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Virus and Phishing Levels


Farelf

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This will be no surprise to those exposed to the full force of the spam torrent but ...('scuse their 'promotion' but it's their release)

New York and London – 27 September 2007 – MessageLabs, the leading provider of integrated messaging and web security services to businesses worldwide, today announced the results of its MessageLabs Intelligence Report for September and 3rd quarter of 2007. The new data reveals that virus and phishing levels have significantly increased, reaching levels not seen since early 2006. In addition, MessageLabs exposes a second wave of highly targeted C-level and senior management email attacks with increased sophistication and outreach.
The full release C-level defined

Coincidentally or otherwise, I'm just now running into some really heavy (and dumb) filtering within some odd corners of corporate America. I'd be resorting to the carrier pigeons but with the price of grain ... oh well, there's always fax, though recipients tend to whine at anything over 20 pages. Come to think of it the pigeons wouldn't enjoy such loads either. These things shall pass ...

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This will be no surprise to those exposed to the full force of the spam torrent but ...('scuse their 'promotion' but it's their release)The full release

Now, aren't these the people who can't figure out how to keep themselves from looking like spam sources rather than spam filterers? (and, is "filterer" even a word?)

Anyhow, I think I've seen this particular bit of the PR before, maybe from them, but I have no idea what it means:

The Agriculture sector is still ranked the most spammed sector with 67.8 percent, marking a slight increase of 0.9 percent from the previous month. Over the previous quarter this marks a continued increase of 7.36 percent.

Does this mean that farmers get more spam than anybody else? Any farmers out there?

-- rick

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Just make sure that you maintain RFC compliance: RFC1149 & RFC2549. ;)
Haw ... I had quite forgotten about those (think it was just RFC1149 last time someone - probably Jeff G - raised it for our edification). :lol: I have some reading to do.
Now, aren't these the people who can't figure out how to keep themselves from looking like spam sources rather than spam filterers? (and, is "filterer" even a word?)
Indeed ... though there may have been other priorities in play leading to that. Still, their problem, not ours. And "filterer" certainly ought to be a word - the "erer" ending only *looks* a little contrived but compare to the synonym "sifter". :D
...I think I've seen this particular bit of the PR before, maybe from them, have no idea what it means:
The Agriculture sector is still ranked the most spammed sector with 67.8 percent, marking a slight increase of 0.9 percent from the previous month. Over the previous quarter this marks a continued increase of 7.36 percent.
Does this mean that farmers get more spam than anybody else?...
Yes that's what it means, however they are maybe drawing ahead of the rest of the populace at at decelerating rate which reduces the element of alarm somewhat and might be impolitic for their purpose to show too clearly. I think it conveys exactly:

[tcol]
spam proportion [/tcol] Increase
Month Qtr
Last Qtr 0.602
Last month 0.669
Now 0.678 0.009 0.07361
1(0.0245/month)

I would put it all down to those long isolated winter nights indoors with inadequate malware protection myself. What a pity the traditional ways of whiling away the hours have evidently declined. Maybe central heating has contributed too. :D

[edit - corrected 0.076 to 0.0736 & resultant monthly figure]

[2nd edit - removed line breaks between TROWs to lose preceding white space. Looks fine in Mozilla, IE7 & Ffx]

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  • 2 weeks later...
Coincidentally or otherwise, I'm just now running into some really heavy (and dumb) filtering within some odd corners of corporate America.
Just an update - the particular problem child was whitelisting me. Unfortunately, they were, in addition to all else, running an "inappropriate language" filter before the whitelist. It just so happens the message I particularly wanted to get through contained an abbreviation of "cumulative".

There's always an explanation, however unexpected the answer might be. Washing my mouth out now. :D

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Just an update - the particular problem child was whitelisting me. Unfortunately, they were, in addition to all else, running an "inappropriate language" filter before the whitelist. It just so happens the message I particularly wanted to get through contained an abbreviation of "cumulative".

There's always an explanation, however unexpected the answer might be. Washing my mouth out now. :D

I hope they don't have any clients in Sc**thorpe. As in this case, the explanation is almost always stupidity.

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I hope they don't have any clients in Sc**thorpe. ...
:lol: Yes, well, time was when Chief Quimby would have been in for a ton of grief as well but if the lexicon of naughtiness included every word ever used for the female pudendum (even just in English) I have a feeling the allowable vocabulary would be appreciably diminished. A nanny filter for a workplace (in addition to comprehensive spam filtering) is, on the face of it, an absurdity. Let alone subverting the whitelist through its application. If the problem is mostly internal (the nearest thing to making sense) then there are other, more effective, remedies mandated.
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:lol: Yes, well, time was when Chief Quimby would have been in for a ton of grief as well but if the lexicon of naughtiness included every word ever used for the female pudendum (even just in English) I have a feeling the allowable vocabulary would be appreciably diminished. A nanny filter for a workplace (in addition to comprehensive spam filtering) is, on the face of it, an absurdity. Let alone subverting the whitelist through its application. If the problem is mostly internal (the nearest thing to making sense) then there are other, more effective, remedies mandated.

Sounds like thse folks need an introduction to regular expressions, particularly the "\b" token.

Reminds me of bit I heard on a TV show featuring the late Marty Feldman (seen on German TV of all places) in which he played a harrassed TV announcer on a network that "bleeped" bad words -- he found himself unable to utter such names as "Alfred Hitch****", "P**** O'****e", "**** Burton", and "Gregory ****"

Some years ago we got a net-nanny on our company's net proxy; one guy I work with got a warning for trying to load Fox News (and no, this was not political, it was in pre-Bill-O days). A manager I work with told me that the actual reason why companies do this kind of thing is not to regulate the moral tone of their premises, but (as with much else today) simply to keep the lawyers away from the door -- if they are hit with a "hostile workplace" suit or similar, they are able to say that they exercised due diligence to prevent employees from accessing offensive materials (whether or not the measures were logical or effective).

-- rick

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:lol: Thanks Rick - ah yes, the googly-eyed Marty Feldman. These days he would probably be hit with a writ for unlicensed use of the Google trademark or whatever.

... A manager I work with told me that the actual reason why companies do this kind of thing is not to regulate the moral tone of their premises, but (as with much else today) simply to keep the lawyers away from the door -- if they are hit with a "hostile workplace" suit or similar, they are able to say that they exercised due diligence to prevent employees from accessing offensive materials (whether or not the measures were logical or effective)
Each and every employee deserves and has the right to protection. But from themselves? No catastrophe eludes the sufficiently-talented fool, hence the ability of lawyers to permeate any transaction - there is conceptually no base level of personal responsibility. At the same time it is all quite worthless to the purported proper purpose of personal protection [Warning: don't try repeating that without a dry mouth.] Where was the 'hostile workplace' protection for Julie Amero?

It's all extraordinarily counter-productive. And, doubtless, contributory to greenhouse gas emissions. Feeding lawyers to the sharks doesn't work either - we tried that here (years ago) and it was the shark that ran.

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