Dick Logan » Security http://www.dicklogan.com Beer, Zombies, and Pizza Mon, 29 Mar 2010 18:06:27 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Dreamhost blocked all of my sites from Google and other search engines without my permission! http://www.dicklogan.com/dreamhost-blocked-all-my-sites-from-google-and-other-search-engines-without-permission/ http://www.dicklogan.com/dreamhost-blocked-all-my-sites-from-google-and-other-search-engines-without-permission/#comments Tue, 01 Jul 2008 06:50:44 +0000 admin http://www.dicklogan.com/?p=53
I am so pissed off right now. I’ve just found out that for months my blogs and other sites have been, without my permission, blocked by my own hosting company.

I seriously did not know what the heck was going on with my SERPS. I just figured that Google had just given up on me, discarded me for better content. If that had anything to do with me losing my pagerank then I am going to be terribly upset. This blog had a pagerank of 2, with a future pagerank of 5, and now it is zero. My other blog, a 4, now zero.

I am now definitely paranoid about if they’ll change it back. Does that mean I have to check all of my sites everyday in fear of my hosting company blocking me?

]]> http://www.dicklogan.com/dreamhost-blocked-all-my-sites-from-google-and-other-search-engines-without-permission/feed/ 0 Dr. Alex Smith of Nigeria http://www.dicklogan.com/alex-smith-of-nigeria/ http://www.dicklogan.com/alex-smith-of-nigeria/#comments Tue, 11 Sep 2007 15:56:49 +0000 admin http://www.dicklogan.com/alex-smith-of-nigeria/ I sold a laptop about six months back on Ebay and received one of those now common cookie-cutter spam messages asking me to stop the auction and sell it to someone in Nigeria. It seems that the good Dr. ALEX_SMITH is constantly buying laptops as gifts for his son. What a loving father…

O.K. well if you hadn’t known by now Dr. Alex Smith and all his other friends in Nigeria are scammers, frauds, crooks. They send you a message saying they’ll buy your laptop or camera or whatever for a price much higher than it’s actually worth and that they will pay you with Travelex funds. Then they send a phony email claiming to be Travelex and say that the money is on its way, complete with all the proper grammatical and spelling errors of course.

What takes me by surprise is the sheer number of people that actually fall for this fraud. I did a google of “Alex Smith Nigeria” and it took me to this discussion on ebay where everyone was talking about their experience with the Nigerian fellows. The real shocker is that many of the people sent out their laptop and are now scammed.

The worse thing about this is that Ebay is doing very little to stop Dr. Alex Smith’s message from getting to you. My girlfriend is now selling her laptop and what do you know, she gets the same ALEX_SMITH letter I received six months back. Why isn’t Ebay doing anything to stop this scam?

“Dr. Smith” sends the letters through Ebay’s messaging system, so why doesn’t Ebay filter the scam out? Ebay has the power to stop it and it seems like they’re doing nothing about it (like simple spam filtering) while people continue to fall victim under this scam.

]]> http://www.dicklogan.com/alex-smith-of-nigeria/feed/ 2 Pfizer Computers Spam The Internet With Viagra http://www.dicklogan.com/pfizer-computers-spam-the-internet-with-viagra/ http://www.dicklogan.com/pfizer-computers-spam-the-internet-with-viagra/#comments Fri, 07 Sep 2007 02:16:38 +0000 admin http://www.dicklogan.com/pfizer-computers-spam-the-internet-with-viagra/ A security company reports that hundreds of Pfizer computers within the company headquarters are spamming people’s inboxes with what else, viagra ads. Surprisingly Pfizer was not aware of this and claims to have no involvement in the spamming at all. Pfizer claims that hackers made their computers “zombie” computers, that is, computers that ran programs and sent out spam e-mail 24 hours a day without the network administrator’s knowledge. Drug and medicine spamming has become commonplace on the Internet because of the high sales commission earned when sold, but what makes this incident really unique is that the company’s computers were actually spamming a product they endorsed. The Pfizer company is dealing with the problem and looking into how the sabotage went unnoticed.

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