April 14, 2008
Each Monday, we'll discuss a few notable articles from the past week. These articles will touch on topics relevant to the email sender and ISP communities. Some topics of note will be phishing and spamming, email authentication, branding, online advertising, email statistics, and others.
Welcome to this week's blog posting.
I'm Seth Redmore, and I'll be your host while you're here. Thanks for joining us. Please feel free to drop me a
with thoughts or opinions.
War, what is it good for?
Our first article brings us the subject of this week’s blog: War. The concept is one that comes up pretty often in the rhetoric of email security companies.
“Spam ‘cold war’ set to continue.”
It’s an interesting concept. Are we actually fighting a war? To cite our friends at dictionary.com:
1. a conflict carried on by force of arms, as between nations or between parties within a nation; warfare, as by land, sea, or air.
2. a state or period of armed hostility or active military operations: The two nations were at war with each other.
3. a contest carried on by force of arms, as in a series of battles or campaigns: the War of 1812.
4. active hostility or contention; conflict; contest: a war of words.
5. aggressive business conflict, as through severe price cutting in the same industry or any other means of undermining competitors: a fare war among airlines; a trade war between nations.
6. a struggle: a war for men's minds; a war against poverty.
7. armed fighting, as a science, profession, activity, or art; methods or principles of waging armed conflict: War is the soldier's business.
So, I suppose that by definitions #4 and #5, we are. I look at it more as a “police action” or “contest of strength”. Seriously, though, I don’t really care for the concept of business as war.
"From a technological point of view it's pretty much a cold war going on between spammers and the anti-spam industry. When they up their game and invent a new way to get around anti-spam technology we are then forced to find methods to counteract them," he added.
“Forced to find methods to counteract them?” Really? Forced? Just like I’m “forced” to write this blog. None of us like phishing or spam, and if they went away tonight (Shazam!) then I would happily find something else to go do.
Oh, wait. We do branding, too. Nevermind that. I would be happy if spam and phishing went away, but I’d keep doing the branding nonetheless.
Having said all that, I just want to say that we here are fighting at the front lines of the campaign to take back your email freedoms from the invading phisher horde, sacrificing ourselves in the name of good communication everywhere.
(Link)
Absolutely nothing…
Other than producing unbelievable amounts of malware… Check this out:
“The total number of viruses will reach one million by year's end, according to security experts.”
Ok, that’s not great, but I’m not going to stress out over it.
“Sophos chief technology officer Paul Ducklin said about 25 percent of unique malware has been created in the last six months of its 20 year history.”
Let's work some math here. Assume that each piece of malware takes 5 hours to build (clearly far lower than it probably is). With that assumption, in the past six months, over 625 person-years have been spent building malware. Ok, fine, so that's the equivalent of a small to medium sized business making bad stuff.
It brings to mind a question – when do the viruses start to modify each other? It happened in the course of human evolution. It wouldn't surprise me if a tactic evolved for virus makers to try to eliminate competing viruses and malware on your machine, or if the malware in the process of writing over the memory of your machine caused new, sometimes better, but largely worse malware to evolve.
Sure, that's all fine and dandy to daydream about. What was most troubling from the article is that the development of malware is accelerating. There is something to stress about. Perhaps even “go to war” over. (Link)
…say it again.
and again, and again:
"Just remember that your bank will never send you emails asking you to disclose pin numbers, login details or complete passwords."
Parents, won’t you please tell your kids? Because…
“Cases of fraudsters trying to steal people's bank details more than tripled in the first three months of the year compared with the same period in 2007.”
(Link)
"Do not touch anything unnecessarily. Beware of pretty girls in dance halls and parks who may be spies, as well as bicycles, revolvers, uniforms, arms, dead horses, and men lying on roads -- they are not there accidentally." |
