Well, look what the spam cat just dragged in – address book importing spam from Bebo.com. Why is it that these various social networking and other sites seem to simply consider the incidental spam attendant to address book importing (if they think about it at all) to be the cost of doing business – and, mind you, a cost sent COD to the people receiving the spam – when in fact it’s really an occupational hazard?

The Waledec botnet is using spam that claims that “Obama Quits”, explaining that “Barack Obama abandoned sinking ship” and that Obama doesn’t want any more to be president, in order to lure unsuspecting users to add their PCs to its group of zombied computers that it uses to do its dirty work. Other subject lines include “Who Will Be Our President Now?”, “End time for the USA”, and “Haven’t you heard latest news about our president-elect?”

Craig Hughes, who originally worked with the Spam Assassin team, and then went on to found GumStix, has discovered something interesting: much more spam is received during the nighttime hours than during the day. It’s a dramatic enough difference that Hughes says that he is convinced that ‘time of day received’ is a useful test to help determine whether something is spam.

In what seems like a good idea, the Peoples Email Network (Us Alone.com), claims that it “facilitates the process of sending email messages to Washington. In one place on our site you can send a message that is automatically submitted to the members of congress for where you live.” But the price you may pay is not worth it.

Authorities in the U.S. and New Zealand have coordinated to take down big time male enhancement and supplement spammers Lance Atkinson and Jody Smith, and their Target Pharmacy, Canadian Healthcare, Inet Ventures, Tango Pay, Click Fusion, and TwoBucks Trading spam operations. Lance Atkinson and Jody Smith were the muscle behind what Spamhaus has called “the biggest spam gang in the world,” and they recruited countless affiliates to send their spam through a spam affiliate program called Affking.

The next time somebody tells you that they don’t understand what the big deal is about spam, you can tell them this story. Thousands and thousands of Virgin Media customers went without email service for two full days after a spam run took down the email servers of their email service provider, Tucows.

Elsevier Publishing, the noted – and acclaimed – publisher of science and health books, has resorted to comment spamming on blogs, pushing their Elsevier Direct and Syngress divisions at ElsevierDirect.com.

“You have received a postcard from a family member!”, says the subject of one of the latest spam scams.

Whenever somebody starts ranting about “the damn lawyers”, of which I’m one, mind you, I’m fond of saying “you know, 95% of the lawyers out there… make the other 5% of us look really bad.” It’s tongue-in-cheek, of course, because people expect the message following the “…” to be that 95% of the lawyers are good, and it’s the small 5% that are the bad apples. And, of course, in reality usually the numbers do flow in that direction. But unfortunately, sometimes, it’s all to true. But even I, jaded though I am, was stunned when this little gem – this blog comment spam – advertising the firm of Gersowitz, Libo & Korek – landed on the Internet Patrol today.

Wonder why you get so much spam? Wonder how spammers can possibly make money sending spam? Wonder who on earth would ever actually buy stuff from spam? Well, wonder no more. Because here’s the answer.

Spamza.com is a website that recently went live, where you can enter someone’s – anyone’s – email address, and they will start getting instantly spammed by dozens of newsletters for which they did not sign up. If you’ve had a sudden increase in spam or suddenly found yourself signed up for a lot of mailing lists and newsletters that you didn’t request, Spamza may be why. You see, the Spamza site runs a script that takes their email address and then Spamza signs them up for those newsletters, without their permission.

Prolific spammer Eddie Davidson was arrested last year, and, in April was sentenced to twenty-one months at the Federal prison in Florence, Colorado – about 3 hours north of Denver. This past Sunday, Davidson escaped from Florence Prison, and is at large.

There has been a new rash of “Receipt for your payment to” eBay Paypal phishing spam which is intended to elicit a shock response causing the target to rush to log into their Paypal account to figure out why they are being charged hundreds to thousands of dollars for an eBay purchase which they know that they didn’t actually make.

Imagine our shock to discover that VoIP provider Vonage has turned to comment spamming. Oh, they will probably deny it, but what else can you call it when their Online Marketing Manager, Costas Kariolis, shows up at an article about Skype on the Internet Patrol, and posts a comment about the Vonage offerings, with an SEO-formatted link back to the Vonage site? and also posts the exact same comment to articles about Skype on other sites?

Reverend James Shea of Killdeer, ND, received an email from the White House, containing an invitation to meet Pope Benedict XVI during the Pope’s recent visit to the United States. So he did what most of us would do – sent it to the spam folder. Only, it wasn’t spam, it was a legitimate invitation. Oops.