A new hack has Wordpress hackers disabling all of your Wordpress plugins (including, you see, Akismet or any other anti-spam comment spam stopper plugin), which then allows them to inject comment spam into your blog at will. So if you suddenly find yourself getting an enormous amount of comment spam all at once, or if you suddenly find your blog pages coming up blank (because with your plugins disabled, that often can be the case) you may be the victim of this latest plugin-disabling comment spam hack.

Recently I got a notice that someone of whom I’d never heard was following me on Twitter. Now, this isn’t all that unusual – it happens to me at least once or twice a day. But when I checked this person’s profile, it said they were following 32,244 people! Yes, I’d run into a new breed of spammer – pushing a new breed of Twitter spam.

Chinese cellular providers China Mobile and China Unicom together have over 500 million active cell phone accounts, and recently more than 200 million of these users received a stream of unwanted and unwelcome advertisements as text messages – cell phone spam. Both cell phone providers and the spammers received a stern talking to from the Deputy Head of China’s State Council Office for Rectifying Malpractice (yes, really).

People across the country are reporting telephone calls coming from the numbers (623) 238-6228 and (408) 587-2116. These calls claim that your car warranty is expiring, but they are really scam artists trying to steal your personal information and identity. So if the number appearing on your cellphone screen is either (623) 238-6228 or (408) 587-2116, don’t answer it! Other numbers generating these spam identity theft calls include (202) 552-1332, (702) 520-1105, (609) 948-0971 and (562) 289-8136.

Spammers are now cloaking their website domains in their spam by abusing the TinyURL service. In this example, the spam is being sent by Advanced-Intelligence.com, and the TinyURL resolves to their site at http://www.advanced-intelligence.com.

Mega spammer Alan Ralsky has been indicted under Federal anti-spamming law, along with ten other spammers involved in Ralsky’s operation, including Ralsky’s own son-in-law, Scott Bradley (“Oh dad, how could you?) Other spammers charged include Judy Devenow, also of Michigan; James Bragg, of Arizona; California spammers John Brown, William Neil, Anki Neil, James Fite, Francis Tribble; and How Wai John Hui, of Vancouver, Canada and Hong Kong, and Peter Severa of Russia.

To help avoid email spam, it’s important to not post your email addresses openly on the Internet – for example, in comments on blogs, in user forums, and on social networking sites. You may think that this is obvious, but plenty of people still do it, and then wonder why they get so much Internet spam – for example spam from web-site contact form links. Good spam protection begins at home – to help avoid junk email spam reduce your own email address footprint and make your email addresses spam resistant. You can do this by posting your email address in a way that allows humans to know how to contact you, but which cannot be recognized as an email address by spamming programs. Here’s how.

Massive Gmail storage plus the awesome folder view provided by a Gmail account equals the perfect spam folder! If you have the ability to have your spam filtering program forward all detected spam to a separate email address, then you can create your own Gmail spam folder account too! Gmail is the perfect way to scan all of your spam for mail that you actually want, because the Gmail email folder view shows you the first sentence of the email along with the subject, making it super easy to determine if the mail is really spam or not without opening it! Here’s how!

Sure, there may be some cool email chain letters, but the reality is that they are still email chain letters, and that’s just not ok. The most recent of the chain emails making the rounds is a Recipe Email chain email letter. Seems innocent, seems fun, even seems useful. But it’s still chain mail, and it’s still not ok. In fact, it’s spam. Chain mail is illegal in the postal mail system, and it’s just as unwelcome in the Internet email system.

So you got email saying that you won a Toyota? You and thousands of others, in the latest round of the Toyota lottery scam!

Here’s the basic text of this spam scam – don’t be taken in!

By now you should now that you should never open a file which comes through in email, particularly if you are not expecting it, even if you know the sender. This certainly applies to the new rash of MP3 spam that is going around, which is actually audio stock spam for the pump and dump spammer scammers, who are pushing the publicly traded Text4Cars.com by Exit Only.

The mega popular Facebook site has joined the ranks of social networking sites that trick you into providing your password so that they can steal your AOL , Yahoo, MSN, or other address book, and spam all of your contacts. Only this time it’s with a twist – they are actually spamming your AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) contacts in your Buddy List! The spam starts out like this: “According to his Facebook status, Friend’s Name (their username) is now “Friend’s Nickname”. Friend invites you to join Facebook and keep up with what he and your other friends are doing.” What we want to know is WHY are AOL, Yahoo, and MSN continuing to let this go on?

A new version of the old 419 advance fee fraud scam has surfaced, this time claiming that you stand to receive a “long overdue inheritance / contract payment”.

Does the title of this article on Quechup and spam sound familiar? It should, and it’s no accident. Substitute Flixster for Quechup, and you’ll find that we had to write the exact same article about Flixster earlier this year. So if you get spam from Quechup saying that someone “has invited you as a friend on Quechup.. the social networking platform sweeping the globe”, well, don’t blame that someone, blame Quechup.

A new wave of spam hitting everybody’s inboxes takes the form of a welcome to one or another website and service, complete with temporary login information and a link to ‘change your temporary password’. The subjects all say some variant of “Login Information”, “Member Details”, “Registration Details” or, even, occasionally, “Internet Techincal Support” (sic). What they also all have in common is that if you click on that link, your computer will have just become a botnet pimp’s newest bitch.