Random observations – Tony Finch

Happy new year! Cambridge has 10,000 extra enthusiastic, intelligent, (young, attractive) people again, and internal email volumes are up 50%. Summer’s having its last blast, as it usually does in October, making the place look its best for the new intake.

I was interested to hear a news item this morning about SOCA busting a load of 419ers. The odd thing that struck me is that they are calling the crime “mass marketing fraud” instead of “spam”. Also, I think that the SOCA web site looks like a Dr Who secret agency web site - for example, compare Geocomtex with SOCA.

One sad/amusing aspect of 419 spam is that it’s mostly sent manually, unlike the botnet-driven techno-spam mostly sent by Americans with the help of the Russian mafia. Bruce Schneier and Time Magazine write about the frightening sophistication of the Storm Worm.