Re: Let's try to be productive...

Part III (and this will be the last for now):

What has changed recently in the spam-o-verse?

What is likely to change in the near future?

How does it affect any or all of Parts I & II?

For example:

1. ICANN is injecting over 1,000 new TLDs. Many have already been
added to the DNS root but aren't in general use yet such as .CEO,
.EMAIL, .HOUSE, etc.

  http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/delegated-strings

2. The net is moving to IPv6.

One example is this vastly expands the IP blacklisting and IP mobility
landscape.

3. Internationalization - ICANN is approving new scripts for TLDs and
host names (SLDs etc) such as Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic, etc. A lot of
work has gone on in recent years in this area but now these are going
live.

One obvious and well-discussed problem is homograph fraud.

For example using a Cyrillic code point (character) which looks like
an ASCII or Latin-1 'o' but can be delegated to a different owner such
as microsoft.com vs (replace the 'o's with Cyrillic 'o's). And
punycode and all that (does it help?)

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homograph_attack

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode

4. Social networking.

I seem to get more and more spam which uses a real name probably
scraped from my facebook friends list or similar (linkedin etc) in an
automated attempt to get me to open it.

      From: <[email protected]> Chris Lewis

that sort of thing.

I'm sure there are many issues arising from the ubiquity of social
networking and relating to or amplified in spam.

5. Smartphones and related -- tablets, wi-fi hotspots, mi-fi devices,
etc. all providing for more and more identity hiding, potential
botnets, as well as new targeting methods for users of these devices.

6. Changes in legislation and court decisions? Always a moving target.

Others?


-- 
        -Barry Shein

The World              | [email protected]           | http://www.TheWorld.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD        | Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada
Software Tool & Die    | Public Access Internet     | SINCE 1989     *oo*
-
This is the asrg mailing list.  To change your subscription settings, see
http://lists.services.net/cgi-bin/mj_wwwusr/domain=lists.gurus.org