In a surprise finding, the New Jersey based anit-malware company Comodo’s Threat Research Labs found that Michigan is one of the leading sources of unsolicited e-mail on the Internet. Unsolicited bulk email is also known as “SPAM.” SPAM is usually considered junk e-mail. The Great Lake state ranked third behind California and New York in spewing out the most SPAM.
The Comodo researchers examined all the emails Comodo filtered for customers in the second half of 2015, specifically looking at SPAM. In doing their research, they conducted an IP address analysis of the millions of pieces of email SPAM that came into the Threat Research Labs from their customers.
Through this analysis, researchers have been able to break down SPAM by state and find where it originated from. IP addresses from California (24.37%) and New York (22.36%) sent nearly half of the spam Comodo filtered, while Utah (19.42%), Michigan (10.79%), and New Jersey (3.68%) IP addresses rounded out the top five states.
Fatih Orhan, Director of Technology and lead at the Comodo Threat Research Labs said:
California and New York were not really surprising in terms of the top two states because of population and technology innovation taking place in those geographies — but finding Utah and Michigan in the top five was somewhat shocking
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I have followed the battle against SPAM since 2009. Here are some tips to help protect yourself from SPAM
- Keep your Junk E-mail Filter updated
Updates are available at Downloads on Office Online. Under Office Update, click Check for Updates.
- Block images in HTML messages that spammers use as Web beacons
By default, Outlook is set to block automatic picture downloads. To verify your settings are, on the Tools menu, click Options. Click the Security tab, and then click Change Automatic Download Settings. Verify that the Don’t download pictures or other content automatically in HTML e-mail check box is selected.
- Watch out for checkboxes that are already selected
When you buy things online, companies sometimes add a check box (already selected!) to indicate that it is fine to sell or give your e-mail address to other businesses. Clear the check box so that your e-mail address won’t be shared.
- DO NOT sign up for commercial mailing lists.
- DO NOT reply to email or unsubscribe from a mailing list that you did not explicitly sign up for.
- Configure your email client to send and receive emails in Plain Text or Rich Text Format.
For Microsoft Outlook go to: Tools > Options… and click the Mail Format Tab. Change your Message format to Text Click OK.
- Report SPAM that is fraudulent – offering products that don’t work or don’t exist, pyramid schemes, and so on – can be sent to the US Federal Trade Commission at uce@ftc.gov.
- Report SPAM that promotes stocks can be sent to the US Securities and Exchange Commission at enforcement@sec.gov.
Lest we forget, this is the same Comodo that was responsible for releasing 9 fraudulent certificates onto the Internet which, Sophos says impacted the trusted root authority on all default Windows and OS X installations, as well as high-profile websites like:
• mail.google.com
• www.google.com
• login.yahoo.com (3 certificates)
• login.skype.com
• addons.mozilla.org
Sophos states that this breach allowed an attacker to easily masquerade a malicious website as one of the above with the HTTPS authentication succeeding.
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
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