Spam, It's Not Just for Email Anymore
If you've traveled through the southeast US you may have seen an invasive vine called kudzu that seems to spread quickly to the point of overtaking other plants in an area. The Nature Conservancy says:
it grows out of control, smothers native plants and even uproots entire trees by the sheer force of its weight.
Think of it as biological spam. True to form, spam is spreading and threating any messaging services. The latest victims are Twitter and your calendar.
Twitter has grown to the point where it's such a popular target of spam that the service providers are blacklisting spammers and deleting their accounts. Any one willing to venture a guess on how well that will work?
McAfee Avert Labs is tracking a new kind of spam that is targeting your calendar.
Have you had any odd meetings in your Outlook or Google calendars lately? I've been monitoring an interesting spamming technique over the past few weeks where they are sending automatically accepted meeting requests (if you allow that) to your calendar.The spam is originating from Gmail accounts but the Google and Outlook calendar functions are compatible so the meeting request goes straight into your calendar and you probably won't notice it until you get a reminder at the spammers chosen time.
It's like the equivalent of a biological imperative for spam: if there is a sufficiently useful messaging medium, spam will find a way to encroach and smother and outweigh the other messages in the medium.
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