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Olympic Spam Reaching Olympian Proportions
David Utter
Staff Writer
2008-07-25
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A couple of weeks ahead of the Beijing Olympics, spammers continue to rollout millions of messages with an Olympic theme.
 | | Olympic Spam Reaching Olympian Proportions |  |
Major topical events always gather their share of spammers trying to capitalize on them in their junk mailings. The huge spectacle of the Olympics is no exception.
Security vendor Secure Computing said they have seen a huge spike in this spam. In the past week, as many as 360 million showed up online.
Their common theme of Olympic news led to their containing subject lines like "President Bush calls for Olympic boycott," "China issues anti-terror guide for Olympic games," and "Beijing Olympics cancelled, moved to Atlanta."
Security vendor Symantec said in its July 2008 State of Spam report that spammers tried in June to entice people with an Olympic lottery scheme.
That junk mail asked for personal information via email, in order to process the purported winner's prize. Naturally there is no Olympic lottery, only a conduit to hand over private details to criminals.
CMU professor Randy Pausch dies at 47: The computer professor whose Last Lecture became a viral wonder of inspiration lost his battle with pancreatic cancer. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said Pausch died in Virginia early on July 25th.
"The family requests that donations on his behalf be directed to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, 2141 Rosecrans Ave., Suite 7000, El Segundo, Calif. 90245, or to Carnegie Mellon's Randy Pausch Memorial Fund, which primarily supports the university's continued work on the Alice project," the report said.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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