June 29, 2009
Spammers prey on the desperate
It has been a while since we looked at the Symantec monthly spam report but, with the rise of Twitter, it seems germane to re-visit it.
And it is Twitter where the main focus is with the security company identifying two particular spam campaigns: Make Money Fast (MMF) and dating spam.
(Link)
In the MMF campaign, the spammers post tweets advertising “Risk-Free Twitter Profit Software”. You click on a link and are brought to an online form where you’re asked to fill in some personal details. But no “risk-free” software would be complete without a request for your credit card number and expiry date. Needless to say this is not a good idea.
The second attack is based around the dating site DateTwit with spam tweets pointing you towards fraudulent sites masquerading as the Twitter dating site that are simply hungry for your Twitter credentials. I’m sorry but if you’re inclined to join an online dating site then perhaps you get what you deserve.
Elsewhere, Symantec say that 92% of all spam has URLs in the message body and that 90% of all emails are spam. These are frightening numbers and the prevalence of spam underline just why it is such a lucrative pastime for these cybercriminals.
Ooh! Just got a message on DateTwit!
Microsoft versus Google, part 398273
There was a time when technology vernacular consisted of “mainframe” and “network”. Now there is “social media”, “peer to peer”, “LOL” and probably one or two others. One of the major new concepts is “cloud computing”, a new way for large Internet corporations to make money help you work more efficiently.
The concept is so big now that whole conferences are dedicated to it, most recently the “Structure 09: Cloud Computing and Internet infrastructure” conference in San Francisco last week. Google - a major player in Internet search if you haven’t heard of them - took the stage at the conference with Microsoft - a minor player in Internet search - and took repeatedly successful pot-shots.
(Link)
Vijay Gill, Google’s senior manager of engineering and infrastructure batted away every argument that his nemesis, Najam Ahmad, Microsoft’s global networking services general manager, bowled at him.
Ahmad waffled in a somewhat vague manner.
“The set of applications we have are tremendous. We have all sorts of applications on our network, and we can't really come up with one solution that actually works - or even one set of KPIs [key performance indicators] that works. Some services are very stateful, like Messenger, and some are very stateless. What we end up with is really varied mixture of KPIs and solutions in terms of building performance."
After bigging up Microsoft’s Virtual Earth mapping service, Vijay jumped in to point out that a real estate outfit called RedFin recently ditched the Microsoft solution for Google Maps. Strike one.
The rest of the linked article sees Vijay go in to great detail about how great Google is and point his audience towards a 108-page Google paper entitled “The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines”.
I was just going to settle down for a read when I got another message on DateTwit.
Another Technology Death Match
In what seems a very confrontational arena at the moment, eBay and Skype are having a face-off over the former’s desire to go public with the latter’s technology that they acquired in 2005 for $2.6bn.
Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have accused eBay of breaching a licensing agreement and, since they still own the peer-to-peer sharing technology that Skype is based on (yeah, way to cut a deal, eBay), they are threatening to pull the plug.
In retaliation, eBay are suing their company, Joltid.
(Link)
Skype’s attorney has told the court that if Joltid win the lawsuit, the effect would be devastating on the service with the company’s developers needing to go back to square one and develop a new technology.
A scheduled IPO for Skype in 2010 is under threat with speculation that eBay may offload the service to a private investor. But money usually talks in these situations (metaphor) and I’d expect the companies to come to some sort of agreement.
I was about to have a look at the court transcripts but I just got a third message on DateTwit! And they’re all from someone called MakeMoneyFast. Oh well.
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