If you have a Facebook account, and most of you do now a days, its getting tougher to to know if an email from them is legit.  Below is an example of such email that is NOt legit.  If this or any other type of email make it past your spam filters, there are way to find out if its legit before you go clicking on any links.  The first thing you might notice is the blank picture and the user name of Facebook Support.  That alone should make you aware that something is not right.

When it comes to social networking, the spammers and hackers are usually only one step ahead of the good guys.  Why is that?  And when you take out trash the night before garbage day, you can always tell that the animals got to it, by the mess they leave on the ground next to the can.   Same thing happens when you take down a spammer, a new one take its place.  Are Twitter users under attack?  Again?  Read on...

They're at it again!  The spammers from China are floating their junk accross the internet in hopes of someone seeing their advertisements.  We do understand that everyone does have a right to advertise, but this is illegal in the way they go about it.  They have now sucessfully gained access to hotmail's mail server and are pumping out millions of junk mails everyday.  The names and email address's they use are in the headers of the emails that are sent out.  Example below demonstrates it fairly well.  If you follow the header and url, you will notice that it is definately spam without a question on your mind.

AOL User Accounts Under Attack!

It seems that as of lately we have been seeing more and more spam E-Mail from AOL users.  These spam messages have been very subtle in that they only have a single url in the message.  These links mostly resolve to spyware and malware sites that try to infect your computer while visiting their site(s).  Do yourself a favor and immediately delete these messages as soon as you see them in your inbox.  Do not bother trying to track them down as they are actually going thru AOL's servers.  The only thing you can do, is if you happen to know this person's email, is to ask them to check their machine for virus's, spyware and malware.    If you are constantly receiving these spam messages, then send a raw copy with the header to abuse@aol.com.  Hopefully they (AOL) will get the message to tighten their filters.

Facebook users under attack?  It would appear that the three million users that Facebook has under its skin, are serpentinely being duped into clicking on the link found in an email being sent to them.  In this mass mailing, users are asked to update their account information before they are allowed to login, by clicking on the link provided in the email. 

If your interested in learning how to take down a spammer, read on.  The information that will be provided in this article will only get you started.  Over the years we have had several people ask us to help them deal with a spammer or or bot master.  Most of what we do is investigative work.  By that we mean actually pulling apart the emails or decompiling the bots that we catch.  Granted decompiling is a job that most users cannot do themselves, but the pulling apart emails, you can.

First off, you need to copy your entire spam email message over to plain text file.  An example in how to do this using Microsoft Outlook Express.  The easiest way to do this is to right click on message in the top window, above the preview window, and click on properties.  Then click on details.  After that, you can now see the full raw email with headers.  Right click in that window and select all and the right click again and select copy.  Now your ready to paste that over to a blank text file.  Open up windows explorer and either find a directory that is suitable or create one to place all your investigative work in. 

If your like everyone else, you not immune to the phishing tactics of the scammers or spammers that send you daily junk that tots messages about your banking services being updated.  We have decided to take one such phishing email apart and show you just how crafty these criminals really are.  We start off by receiving the spam message in our inbox like the one below.