Spam from Microsoft Live
By maurizio | October 7, 2007
Today I’m too lazy to check if I’m right or wrong so let me know if I am wrong. Let me know if I’m right too…I like feedback. :-)
Anyway the thing is that I’ve received an email from “Microsoft”
We received your request to reset your Windows Live password
Uhm. very suspect. A txt email from Microsoft? Why not the usual superbig html page? Let’s go on..
If you didn’t request that your password be reset, please follow the instructions below to cancel your request.
Phishing alert N.1! Why Microsoft should create a sequence of operations for something so dumb? If I haven’t requested it, just forget it after a while as 99.999% of other sites does. Ok, Microsoft is able to create braindead things to do, but not this time IMHO.
IMPORTANT: Because fraudulent (“phishing”) e-mail often uses misleading links, Microsoft recommends that you do not click links in e-mail, but instead copy and paste them into your browsers, as described above.
Nice suggestion! That could solve half of the phishing problem. Most of the phishing attempt can be solved this way because the “trick” is inside the mail, but you can have “phishing tricks” on the site too. (Check my post about Paypal spam to see what’s a “phishing email trick”). The suggestion is useless for this email because it’s plain and simple text without any kind of html or javascript on it.
Copy the following web address:
https://accountservices.msn.com/EmailPage.srf?emailid=50ace34168ea8a4
This is the tricky part. I do not use Live a lot (I’m not even sure if I’m registered with the email I’ve received the spam on) but I can imagine that the problem lies on the way Microsoft want to use soo much their users.
Microsoft is probably offering the possibility to let users send email with Urls on it. I don’t want to check, but if you have an account on Live, just look for an option that allow you to send an email with the link of the page you are watching.
That option will probably create a long link with a unreadable url starting with a Microsoft’ server as the link I’ve copied above.
That’s it! You have a link for a Microsoft service with a Microsoft url. Of course the page they link are just copies of the real Microsoft pages. In fact if you dare to open them, you’ll see the link below (“Privacy”, etc.) that point to some strange urls, always on live. The thing is that those pages are on Users’ Accounts! Look at them.
I don’t think I’m wrong but I’d like to hear if other people got the same emails.
Topics: Ramblings | 7 Comments »
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Yahoo’s spam from Malaysia
By maurizio | October 5, 2007
Today I received an email from a guy from Malaysia. It’s the always the same story about a deceased man and a lawyer and some amount of money (5.7M$). The strange thing is that I’ve received it from Yahoo (on my Gmail account).
I’m not an expert on Spam, but I thought that at least some email headers are not forgeable (it means that you can’t fake them). If you can’t fake them, then someone is using yahoo to spam.
Received: from [68.142.237.89] by n10.bullet.re3.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 05 Oct 2007 10:52:24 -0000
Received: from [216.252.122.219] by t5.bullet.re3.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 05 Oct 2007 10:52:24 -0000
Received: from [69.147.84.100] by t4.bullet.sp1.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 05 Oct 2007 10:52:24 -0000
Received: from [127.0.0.1] by omp201.mail.sp1.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 05 Oct 2007 10:52:24 -0000
Topics: Ramblings | 1 Comment »
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John Chow Vs. Shoemoney
By maurizio | October 4, 2007
Here is again another easy piece of code.
You can add it to your blog if you wish. You just have to add a script pointing to blog.nafurai.com/other/sjc.php. It’s not php code. it’s just a piece of javascript that create a small table. I get my data from Feedburner, but unfortunately I don’t have all JohnChow’s data because he’s not using Feedburner PRO. If you have old data for his feed (circulation and hits) please let me know.
You can see the table on my right bar. I know it’s a bit ugly, but since almost no one is commenting on my blog, I just figure that no once cares. :(
If you care and you don’t like it let me know and I’ll ad some border to it.
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Feedburner Top List
By maurizio | October 4, 2007
New version of my stats page with the Feedburner Top 100 list.
595710 http://techcrunch.com
230887 http://www.elise.com/recipes
177958 http://FreeiTunesSongs.blogspot.com
137295 http://itotd.com/
128087 http://www.mashable.com
As you can see from the list, this time there isn’t any cheater..at least not in the top 10. I am surely missing some blog because I still use a dumb way to check if it’s a feedburner user. In the next weeks I’m planning to use another trick. Right now I have only 13000 Feedburner users out of more than 381000 blogs.
I notice JohnChow and Shoemoney on the list..I think I’ll track their effort since they are having a RSS competition.
Since JC is giving away prizes to have more subscribers, I have to post his feed here to be part of his competition. I’m adding Shoemoney RSS feed too (JC forgot to mention to not link it. :D )
John Chow RSS Feed
Shoemoney RSS Feed
Stay tuned for a chart of their efforts..
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