Teen Shows up Government Spam Filter for Blunt Instrument

So the Social Development Ministry is blocking any emails with the word ‘teen’ from getting through.

From the point of view of a mail administrator it might seem reasonable to block the word ‘teen’. After all it is commonly associated with pornography.  In fact I bet the views for this post will be the highest I’ve seen for a while simply because it contains the words ‘teen’ and ‘pornography’ together on the same page.

Of course blocking the word teen from the in-boxes of a government organisation which oversees the welfare of young people is ridiculous and shows that little or no risk assessment was applied.  Yes the odd bit of spam might get through if the word is whitelisted, but surely even government employees are capable of exercising a little judgment and deleting any offending emails.  Isn’t that better than potentially serious email being blocked?

Imagine if banks started blocking ‘mortgage’ or ‘withdrawal’.  Or health care providers blocked ‘pill’ or ‘medication’.

This is a clear cut case of applying the wrong controls, technology rather than people.

The International Network of Spam Targets

Steve Riley is a senior security strategist in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group.  I read his blog occasionally.  His latest post is nothing too heavy, just reflecting on the ridiculousness of the latest serving of spam in his inbox.  He puts it eloquently when he says:

I guess enough people are lured by cheap mortgages for their penis extensions that the spammers rake in enough money to cover their costs…

Anyway the post made me take a look at what spam I had in my inbox today, and what do you know? I had some of the exact same spam as Steve.  One of his was titled ‘PayPal – Email Handling Opinion Needed’. The sender was IPv6@microsoft.com which is apparently an internal discussion group at Microsoft. So a technical discussion group was talking about email handling…

My version of the same email however was from myself. I’m pretty sure I hadn’t sought my own opinion on PayPal email handling – I don’t even use PayPal.

Regardless, what this little exercise did for me was make me feel like part of one big worldwide network. Yes a network of targets for spammers, but hey at least I’m a good guy and not a bad guy!

By the way – the PayPal spam was actually trying to get you to link to the site ordeep.com which was selling, wait for it……. male enhancement pills.

Lawyer uses Facebook to get keys to house.

In another example of convergence on social networking sites, an Australian couple are to receive, via Facebook, a legally binding notice that they are to hand over the keys to their home to their mortgage lender because they defaulted on their loan payments.

PWNED! via Facebook

Apparently such notices have been served via text message and email, but this is the first time it’s been tried via Facebook.  The lawyer for the mortgage lender claims he had tried other avenues to contact the couple and resorted to using details provided on the loan application form to hunt them down on Facebook.  He was able to find them because they had not used the security options to keep their pages private.

Kudos to the judge who has ruled that Facebook can be used to serve the notice as he also imposed the restriction that the lawyer must use the private mail system in Facebook rather than posting a comment on the womans’s Facebook wall.  Clearly this judge is a rare find as someone in the judiciary who at least has an inkling of how social networking (or any web 2.0 system) works.

I might be wrong here, but I had a quick look at the settings on Facebook and couldn’t see a way to set up spam filters on the internal message system.  Given the tactics of some of the latest malware to send spam amongst friend networks on the bigger social sites, I don’t think it will be long before we see such filtering options become available.  On my Hotmail account I have a number of filters set up to block spam containing words such as ‘viagra’, ‘sex’, ‘enlargement’, ‘porn’ and ‘mortgage’.

If I had such filters set up on Facebook, would a message such as the lawyer above was trying to send, containing the word ‘mortgage’ be blocked? And could I therefore honestly deny receiving the notice?

This of course may already have happened in other cases where notices have been served via regular email.

Of course I will never read one of these in my email inbox anyway, because I’m always being told email messages purporting to be from my bank are scams.