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Oct 29 2009

I Feel Better and Look Great! Twitter Spam Attack

Category: tech opinion,toolsjmacofearth @ 12:17 pm

When one of my sr. mentors in social media sent me a tweet with the subject "I feel better and look great." and a very strange xxx.info URL I figured something was up.

Here's what I found.

feelbetter spam

Turns out this is a common version of Twitter spam. How they get access to these folks accounts I don't know. If I am unwittingly sending similar messages, I also don't know about it.

What I do know is not to trust any of these random links. If it looks like a shortened URL but it's not…

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/tweespam-2

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Oct 21 2009

WordPress Updates to 2.8.5 – The Hardening Release

Category: tech opinion,tech reviewsjmacofearth @ 10:18 am

If you've had suspisious downtime on your blog, or huge spikes in traffic during odd times of the night it might be worthwhile to go ahead and update your WordPress to 2.8.5

Screen shot 2009-10-21 at 10.06.47 AM

From the WordPress blog here are the highlights of the update.

  • A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
  • Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
  • Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
  • Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

We would recommend that all sites are upgraded to this new version of WordPress to ensure that you have the best available protection.

The update was quick and painless. I'll update you on the swarm attacks I've seen coming from China at odd hours.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/WordPress-2-8-5

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Oct 14 2009

Twitter Steps Up the Spammer Reporting with a New Action

Category: social media,tech opinion,toolsjmacofearth @ 4:10 pm

I have not been quite so aggressive with my Twitter spam management lately. But Twitter has added a new hammer in the wack-a-spammer tool box. Yesterday as I was deleting a few "teeth whitening" TweeSpammers I noticed an extra option under the pull-down menu.

Probably a lot of us were asking for this simple addition and it's finally come!

image of twitter block and report

Here is the post from yesterday on Twitter's blog called "Help us nail spammers."

I still love TwitBlock but now you can actually make a difference when you block these clowns.

If Biz and Co. would just allow us to see more than 20 followers/followees per page we'd have a real spam deleting frenzy on our hands. As it is, a great feature that makes it easier to voice your annoyance with the people and businesses that are filling our Tweetdecks and Seesmic Desktops with junk.

So, go fourth and report the spammers for spamming.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/twitter-reports

Catch all my Twitter posts here: The Twitter Way

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future posts

A Collaborative Space: WebEx, Go-To-Meeting, Skype, Basecamp (Teaming/Meeting Tools)
Twitter Problem: How do you find enough interesting people to follow? Then how do you keep up with them?
The Agile Mind: Construction, Evolution, Care, and Feeding Instructions for Mental Flexibility

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