News and Updates from Seven Sages

Seven Sages Online Profiles

scattered_online_profiles Being online can become a mess of online profiles and identities. Many profiles just pop up in online directories, without you knowing, sometimes with incorrect information.

Instead of trying to fight against the tidal wave of information about you or your business, try to steer the flow to one or two locations you have complete control of.

Take control of the scattered chaos.

New Wave Of Spam Seems Personal

I know, you bore of all this spam news. I do too. But, volume has increased yet again and I'm not just seeing it on my own servers, but also with Google App's and Postini.

Following the wave last month using the familiar looking 'Delivery Status Notification' (DSN) faking a bounced message, the spammers new technique appears to be using more familiar messages like Amazon order confirmations that look a lot like real Amazon orders. But it's getting a little scarier...

Spam as spoofed Email Policy Violation

These spammers are good, really. Not wholesome good, but good at what they do which is bad. They are using simple mind games to infect your computer. Like their recent vector of attack using DSN (Delivery Status Notification), they are preying on your fear of trouble. The lastest is "Email Policy Violation" coming from your host's mailer-daemon.

subject Email Policy Violation
The attached message contains content which violates our email policy. The message was not delivered.

Who wouldn't open it to see if it was an important message you sent?

Widespread Web Attack Infects Thousands

I received this email the other day:
"Brian, Have you heard about this? Have you scanned your server for this issue?"

Thanks. Yes, this is an old type of attack, at least for responsible server admins. (old being anything more than 6 months old) The problem comes from older scripts on the server.

Why Blogging Is Not Great For All Websites

As I was posting about the increase in spam, I noticed that my last post was over a month ago, talking about a server outage. That's not the kind of stuff that you want staying on the frontpage. :)

This is why I recommend NOT blogging to many website owners. It takes a lot of time to regularly update a website, unless that is your job, or you have a lot of free time managing your business.

Spam as Delivery Status Notification (Failure)

spam using DSN The newest wave of spam is quite clever. They are abusing the geek-sacred protocol of the DSN (Delivery Status Notification), adding an attached html file that is a script set to redirect to a distant website, maybe selling Viagra.

Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.
Delivery to the following recipients failed.

Look familiar? The standard, important notice that your email has bounced for some reason. Now it could be spam.