Gadzooked!

Manny emailed us this:

I’m having site problems yet again.
This is really starting to tick me off.
At about 9:30 pm last night the index.php file on my main blog domain Feverishthoughts.com was accessed repeatedly. I received a note from Hostgator shortly after this happened telling me about the problem and also saying that they’d shut down access to that directory.

At least this time round it’s a little better than when I was with Lunarpages. They’ve actually been able to tell me specifically what time the problem occurred and which domain was affected. They also only shut down that domain rather than my whole account. So at least I’ve got two blogs and two websites still functioning.
At this point - 3:30 a.m. I’ve been going back and forth with support. I think we’ve exchanged email three times now. The last one stated that they’d […]

Read the rest here.

Here’s a great post:

CRN | Breaking News | New Santy Variants Spread Beyond Google
“By Matt Villano, CRN
7:22 PM EST Tue. Dec. 28, 2004
The Santy worm, which appeared just before the Christmas holiday and uses search engines to spread, appears to be morphing into dangerous variants, virus experts warned Tuesday.
Much like the original, the Santy variations target Web bulletin boards designed with the open-source PHP scripting language. But a few of the mutated forms, such as Santy.E and Santy.C (also known as PhpInclude.Worm) focus on different parts of the PHP code by using multiple programming flaws to gain entry.
While incidents of the Santy worm have decreased dramatically since Google started blocking it, the new versions now use search engines such as AOL and Yahoo! to enable remote attackers to inject malicious code into PHP scripts.”
Read More:
http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/dailyarchives.jhtml?articleId=56200708

Read the rest here.

This is interesting:

U.S. World Leader in Spam Production
By Ed Raymond
NewsFactor Network
December 28, 2004 5:47PM
The United States remains the world’s top producer of spam, according to a list compiled by security Latest News about Security firm Sophos.
Sophos researchers report that the U.S. is responsible for exporting 42 percent of all mass e-mail attacks. South Korea is second, at 13 percent, followed by China (8 percent), Canada (6 percent) and Brazil (3 percent).
Despite signs of progress, such as the CAN-SPAM act, which was passed in January, efforts to address the problem in the U.S. are having little impact, Gregg Mastoras, senior security analyst at Sophos, told NewsFactor. “The problem is poor legislation and a lack of interest among law enforcement agencies to pursue spammers,” he said, noting that the U.S. topped the previous “Dirty Dozen” list issued early this year.
Spammers are taking advantage of high-speed Internet connections, Mastoras noted, with South Korea, […]

View the complete post here.

Chris sent us a link to this:

Danny Sullivan calls that people who, like Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis, think SEO is about spam to fuck off. Calling SEO spam is like saying email is spam, he suggests. In exasperation, he rattles off a list of previous posts that are to explain why SEO is not spam.
Is email spam?
Without automated filtering, email today would be unusable - because of the high volume of spam. If you turned off all automated filtering and manually deal with spam, you’d be very likely to abandon email and write it off as spam. But we are lucky - we have automated tools that make email a little more bearable for the time being.
That filtering is how email remains usable when 94% of all email is spam. To say email is spam today, is probably more than 95% correct. I grant the fact that less than 5% is spam, but clearly spam […]

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