Aehso’s Output

Facebook are cracking down hard on invite/application spam

Facebook finally tackle the problem of forced invites, a behavioral characteristic of some (bad) applications that repeatedly prompt users to invite other users after installing an application of performing some action within the application.

This combined with new controls for limiting the number of application notifications per user per day from applications should mean a lot less unsolicited spam from applications.

Long overdue, the continued abuse of both the invite and notification APIs has significantly devalued and reduced the utility of service. Many high-tech folks I’ve talked to recently have already given up on Facebook (retreating to Twitter) but perhaps if they continue improving the spam controls they might be tempted back.

It would seem the initial “grab as many users as possible” focus of some applications in order to boost valuations may now be coming to an end (thankfully).

100+ Comment Spams in one night.

My blog seems to have made it onto a spambot list so it’s time to install a captcha on the comments page I think.

Anyone out there with quick recommendations for any of the various Wordpress captcha/spam tool plugins?

Deleting Spam email on a *nix-based hosting server.

Recently I’ve been getting a couple of thousand spam messages in my inbox every day (mostly delivery failures for spam not-from-me). Rather than pull them all the way down to my laptop to delete them, I’m deleting them using Pine after ssh’ing into my hosting account. I’ve found a quick way to delete all messages in the INBOX almost automatically, rather than tagging the messages for deletion individualy.

Here’s what to do:

1. Enable aggregate command sets in Pine - go to Setup (’S') -> Config (’C') and tick the box for enable-aggregate-command-set.
2. Exit Setup (’E')
3. Open the folder list (’L') and open a folder e.g. INBOX.
4. Hit ‘;’ and you should see “SELECT CRITERIA :” in the status bar.
5. Hit ‘A’ to select all messages. The status bar should change to something like “[All XXX messages selected] and you should see an ‘X’ at the start of each entry in the message list.
6. Hit ‘A’ and you should see “APPLY COMMAND :” in the status bar.
7. Hit ‘D’ to Delete selected messages
8. Hit ‘X’ to Expunge the deleted messages

Or you could just edit the /var/spool/mail/<USER_NAME> file and delete everything in it using your favourite editor, as I subsequently remembered…

Spam, not from me.

Recently the volume of spam email hitting my (hosted) SMTP server has started to become a real nuisance. Incoming spam of the “buy viagra”, “amazing stock opportunity” and “exiled prince of ” variety are old school, and my hosting service’s SpamAsassin gateway flags a lot of that on the way in. That’s a good start, although I have no inclination to go through 500 of these a day looking for false negatives so I’d almost prefer if they were just deleted on receipt - if you’re listening Justin!

What is really starting to bug me are the 1000s of mailer daemon responses I’m getting every day from other SMTP servers for emails that were never sent through my relay. My hosting service uses rock solid BSDUnix so it’s safe as houses and isn’t being used to send these emails in the first place. It would appear that my domain seems to have made it onto some spambot’s “acceptable from” domain list and they are using it with impunity to try get through other spam filters, no doubt via compromised Windows hosts on broadband connections.

So I have to applaud the Spam Prevention Early Warning System’s recent action to blacklist all 700,000 of Telewest’s subscribers - compromised hosts on Telewest’s network were generating 90.4 million emails per day. I’m sure Telewest would debate the “on Telewest’s network” statement above since it was Telewests customers machines that were generating the emails but Telewest have to recognise they have a responsibility to the rest of the network to keep their house in order. This is the only way the spam filters can push back on the ISPs and it is a fair reaction, given the inconvenience imposed. I had a minor concern that my domain would be blacklisted but I’d imagine SPEWS do some more checking than just the From: address!

I’d be interesting to find a measurement of the load the global SMTP servers are under at the moment - they must be red hot, bouncing junk emails around 24×7. I expect to soon see ISPs identify and take compromised customers hosts offline from their networks - or else they’ll start advertising “premium” services on clean subnets, away from the unwashed masses that have all been blacklisted. (Why, oh, why do I expect the second to be the option they go for?)

All in all, unless they can put a stop to this soon, email will become an all but useless tool.