Sources of Spam (Research Project)

My e-mail servers are being hit about 1,000 times a week with robots trying various username and password combinations. This is quite normal given the uncontrolled criminality we see online nowadays. There are many that are clearly working their way through a dictionary of known combinations, such as default passwords...

Change Your Password

In 2010 I purchased items from an online store called Pooleys. It soon became apparent they had a security issue as I started to receive SPAM to the unique e-mail address assigned to them. Troy Hunt's amazing haveibeenpwned.com site also confirms the e-mail address is present in "Exploit.In" and "Collection...

Maintain a Good Security Posture

Malicious actors are sadly everywhere these days so maintaining a good security posture for servers is essential. Last night I was enjoying watching this Mexican IP - 187.205.205.34 (dsl-187-205-205-34-dyn.prod-infinitum.com.mx) "lifting the door handles". You'd hardly call three to four attempts per minute a brute force attack. Perhaps it was to...

AWS Cost Optimisation – Part 2

Following on from my post last year about the upcoming new charges in AWS for public IPv4 addresses, I've found more optimisations some might find useful.I like to have things all "under one roof" but often the financial savings are worth having a couple of different suppliers. AWS charge users...

AWS Cost Optimisation – Part 1

Will the upcoming new AWS charges help stop our addiction to IPv4 or is Amazon "taxing fresh air", that is, charging us for something that's hard to give up? Uptake of IPv6 has been painfully slow (see https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address-charge-public-ip-insights) but for a user of EC2 for personal services at home I will...

No more SPAM, ever!

For many years now I've wanted to tackle the problem of SPAM e-mail. The source is quite simple, it comes from phishing attacks where you enter your e-mail address into a fake site, or idiotic chain e-mails that contain countless addresses. Perhaps even more sinister, addresses are harvested from hacking...