Blight Watch

Nov 07, 2008
The Ups and Downs Of Blog Spam
Their appears to be good news and bad news in the fight against blog spam.  The good new, as reported in Search Engine War is that the Askimet Live Spam Zeitgeist shows a distinct decline in the ration of Spam to Ham.  This trend has been taking root over the ... more  
   
Jul 11, 2008
Time For A CAPTCHA Alternative
Every time a better mousetrap appears on the market, somebody engineers a better mouse to defeat it.  CAPTCHA (”Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”) is a mousetrap designed eight years ago by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to stop automated botware from creating accounts or ... more  
   
Jul 02, 2008
Amazon EC2 Cloud Heaven For Spammers
The Washington Post reports that spammers have begun making Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute the platform of choice for launching attacks on innocent users.  The payload of the latest Spam assault mixes the usual porn, pills and casios (pretending to be a Rolex) offers with a bit of Malware posing as ... more  
   
Jun 30, 2008
Another Cat and Mouse Game Goes To Hackers
The latest attempt at making Captcha more difficult to crack, the so called Cat CAPTCHA from Rapidshare, has capitulated to hackers.  After less than 2 months, Tips and Hacks reports that CryptLoad is able to reliable solve Cat CAPTHCA. I was very excited to test it but wasn’t able to ... more  
   
Jun 23, 2008
Craigslist CAPTCHA Fights Users
Complaints are emerging in the Blogosphere that the latest Captcha from Craigslist’s fight against blight are too difficult to solve. We are approaching the end game, as the newest Captchas are too hard to read and too easy to crack. The time has come for a new alternative.  Stay tuned…  
   
Jun 10, 2008
Hidden Cost Of CAPTCHA – One Billion Dollars Every Month
A June 5th, 2008 Time Magazine article cites Luis von Ahn, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon who was part of the original CAPTCHA team in estimating that people fill out close to 200 million CAPTCHAS a day. If the average person is slowed down by 15 seconds when they ... more  
   
May 25, 2008
New Evil Empire Serves Craigslist A Spam Sandwich
Wonder why Google has retired the commandment “Do No Evil”? Not content to profit from the sale of bots to blight Myspace, Google is selling advertising and offering Google Checkout for tools for spammers to go after Craigslist. You would imagine that Google has enough PhDs (or even ... more  
   
May 24, 2008
Bots Shred Craigslist Spam Defense
Craiglist is the latest victim of in the spread of blight, with half a dozen commercial products designed specifically to exploit Craigslist. The sheer volume of these attacks have overwhelmed both their automated defenses and the community flagging system and are threatening to make entire categories unusable ... more  
   
May 12, 2008
Web 2.0 The Perfect Pitri Dish For Blight
Like a physical network, a single point of entry into a social network can enable the cyber attacker to turn loose their bots for phishing, webspam or to deliver a Malware payload. ... more  
   
Apr 15, 2008
YourName@Live.com – Crack Microsoft Captcha in 6 seconds
Have you noticed an increase in the amount of blight cluttering up your inbox lately? Computer world reported yesterday that the latest attach by bot masters show that they are now able to solve the Microsoft Live – Hotmail Captcha in 6 seconds using an infected computer. While ... more  
   

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