May 2004 Archives

For the past two years I have had a closely guarded yahoo account that I've used for personal business. I gave it an esoteric name to thwart spammers from guessing the account. Imagine my surprise when a couple of weeks ago I opened my inbox and was greeted by a torrent of spam. Had yahoo sold my account? Had I been careless with the account and used it on a crooked site?

Whatever the case, it had suddenly been added to various spam lists and it was getting lots of attention from the evil spammers. The genie was out of the bottle and it was time to move on to another account. But a couple of days later, I found the culprit, and of all the suspects it was me who had leaked it out. While crafting a new page on a site I was working on, I had used that account to test the page's functionality. When the page went into production, the email somehow crossed-over to the production version and suddenly it was plastered all over the site. Within one day of posting the new page, it was harvested and paying tremendous dividends to the spammers.

Now everyone (myself included) knows that harvesting emails from Web pages is one of the most utilized techniques by spammers. But the speed at which the email was found and targeted even surprised me.

Moral of the story: if you like spam, don't bother submitting your email to various sites. Post it on a Web page for a day, and watch with amazement how the spammers swarm around it like vultures on a carcass. (With apologies for debasing vultures.)

It’s been over two years since Microsoft announced plans to make their products secure. Since then continuous stream of new and increasingly vicious viruses and worms have crawled their way into our computers and the trend doesn’t appear to be stopping (or even diminishing) any time soon.

Okay, so we knew all that talk about security was a lot of hot air and convoluted products such as Windows and Office can never truly be trustworthy. And we keep downloading new definitions for our gallant software defenders of viruses, spywares, and worms, in the hopes to shield ourselves from these mischiefs before they get a piece of us. It’s an incessant act of arm-wrestling with the clever hackers. Sometimes we win and other times we end up with a big “L” on our foreheads.

Having to juggle so many high-tech tools to protect myself from these miscreants has really started to tire me. So one day when I was checking the running tasks on my PC in the never-ending quest to find aliens, I realized that most of the tasks already look like aliens. Have you checked them out recently? (if you have Windows 2000 or XP press Ctrl-Shift-Esc and click on Processes). I mean what the hell are lsass or wisptis? Or for that matter crss or smss?

So how about it Microsoft? How about giving us a simple tool to understand what’s going on in our PC’s and what all these running tasks are? And while you are at it make the extra effort and give us a list of the bad (or at least mysterious) actors and verify that the good are authentic, not evil imposters.