International Business Times: The suspect, believed to be Dutchman Sven Olaf Kamphuis, has been arrested in Barcelona in relation to the cyber-attack on Spamhaus, which has been called the biggest in the history of the internet.
Authorities have only addressed the 35-year-old suspect as SK; however, IBTimes UK understands the suspect in custody is Sven Olaf Kamphuis who is affliiated with Stophaus, a group whose goal it is to shut down the anti-spam Spamhaus operation.
The distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which took place over several days towards the end of March, was called the largest in internet history and hyperbolically compared to a nuclear bomb going off, by the company helping defend against the attack.
More from the International Business Times here.
The attack took place after Spamhaus, which has drawn criticism for its blacklist program against internet hosts it believes to be sending spam, blacklisted the internet provider CyberBunker.
Wondering what kind of spam Google is killing right now? Glance through the company’s “fighting spam” section of its “How Search Works” site. These are actual sites recently taken out of Google’s search results. Feel like you’re missing anything by not getting to read this content?
Regarding the last post, we should crowdsource a ton of money together and send Zuckerberg a piece of “spam.” Just to see if he responds.
![dailydot:
Unraveling Markovian Parallax Denigrate, the Internet’s oldest and weirdest mystery
Spam. It’s the Internet’s most resilient parasite. Millions of messages pollute the Web’s pipes every day. Grow a monster penis. Lose 20 pounds. Help out an African prince. You know the drill.
A lot of it is garbled junk, sentences that read like a computer ingested the Oxford English Dictionary and vomited it back out. The results are bizarre and often unintentionally hilarious, a favorite subject of forwarded emails or, in the age of Twitter, cult celebrity. Spam account @horse_ebooks boasts 120,000 thousand followers thanks entirely to the accidental and absurdist poetry of its tweets.
But back in 1996, users of the proto-Web community Usenet got spammed with messages that reached an almost transcendent level of bizarre—a weirdness so precise it implied the influence of a very human intelligence. [more]
I read this piece all the way through, and it really reminded me of this magazine that no longer exists, but was a cover-to-cover read for me in the late ’90s: Internet Underground Magazine. It had some awesome design for the era, covered edgy topics, and even inspired some notable early memes. It was a great magazine because it seemed much more invested in the culture of the internet than its much-more-heralded competitor, Wired, did. But it closed in 1997, the victim of low ad sales and a change in ownership. It’s too bad. Like Suck.com, they missed out on the good part.
It just hit me that The Daily Dot is the modern equivalent of this magazine, which just made my respect for them go way up.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcvi13awvK1qiavcao1_400.jpg)
Unraveling Markovian Parallax Denigrate, the Internet’s oldest and weirdest mystery
Spam. It’s the Internet’s most resilient parasite. Millions of messages pollute the Web’s pipes every day. Grow a monster penis. Lose 20 pounds. Help out an African prince. You know the drill.
A lot of it is garbled junk, sentences that read like a computer ingested the Oxford English Dictionary and vomited it back out. The results are bizarre and often unintentionally hilarious, a favorite subject of forwarded emails or, in the age of Twitter, cult celebrity. Spam account @horse_ebooks boasts 120,000 thousand followers thanks entirely to the accidental and absurdist poetry of its tweets.
But back in 1996, users of the proto-Web community Usenet got spammed with messages that reached an almost transcendent level of bizarre—a weirdness so precise it implied the influence of a very human intelligence. [more]
I read this piece all the way through, and it really reminded me of this magazine that no longer exists, but was a cover-to-cover read for me in the late ’90s: Internet Underground Magazine. It had some awesome design for the era, covered edgy topics, and even inspired some notable early memes. It was a great magazine because it seemed much more invested in the culture of the internet than its much-more-heralded competitor, Wired, did. But it closed in 1997, the victim of low ad sales and a change in ownership. It’s too bad. Like Suck.com, they missed out on the good part.
It just hit me that The Daily Dot is the modern equivalent of this magazine, which just made my respect for them go way up.
In an effort to draw attention to the controversial YouTube video that has sparked major protests in the Middle East and may have led to the death of a U.S. ambassador, protesters have taken to a number of major news and celebrity Facebook pages to spam a variation of the above message — no matter on which post. The message here is from the Sky News page; other pages that have been hit include Reuters, The Washington Post, Barack Obama and Michael Phelps. The New York Times has more info on the controversial video that sparked these protests.
