Fresh Spam Rears its Ugly Head
by Maggie Brudnicki
Virtually everyone has noticed the increase in spam over the past couple of months. The UCit Help Desk and E-Mail Services have received many inquiries about it. This is not just a UC phenomenon, but a worldwide one.
The media is full of articles about how spam exploded in October. Spammers are getting more sophisticated with the technologies they are using and, as you may have observed, are changing the from: addresses so that blacklist filters are ineffective.
We are working with our vendors to update our anti-spam defenses. These spammers have programs that latch onto the address @uc.edu and use programs to generate all possible combinations of letters and numbers to blindly send out e-mail messages, hoping some will hit targets. These messages are not sent specifically to your address because someone obtained it. Rather, someone made a good guess at what a valid e-mail address might be.
We drop a lot of e-mail before it reaches the mailboxes because it is obviously spam. Other e-mail is questionable: to some people these messages are unwanted, but others may want them. We have to be conservative about how much we drop.
If you are using Outlook to read your e-mail, you can invoke another layer of spam defense. Instructions for creating a rule to move e-mail messages that we have flagged as ‘possibly spam’ to your junk mail folder are at http://www.uc.edu/infosec/HowToSetupSpamFilters.htm.
We encourage you to take the time to set up such filters. Then, if you do not receive e-mail you are expecting, you can check your junk mail folder and possibly retrieve it.
Keep your anti-virus programs up-to-date and consider using an anti-spyware program. Spammers are creating programs, called bots, that invade your machine as viruses or spyware might. It then spits out spam e-mail using your machine, e-mail address, and data connection.
Another spam technique involves penny stocks. These messages are just recommendations to purchase a certain, obscure stock. In this “pump and dump” scheme, spammers invest in, then create spam messages about the stock. In the short term, prices tend to rise in the wake of a mass spam mailing; that is, when people actually buy these stocks, prices rise. Spammers sell their stocks - and leave other investors “holding the bag” when prices quickly drop, again.
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