One in six are replying to spam email offers, only rarely are they from Nils Ling

Spam up 300% over May

With story from Computerworld

Something happened on the Internet on June 22nd when Internet spam started an historic rise.  Since then spam from China and Russia has flooded websites with denial of service attacks and email.

NJN Network spam traffic is up 300% this month. It has become almost an hourly job to check the spam bucket for false positives. Our spam filter learns about new attacks and tries to tighten down the hatches to control the attacks. It can get overly aggressive and remove real reader comments. Some of the spam comments are getting inventive and almost sound legitimate.

The new approach is are long comments of gibberish on NJN Network that we initially thought were more invective from Nils Ling. On second glance we could see they were not 1,500 words long which is a dead give away. Nils likes to write long articles since he gets paid by the word.

We get more spam in email everyday. There is a steady stream of email scams with winnings from lotteries and long-lost relatives estates. More rich African high placed civil servants professing to need my help in money laundering occur every day.

Do people fall for these scams? According to IDG, one in six Canadians and Americans have replied to spam.

An Islander got an email claiming to be the estate of a long lost African relative with a million dollar inheritance. Against the advice of family and financial advisers, $40,000 was borrowed at high interest rates and sent to Nigeria to pay legal fees. No money of course was received in return.

An out of work Hollywood producer got involved with one of the Nigerian scams and was found dead at the bottom of a remote canyon. Scammers are not children: they are professional criminals who prey on our gullibility and greed.

About one in six consumers have at some time acted on a spam message, affirming the economic incentive for spammers to keep churning out millions of obnoxious pitches per day, according to a new survey.

Eight hundred consumers in the U.S. and Canada were asked about their computer security practices habits as well as awareness of current security issues.

Those who did admit to opening a spam message — which in and of itself could potentially harm their computer — said they were interested in a product or service or wanted to see what would happen when they opened it.

“It is this level of response that makes spamming a lot more attractive as a business because spam is much more likely to generate revenues at this response rate,” according to the survey. Computerworld

If the deal is “money for nothing” that means our money gets nothing back. Shields up!