and neither of us sent the messages...

Sorry!


Unintended Consequences

The closure of Apple's iDisk service had me looking around for alternate places to store my files. In my search I bumped into the new Google Drive service. So I moved all my iDisk files to Google Drive, the place where I also find my Google Docs.

I wonder if Apple meant to push me out of their world, into the arms of Google?

I still feel very uncomfortable in this "free world of Google"

I keep being reminded of the cartoon with two pigs talking in a barn...
"Great here isn't it!?"
"Yes and the foods free too!"

I somehow doubt that I will be able to sue Apple for what they have done to me...

I moved from being Chicken to Pig without really noticing the switch!
You remember... the old joke about the difference between involved and committed!

Doh!!!!