Items tagged with spam
These days, you can’t seem to escape reports of major corporations being “taken down” by phishing schemes (“Hello, Sony”) or ordinary spam. Valve doesn’t want its hugely popular Steam digital distribution service (or its users) to fall victim to such attacks, so it’s taking a rather unusual step to help weed out...
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How does one even begin a post with the above headline? In what is either a massive troll or an uncomfortable sign of the times, a pair of Brits named Matt Gray and Tom Scott are touting a new social network launching soon that will use only emoji. Dubbed “emoj.li”, the social network contains no words--no...
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Chances are, you’ve noticed a gradual uptick in the amount of spam in your Facebook Newsfeed. You know the stuff--"like-baiting", spammy links to trick you into clicking on a junk website, and even seeing the content over and over again--and Facebook is trying to get rid of it. “A smaller set of publishers who are frequently and...
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We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating as we enter the era of the Internet of Things (IoT): Anything that’s Internet-connected can be hacked. We’ve seen it recently with TRENDnet IP cameras and warned about it with Nest (even as Google snapped it up in a $3.2 billion acquisition this week). And now, a security company...
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You know malware is a steadily growing problem, but if you aren’t tuned into the cyber security industry, you might not know just how fast the threat is exploding. Hackers are taking computers hostage, stealing credit card data at ever-increasing rates, and spammers are winning the email war. McAfee released a...
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When it comes to the web business, you might say you know you've "arrived" when the spammers show up. Instagram, the blazingly hot photo and video-sharing service owned by Facebook and now topping 130 million monthly active users, definitely seems to have crossed that threshold. You might say Instagram is where all the cool kids...
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Nothing quite like a good, old-fashioned cat-fight between social networks, huh? That's evidently what's ongoing between Facebook and Path. If you haven't been watching, Path has been taking a lot of heat recently for spamming contact lists with invites to join. Essentially, Path users inadvertently spammed just about...
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Facebook has been testing a pay-to-message service in the U.S. since December, and now the trial has expanded to include some 36 countries, including the UK. According to the Guardian, about 10% of UK Facebook users can now message their favorite celebrities--for a price. The cost is on a tiered scale depending on the...
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Talk about spring cleaning. According to techcrunch, citing “a company in the mobile app industry which has insight into changes like this”, some 60,000 apps were removed from the Google Play store in February. That’s a startling number, considering that the total number of apps in the Google Play store is around 700,000....
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If you've had a difficult time connecting to select websites over the past few days, there's a very good chance that an on-going attack against spam-prevention agency Spamhaus is to blame. Spamhaus, based in London and Geneva, helps e-mail providers filter spam, and to do this, it manages a blocklist that includes any...
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It's Christmas. Actually, it's the day before the fake Mayan apocalypse, Winter Solstice Eve, two days before Festivus, and five days before Christmas. Regardless of your chosen holiday, it's the magical time of year when the kinfolk you've spent 51 weeks successfully avoiding manage to squirm their way into your home like particularly determined...
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Love 'em or hate 'em, CAPTCHAs remain one of the most valuable tools for website owners to help keep comment spam to a minimum. While figuring out exactly what a CAPTCHA is trying to tell you can be frustrating as a user, the alternative is to peruse a comments section littered with spam, scams and other garbage...
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Limited Run describes itself as a "platform specifically designed for labels, musicians, and artists, selling digital and physical products." The company (known as Limited Pressing on Facebook) offers a framework for artists to build their own small scale music stores, take orders, and distribute product either...
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Dealing with spam is a reality of the digital life, but there are those among us who spend their time and energy turning back the tidal wave of unwanted and in some cases dangerous metaphorical salted pork slurry. This week, those dedicated souls took out the Grum botnet, which was the third-largest spam botnet and...
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Have you noticed less spam in your inbox lately? According to Symantec’s November Intelligence Report, the rate of spam worldwide is close to a three-year low. Symantec notes that spam currently encompasses 70 percent of all emails. Compared to 2009 when spam accounted for 90 percent of all global emails, this is a significant drop....
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A settlement has been reached in the "Kramer v B2Mobile, LLC and LeadClick Media, Inc." case in which cell phone owners may be eligible to receive up to $100 in compensation for receiving text spam. It could be the easiest C-note you ever 'earned,' only don't get your hopes up, there's a good chance you'll receive...
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While much attention is focused on Facebook scams and trojans involving Osama bin Laden's death, Facebook users should be aware of another new way scammers are spreading links to rogue sites. They have begun to circulate convincing links claiming to be stories from Wired News about the iPhone 5. This scam takes advantage of Facebook’s...
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Like you, Google is fed up with useless sites that consist of little more than keywords to attract visitors to increase ad revenue, but unlike you, Google has the power to do something about it. And so it is. Google's making a bunch of changes to its search algorithm, most of them subtle, but one of them is big and will impact nearly 12 percent...
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Most of us have created a temporary email address at one time or another in an effort to avoid spam and other junk mail from entering our primary email account. Now, the Windows Live team is looking to make this a bit easier for Hotmail users with the launch of a new alias service that will be available starting today. With the alias, you'll...
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Spam text messages are an annoyance, and perhaps more so than spam email, as each spam SMS message could cost a subscriber who doesn't have an unlimited messaging plan money. However, in this case a spam text message prevented a suicide bombing, saving hundreds of lives. Russian security forces reported on the incident with a so-called...
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Do you hate spam? Yes. So does everyone. So does Daniel Balsam. He hates spam so much that he's doing something about it. In fact, he has made his life one that just fights spam, all day everyday. Daniel was previously in a marketing career, but now he's a lawyer. He dropped his marketing gig and headed to law school, and he has come out of...
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One of the most active spam bots, Asprox, has a new gimmick for a Trojan it's been e-mailing around for the past six months: Facebook. Its botmasters are trying to cash in on last week's blocked accounts and unfriending frenzy. Wednesday, November 17, was National Facebook Unfriend day, the brainchild of late night talk show comedian Jimmy...
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