Alexis Wilke's blog

What does Sandhi Schimmel Gold and Scam have in common?

Sandhi Schimmel Gold with Billy Bush and a picture of him by her.Today I found an interesting article about spam...

Sandhi Schimmel Gold loves receiving spam (maybe I should divert my pipe in her general direction...)

Why?

Because she uses it to create art! Paintings of famous people.

Oh! Yeah... that's not the spam you get in your electronic mail. She uses the news paper, marketing letters, etc. to do collages.

Too bad.

Well... at least one person gets nearly all her raw materials for free!

Submitted by on Sat, 07/09/2011 - 16:52

Security problem with your Drupal configuration

Today the Drupal Security Team sent out a message in regard to emails being sent to people asking them to install a file on their Drupal server to make sure that some security problem in Drupal Core was plugged before a hacker finds it.

I wonder how many fell for it... probably not many since only the smartest work with Drupal, although there could be a few silly billies out there too!?

The interesting point of the message sent to Drupal users is that it says that the Drupal Security Team did not announce anything on their website. That's contrary to even receiving such a (public) ...

Submitted by on Thu, 02/17/2011 - 17:33

Queensland, $4 million lost in only 5 months

I've got to say that cleverness is not part of the scam. It's got to be the opposite: Stupidity.

Many people get scammed by Nigerian scams, but to read that in Queensland State, Australia, there were 3,300 people scammed for a total loss of AUD $4 million, is just incredible news to me.

Now I understand why so many "black people" are contacting me on Facebook (okay just 3 so far, out of 3,400 friends, it isn't that many... is it?) and they each tell me that they will gladly give me a phone call. Once you made a few thousand dollars, it certainly doesn't cost you ...

Submitted by on Tue, 06/01/2010 - 18:38

Are 419 scammers learning?

Yes... as usual, I receive a lot of emails, many of which are from scammers. Each day, I delete most of the emails in my mailbox. Now, I'm just waiting to retire!

The trend has usually been to talk about all your problems, how poor you are, how it is impossible for you to get the millions of $$$ from your defunct dad (rarely the mom's rich... ain't weird? I thought the Queen was loaded!)

But lately, for about 2 months or so, I started getting emails that were very very very short. I have had those for the blue pills forever, since there isn't much to say in that case, but for ...

Submitted by on Tue, 04/27/2010 - 22:57

400,000 bots working hard every day

A row of honey pots to capture scammers. You know, when it's too good to be true...

I'm registered with different systems to help my company eliminate most of the scam it receives. The problem is that some of my customers emails also get kicked out... Ouch!

Today, I received an email saying that the Project Honey Pot received it's 1 billionth spam email. I guess that was not a surprise seeing the large amount of scam you receive every day (I know that I receive well over 1,000 emails a day on my site.)

The people on that project work on detecting where things come from and what is being used to send the data. They have found many different things that you can ...

Submitted by on Tue, 12/15/2009 - 17:51

Small business scam from Georgia

I warned about this scam once. Letters coming in the mail telling you that you have to pay $150 and at times even more to keep your corporation open. The scammers could simply get the businesses information on the Californian website. All the information was available. They somewhat copied the letter you are supposed to fill out each year and sent over 1 million of those to businesses.

According to "this article" (not available anymore), they made a whooping $1 million with that scheme. Note that if you have to send 1 million letters and that it cost you about 50 cents each, they really only ...

Submitted by on Fri, 09/18/2009 - 15:04

Did you send me that email?!

Scammers are doing bad things all the time and that includes making use of other people email addresses. It can be much worse, actually, since they may hack and use your actual email account, although that's much rarer.

The following is an email I received from someone in Denmark who received an email from me.

Hi sir
 my name is : [name]
I received an E-mail from you addressed to me. Is it correct?
The following is the content:

Submitted by on Wed, 09/09/2009 - 11:11

Password Hackers Are Slippery To Collar

What a story! Found on the Washington post.

I knew that you could hack in pretty much any account, but the use by Cioni is quite strange to me.

And yes, you could also get the same service as these YourHackerz.com for free. There are many hackers using that sort of a system...

Source was the Washington Post.

By Tom Jackman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 7, 2009

 

When Elaine Cioni found out that her married boyfriend had other girlfriends, she became obsessed, federal prosecutors say. So she turned to YourHackerz.com.

And for only $100, ...

Submitted by on Mon, 09/07/2009 - 14:53

Impersonating a real person to scam friends... never thought of that?

There is an article, published on Southeast Missourian on September 2, 2009 on this page (until removed).

I still think that people were not really smart to send money to someone just like that, but well... some people are easy to convince. And when a hacker takes over the account of a good friend! That's even harder to not believe.

Submitted by on Wed, 09/02/2009 - 23:08

Spam connections increase

Lately, I got a lot of connections on my SMTP server. This is the primary system used to receive and send emails.

The SMTP system has been flooded by connections. Our system limits those connections to a small number to avoid overflows of the system as a whole. This means if the maximum number is reached you may be prevented from connecting since the maximum number of connections is reached pretty much permanently.

Submitted by on Tue, 08/25/2009 - 09:39