August 26th, 2010 by Stargazer
WP-BlackCheck Update
As WordPress changed a few details in their API, I updated the WP-BlackCheck Plugin to reflect those. The current Version is now 1.5 which is available on wordpress.org
Tags: blog, plugin, spam, wordpress, wp-blackcheck
Posted in: IT Related stuff | 2 Comments »
Killing Spam
August 6th, 2010 by Stargazer
Let’s have a look at one of my favorite topics today: E-Mail Spamfilters. They are a quite helpful tool for keeping the inbox clean as long as you don’t fully trust their work. I know this sounds paradox, but what happens if they eat a message you wanted to keep? What if they don’t kill a spam mail for you?
Posted in: IT Related stuff | No Comments »
Untrained Spamfilter Blues
April 6th, 2010 by Stargazer
I migrated my mailserver a few hours ago to a complete new system to have a better groupware solution and less noise. But honestly, I am already missing the old patchwork system as its spamfilter was working very very very… efficient. As the new anti spam system didn’t have that much training, the detection rate is simply crap.
Spam is different. Your spam differs from mine. So the filter needs some time to get used to the messages and learn. The result should improve over time quite well.
Tags: mailserver, mail, spam
Posted in: IT Related stuff | No Comments »
Is WP-Blackcheck effective?
January 27th, 2010 by Stargazer
That was the basic question of the research I did during the last days, greping through the logs to find some info to get an impression of the blacklists effect. Now I know, it isn’t in vain. If we’d say we have 10000 requests we would get about:
- 9000 Spam Comments
- 1000 Ham Comments
- 100 Reports
Tags: blog, spam, wp-blackcheck
Posted in: Malware | No Comments »
Spam or Virus?
October 15th, 2009 by Stargazer
Today I had one of those typical spam malware in my mailbox, showing that Microsoft Outlook is one of the most widely used mail programs, being attacked all the time:
Microsoft Outlook Notification for the xxxx@xxxx.xx
Support [xxxx@xxxx.xx]
Sent :Thu 15/10/2009 06:38
To xxxx@xxxx.xx
Attachment install.zip (12kb)
You have (6) New Message from Outlook Microsoft
- Please re-configure your Microsoft Outlook Again.
- Download attached setup file and install.
True, this mail usually is a bad one, but nevertheless it made me grin due to the fact that I was using Thunderbird and KMail for managing my personal mail flood. So I checked the mail headers and found out that it came from a spamhost somewhere in the net.
Tags: Malware, spam, virus, windows
Posted in: Malware | No Comments »
The blacklist again…
August 12th, 2009 by Stargazer
It is wonderful if you know that a plan is working – especially if it’s your own one. Regarding the WP-Blackcheck plugin, it might even fot more here as I was observing less and less spam comments into the moderation queues of the sites I manage. To get some numbers I tried to deactivate a number of other anti spam plug ins and compared the numbers.
Tags: blog, plugin, spam, wordpress, wp-blackcheck
Posted in: Malware | No Comments »
Is it me John Wayne, is it you?
August 6th, 2009 by Stargazer
Some spammers can really drive you mad – especially if they are doing things like that. Looking at my mailserver logs I have found some strange IP addresses like 123.27.3.81, 222.252.80.188 or 123.16.13.188 which are resolving to ‘localhost’ regarding to their reverse DNS. In other words, a bad configured mailserver thinks that the mail comes from itself and offers special treatment to that messages – which usually means they bypass the spamfilter. The problem can be solved quite simple by using ’127.0.0.1′ instead of ‘localhost’ in your configuration files and you got green conditions again.
Posted in: Malware | 2 Comments »