add livejournal.com

It appears they have captcha on livejournal.com broken. It was a creeping start, but late last night they cranked up the subdomains coming my way. I have not reviewed their system. I'll take a look later.

tc

Filters working too well.

Since late last night my filters are capturing 90% of the spam. It is hard to believe. In any case, I expect them (the spammers) back by Sunday - late.

tc

geocities tumbles & china is abandoned

In what appears to be the biggest break through of the year for spammers, the geocities Captcha is broken. Broken to the extend that they have abandoned chinese domains, and are now using in-place -- geocities.

I have reviewed the Captcha they are using and it appears they could have the repair in hand by the end of the weekend. It is now Friday. The question is: Will they? This is a cat and mouse game, and one has to wonder what Yahoo is up to. (Yahoo being the owner of geocities.)

In any case, it appears the spammers are on the run and will likely try a new tactic within three (3) weeks.

tc

Geocities falls

It appears that the Captcha has been broken at geocities and groups.yahoo as they been flooding my inbox with those URLs.

Not an original scam, but bold

This scam, based on the infamous Nigerian scam, is worth noting. Stated in the email as follows:

I have been waiting for you to contact me for your Bank Draft worth US$600,000.00 SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND U.S DOLLARS), being compensation fund for 150 scam victims, but I did not hear from you all this while.

Yes, I saved a copy of this beauty.

tc

Rate blip

This may be nothing, but between 4pm and 6pm local time, the local delivery rate dropped. Whether this was a gateway issue, or a system reset, or an anomaly is difficult to way, but I have seen these blips before.

To give it some numbers the deliveries were:
448 - 418 - 164 - 366 - 514
number before that are unavailable, and numbers after that have not arrived.

tc

Chinese Domains at 20%

Currently, spammers are sending a majority of the payload in chinese domains. I estimate only about 10%, or so, being ".com". Of the 50k or so domains I have recorded, 12k are chinese. In addition, it appears the spammers may have thought that ".com" names require real english words. But for chinese domains, it appears that random letters will do just fine.

tc