It never fails…

I’m out having a nice time and my phone starts blowing up.

Emails are rolling in at about 2 a minute and I’m wondering what the hell is going on.

The emails are dumb and from people I don’t know.

Don’t worry, this chunk above is a screen grab. So the link isn’t live. Obviously don’t manually type it into your browser. I have no idea what the heck kind of viruses you’ll infect yourself with if you do.

Obviously they’re trying to interest the unsuspecting in a dating site. The site may actually be legitimate but the 50 emails that blasted into my inbox were all from different servers and appeared to be spoofed.

I ignored the first 5 or 10 emails. Then I got annoyed, so while I was drinking my JD, waiting for my meal I pulled out the ipad and started poking around. Pretty soon it was clear that these were spoofed emails. the problem was that I didn’t have all the tools on the ipad to really put a stop to the problem.

About the best I could do was just turn off the email account until I could get back to my computer. (Note to self, beef up iPad tool set.)

I fucking hate spammers.

I was surprised at how many European servers are apparently open enough to allow spoofing.

Some of these emails were originating on Latin American systems too. Bolivia comes to mind as one of the worst offenders.

Maybe I’m just cranky. I’ve thrown my back out and am becoming acquainted  with new definitions of pain. Or maybe it’s that I wanted nothing more than a quiet night spent in a social situation without having to think about technology…

This morning after figuring out the scoop behind these emails, I put the originating servers and a bunch of other questionable sites hitting my blogs from Russia on the deny list.

Don’t get me wrong I like Russia, and have had the pleasure of working with some great folks from there. I just don’t see why a site called prostituteks.ru needs to be linking to my blog 1000 times an hour but not reading any pages.

I’d like that kind of traffic on my blog but only if it was really people reading the site. This looks like some kind of bot trying to do something strange.

So I just spent an hour investigating the traffic and then configuring my deny IP list to block the strange stuff. I’ve also for the first time enabled a SPAM filter on my host. It’s a pity, yet another thing I have to manage and maintain simply because some people can’t restrain themselves from screwing around with other peoples stuff.

I suppose, that it takes a factionally small percentage of people to click on a link to make it worthwhile to a spammer, whether the spammer is looking to increase their bot army or scamming money out of the unsuspecting.

Bottom line, if you even think that there’s something weird about an email you’ve received, just delete it. If your friend really sent you something they’ll probably follow up with you about it.

Stuff like this does make me more likely to leave my phone at home, or turned off.

I miss the days when we weren’t so connected all the time.