North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Blocking mail from bad places

  • From: Thomas Leavitt
  • Date: Tue Apr 03 20:02:14 2007


I can personally testify that, as a proportion of the "mail" I get through it, there's quite a bit of spam on MySpace - phishing scams (Adult MySpace Viewer), fake profiles designed to draw you to adult dating / webcam / porn sites, etc. Lots of attractive women claiming to want you to be their friend for some mysterious reason.


Some of it is quite sophisticated: full blown "instant" profiles with fake comments ... the smarter spammers actually make the profile look real (often lifting material from legit user profiles), and then just stick their spam in the comments (and of course, "comment" spam is quite prevalent too, as is spam that invites you to join "groups" that are front ends to other sites, etc.) or wait a few days and then spam you via "bulletins". Sometimes, it is pretty hard to tell what is spam, and what is not... I have an acquaintance who specializes in documenting these scams and tracking down the sponsors of the affiliate programs funding some of them and getting affiliate accounts canceled (I've done this once in a while myself).

Sometimes there's a strange mixture of sophistication and stupidity - plausible profiles, very credible on their face... all batched together, five or six "friend requests" at a time, coming within two or three minutes of each other at 4 a.m. Or two requests, from users with slightly different "names", and an identical photo.

MySpace does a fairly good job of responding to complaints and terminating accounts (sometimes within hours of their creation).

I'm not a dedicated YouTube user, but I've seen plenty of spam in comments on YouTube as well... this is a generic problem, with levels of vulnerability dependent on the architecture of the communications system, and the scale within which it operates (how attractive it is).



[email protected] wrote:
On Tue, 03 Apr 2007 15:18:36 PDT, Scott Weeks said:
What I meant was: when only a few folks use email, the spammers will go away.

They won't go away, they'll just go infest whatever the people are using.
We're already seeing significant amounts of blog-comment spam, and as soon
as the spammers find a good methodology, they'll be Myspace and YouTube
spam (if they aren't already)....