[Infowarrior] - More on.... IE7 Software to Spot 'Phishers' Irks Small Biz Concerns

[Richard Forno]

c/o RSK.


------ Forwarded Message

Or, a small rant and a possibly-useful technical observation. ;-)

What's appalling is that there are STILL people incredibly stupid
enough to use IE. [1]   Have they not been paying attention?  Do
they not grasp that using IE is the equivalent of pasting a
sign reading "infect my computer, use it as part of a botnet,
steal my identity, violate my privacy" sign on their backs?

WHAP WHAP WHAP goes the clue-by-four over their pointy little heads.

The solution to this isn't to whine about whatever ridiculous thing
that M$ has done to IE this time.  It's to stop using IE.


[1] I've been using passive OS fingerprinting via OpenBSD's "p0f" for
several years now on my mail servers.  If I slice out the network space
known to be owned and operated by spammers, i.e. their Linux server
farms in China (where are quite easy to block outright), and look at
all the rest of the incoming spam, then almost without exception, ALL
spam comes from hijacked Windows boxes.  (e.g. out of the last ~500,000
connecting and spam-emitting hosts seen here and not accounted for by
reference to known-spammer-run-networks, it looks like 8 probably
weren't running Windows.)

Thus..."the spam problem" has become almost euqal to "the Microsoft
OS insecurity problem".  See also:

 http://www.secureworks.com/analysis/spamthru-stats/

for an interesting graph.