Matt Cutts, the head of Google's webspam team, was at at the recent Web 2.0 Expo offering some tips to help users who manage websites fight back against spam.

"Spammers are human," Cutts said. "You have the power to raise their blood pressure. Make them spend more time and effort...If spammer gets frustrated, he's more likely to look for someone easier."

Here are a few of his tips, courtesy of Cnet:

• Use captcha systems to make sure real people, not bots, are commenting on your site. He uses a simple math puzzle-what's 2 + 2?-but he also likes KittenAuth, which makes people identify kitten photos.

One blogger merely requires people to type the word "orange" into a field. "The vast majority of bots will never do that," Cutts said.

• Reconfigure software settings after you've installed it. A little modification of various settings will throw bots off the scent. "If you can off the beaten path, away from default software installations, you'll save yourself a ton of grief," he said.

• Employ systems that rank people by trust and reputation. For example, eBay shows how long a person has been a member and how satisfied others are with transactions with that person.

For more tips, check out PCMag.

May 3rd will mark spam's 30th anniversary. It was on that day in 1978 that a marketing rep at a computer firm called DEC emailed an invite to every single west Coast user on the Arpanet, the precursor to what we know today as the Internet. Here is the Monthy Python skit that lead to the naming of unsolicited commercial email as spam. It's been all downhill ever since. So who's going to celebrate spam's big day? Me either!

Popular social networking site Reunion.com has been outed as a spammer. According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, the site dupes people into joining by sending an email pretending to be from someone who's looking for them. Once the person signs up, their address book is scraped and the site spams them with the same type of email. Nice, huh? Here's an excerpt of one victim's story:

West L.A. resident Elaine Schmidt experienced Reunion.com's aggressive marketing for herself when she received an e-mail the other day that appeared to be from a longtime acquaintance.

It said: "Hi, I looked for you on Reunion.com, the largest people search service - but you weren't there." The e-mail instructed her to click on a link to see who else has been searching for her.

Curious to see if her acquaintance had left a message, Schmidt, 44, clicked on the link and found herself at Reunion.com's site, where she was prompted to register so she could see who'd been searching for her.

In Schmidt's case, the e-mail that prompted her to open her address book to the company appeared to come from Vera Eck, a santa monica psychotherapist whom Schmidt has known for a while.

"I wasn't searching for her," Eck told me.

Just an hour or so before Schmidt received her e-mail, Eck, 46, said she received a message from what appeared to be the father of one of the kids in her son's Cub Scout pack. Curious to know why he was searching for her, she registered at Reunion.com to see if her acquaintance had left a message.

Eck provided access to her Gmail address book as part of the registration process. And so it goes.

The bottom line is that Reunion.com is employing a despicable marketing practice. If you get an email from them, delete it!

PCWorld is reporting that Chinese hackers appear to be preparing for an attack on CNN scheduled for April 19th. The attack is being spurred by the recent pro-tibet coverage in the media. A Chinese site called Anti-CNN is protesting what it considers anti-Chinese propaganda and is calling for protests in several countries including Germany, France and the UK. The attack threat however, appears to be unrelated to the Anti-CNN site. The hackers, believed to be members of The Red Hat Alliance, are calling for a DDoS attack against CNN to coincide with the protests. It is not yet known if the group is capable of backing up its attack threats, but security firms and media outlets will be watching closely to find out. It's quite possible one of the many botnets thriving on the net may be used to carry out such an attack. So far, CNN has not had any comment on the threat made against their website.

In case you weren't sure if the amount of junk mail on the net is increasing, a new study from sophos confirms it. According to the study, 92.3% of all email sent during the first three months of this year was spam. It also found that over 23,000 new spam sites were created during the same time period. That's roughly one every 3 seconds. There's also a new country joining the ranks as one of the top 5 spammers. Turkey has take over the number 3 spot. Russia and the good ol USA are still second and first, respectively. If the Internet is the information superhighway, spammers are the potholes, and like the real ones, they just never go away.

SpamStopsHere, Inc., today launched a blog to inform and educate the public about security and spam issues. Ted Green at SpamStopsHere posted a very interesting blog post "Why is there Spam", When you get a chance do read it. If you've got ideas, suggestions, questions or other ways to control spam please let me know, by leaving a comment here.

Kaspersky is forecasting a huge rise in malware by the end of the year. The security lab is expecting over 1 million malware signatures to be added to its database this year. In comparison only 250,000 were added last year.

"In addition to the quantity, the quality of malicious programs is also improving," said Kaspersky senior technology consultant David Emms. "New and more complex samples, such as the notorious Zhelatin (the storm worm), are emerging that demonstrate a wide range of hostile behaviour and distribution methods," he added.

The total amount of malware programs, which includes viruses, trojan horses, and worms, found on the net in 2007 is said to be over 2 million. Such a surger may be a boon to Linux, the open source OS in competition with Windows and Mac OS's, Unlike Windows, it's said ti be virtually virus proof.

If you have Verizon DSL like I do, you've probably noticed a sharp increase in spam. The messages are the same old thing, purposely misspelled messages promoting online pharmacies, debt reduction services and male enhancement, with subject lines like "weadmid Earbet snato prite Chilet" Complete gibberish. I've been getting about 50 a day and Verizon hasn't been able to explain how these spam messages are getting past their filter. Interesting though, that these messages, which bear all the red flags that spam filters are designed to catch, slipped right through. Things that make you go hmm....

Here is a good video from Kaspersky Labs regarding malware and how to protect yourself from it. With malware threats continuing to grow, you just can't have too much information about them!

If you are administrator you must have got spam from your own email address. How does this happen? How do you stop this? If you have Sender Policy Framework published, you can specify that you only send email from certain IP addresses/servers. If any other machines send a email with your domain name you can treat that as spam. To be more specific when your company domain sends a email to Gmail user, you must have also used SPF (Sender Policy Framework) to list addresses of your email servers, when Gmail receives your email Gmail email server will check your domain SPF record if the ip address is not listed then it's treated as a spam email and email is moved to spam folder. If the IP address is listed it's not a spam email. If you want to create your own SPF please use this wizard. If you've got ideas, suggestions, questions or other ways to control spam please let me know, by leaving a comment here.