Hacker's ramblings

Quite close six years ago, I posted about my visit in Megazone. Now I got to go there again. This time there were more of us and we had a private game for the company.

Round 1

This was me getting the look and feel how this game worked.

Oh boy our team sucked! (Sorry my colleagues, not sorry.)
Obviously I was the best in our green team, but I ranked 11th out of 30. Looking at the scores, red team was way too good for us and blue team had couple guys better than me.

Round 2

I'm not exactly sure, but somehow this turned into a base defense. Other teams were convinced they had to rape our base and me and another member of my red team were almost constantly defending our base.

This turn of events ended me being 4th out of 32 players. Actually, not missing the 2nd position by too much.

Round 3

This round was full-on base defense 100% of the time. There were 5 or 6 players of our team doing base defense to our blue team. Way too many players on other teams were keen on getting their 2000 pts on our base.

Btw, I'm pretty sure we fended them on each attack wave.

Mentally I'd love to do more freeroaming than doing area defense. I didn't enjoy this kind of game that much so I simply gave up. I wasn't moving nearly as much as reasonable Laser Tag tactics dictates. Being stationary will result in a below medium score and position 18th out of 30.

Overall

I still can get my kick out of round 2 while zapping attackers on left and right. That was fun!
However, I'll be waiting for the release of Sniper Elite 5 next week, I know I will enjoy video gaming more than IRL gaming.

It seems detecting and blocking email spam is easy. That's something I stated in my blog post back in 2020.

Here I'm introducing three types of spam I'm getting.

Spam from free email accounts

But wait! That's not new. We've seen email originating from Yahoo for many years.

What is new, the fact that increasing number of spammers are creating tons of accounts into Gmail or Outlook.com. As both free-of-charge services limit the amount of email one can send during 24 hours into 500, quite a lot of accounts are needed. As example, see Gmail's Limits for sending & getting mail.

The reason those two services are used for spamming is the good reputation and both are well accepted among postmasters. As an example I won't block neither of them and consider both being as reliable. As end result, majority of spam I receive is from either of those. To weed of bad ones from good ones, traditional spam-filtering will do the trick.

What's good is both Microsoft and Google are really good in detecting ill behaviour and stopping the activity. However, criminals are really good in spending their 500 mails effectively to make their behaviour as "natural" as possible. Neither service provider isn't fast/good enough to detect and stop the activity. Unfortunately.

SMS / iMessage spam

Getting spam via SMS isn't new, but getting junk from Apple iMessage is. Here is a sample:

For non-Finnish readers, the spam says I've been selected for a part time job. Daily salary range is from 10 to 200 euros.

It seems this weird scam is active all over Europe. See iPhone users lament for spam messages via iMessage. Unlike Android, iPhone doesn't have any mechanisms for detecting SMS-spam. Maybe it should?

Probably those spammers didn't even break anything (much). It is likely they've automated something to be able to send crap to everybody. I don't think iMessage protocol isn't broken nor Apple's authentication. All those jerks did was automate the thing to the hilt.

GPG spam

When spam arrives in a heavily encrypted email, then you'll know it must be very important! Here is one I got encrypted with my GPG-key:

What's weird is the choice of language. That sample is in Burmese, but I got one in Hindi and Telugu. All of which point heavily to Asia and specifically to Indian region. I have no idea why I got those as I definitely need Google Translate to decipher those.

I have no idea how my address leaked, but the one I'm using is from https://keyserver.pgp.com/, a directory where I choose to publish my PGP / GPG public key. Maybe somebody hacked that? Or just iterated all possible keys. I dunno.

Wrap-up

I see all this as a beginning. Email generally is losing emphasis and Discord / Teams / Slack are gaining on that. Spammers are getting really creative and I'm sure criminals will diversify more. Back-in-the-days Skype spam was a a real thing, see my article from 2016 on that.