Technology Courses At CityU of Seattle

At Gnomedex one of the major speakers was one of the original forum, blog, and other systems spammers in the world. While he has gone into Search Engine Optimization, he still uses many of the techniques he started with to help companies increase their placement in search engines. He is also very successful at it. Spam is a universal bane on the internet but it is also extremely profitable. While we have tried to get people to stop clicking on spam, spam has evolved along with the technologies that we use to stop spam.

Spammers are not going to give up, there is no reason to, and they make money from it. What we need to understand in computer science is that no system is 100% perfect, and people like him are looking for holes that they can latch onto. This is not a personal attack against the blog/web site owner, rather this is about money. It is not cyber crime, it is not cyber terrorism, it is not even cyber warfare, his style of spam is about pushing on the consumer the latest venue to purchase pills. Not to say that there are not spammers out there that are heavily involved in cyber crime, any good malware author worth their salt is trying to build botnets that they can rent out for anything they want to do including cyber warfare. If you look at how twitter and Facebook were almost taken down due to a DDOS attack to silence one person, then you realize just how easy this one is.

We need to think like this because the bad guy is thinking like this. No one in cyber warfare or cyber crime is thinking “oh I’ll just pass this one by”. They are actively thinking of interesting ways of getting something to do what they want it to do, not what the programmer wanted it to do. Security in programming (much like the discussion of the 2007 Pligg Attack), and other attacks against information infrastructures like Wordpress, Typepad, Digg, Twitter, and other networks, these are all viable targets. The more we as security engineers and practitioners can think like this the better off we will be. The goal is to think evil but act good, act for the good and fill in those holes in code and in web sites. You want to read this article to get more information on the speech I heard on Friday.

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