Redditors are collecting the blacklisted sites at a freshly minted subreddit, r/BannedDomains. The list so far includes at least five: BusinessWeek.com, Phys.org, ScienceDaily.com,TheAtlantic.com, and GlobalPost.
Redditors are prevented from submitting links to any of the above sites. Instead, they’re greeted with the following message: “this domain has been banned for spamming and/or cheating.”
There’s a bit of backstory here: Jared Keller, a social media editor for The Atlantic, got banned from Reddit a couple months back after heavy posting of Atlantic links, something the community-oriented network frowns upon, but is very tempting due to the high amount of traffic it drives. But why prevent people from even submitting links from such big sites? Well, a Reddit technical staffer Jason Harvey claims that these actions were taken as an absolute last resort.
UPDATE: The bans are temporary, according to Reddit staffer Erik “hueypriest” Martin. (ht Brian Ries)
Twitter spam legend touts greatest creation: Alexey Kouznetsov, the creator of majestic automated spam Twitter account @horse_ebooks, has now taken to promoting his creation on his design portfolio site, to the point where his firm’s logo is clearly inspired by the horse avatar the haiku-like Twitter account uses. (via The Atlantic Wire)
Spammers/phishing bots are always looking for new ways around the system, and this appears to be their latest one. Notice how it appears to have been submitted by my own account, despite the fake email address.
Do not, under any circumstances, click a link that leads to “tumblrlinks.com” - It is straight up malicious and will infect your computer if you don’t have virus protection. If you receive a submission like this, do not publish it. Shoot an email off to support@tumblr.com and let them know.
Hearing word of new kinds of Tumblr phishing attempts going around, including submissions from … yourself. This sounds quite scary. Be careful not to publish things like this when you don’t know the original source.
But seriously … I am not kidding.
I’m not watching all of...
Yahoo wants to buy Hulu now too. They’re going on an “I...
I’m moving back to New York in a few days. Unlike past...
OMG. I got so...
In this week’s Newsweek, a little...
Tumblr this morning. [h/t anne]
#@#$%!.tumblr.com
A high-profile e-mail message hits many. A couple of hours ago, we received the above message from the NYT, thinking it strange they were canceling our print subscription because we only have a digital one. We called the number, and were told the lines were busy, and offered a fax line to call — because, clearly, faxes are the most modern mode of communication these days. Then, just a few minutes ago, we saw this:
A spam message was sent broadly today with the subject “Important information regarding your subscription.”
— NYTCo Communications (@NYTimesComm) December 28, 2011
The email was not sent from The New York Times.
— NYTCo Communications (@NYTimesComm) December 28, 2011
Not good, huh? Well, according to Business Insider, the company in charge of these accounts was compromised earlier this year. Did you get this message?
» EDIT: Yuri Victor at The Washington Post says it’s likely the e-mail was a mistake, despite the company’s claims otherwise, and that the sender had the right to e-mail subscribers for the paper.
» Second edit: A New York Times reporter says that the Times made an error, and that the message wasn’t spam.
TechCrunch cited our posts in this article on Tumblr spam. (To which we say: Thanks, but wish it was under different circumstances.) From what we’ve heard, Tumblr is making a great push to work on this. We will say this much: We’ve seen much less spam in the past few weeks.
A follow-up to our Tumblr likespam post from last night: One of the things pointed out to us by one of our readers, Paulo Ordoveza, is that the blank profiles also have a payload, although it’s not obvious (we initially said the blank profiles were merely holding spots for future backlinking). We just did a check of the source code on one, and here’s what we found. Click with care, guys.
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herochan:
Easy solution to this problem, Tumblr: Let us see our sent messages so that we know that we’re hacked. Also it’d be nice as a way to can remember the messages we sent. *hint* One thing we’d like to note is that, while we don’t get many message spam pieces, we do find ourselves getting hundreds of likespam messages each week. We’ve noticed online that there are easy-to-exploit techniques with Tumblr likes for purposes of black hat SEO, and there has to be some sort of way to prevent these. Perhaps put a limit on the number of likes a day?
There’s no way a single person could like 100 posts in a single day.EDIT: Actually …(Source: herochan)