In July, our Postini datacenters saw the biggest volume of email virus attacks so far in 2008, with a peak of nearly 10 million messages on July 24. One of the more prominent attacks in the month involved a spoofed UPS package-tracking link that was intended to lure recipients into clicking on it and downloading malware. Our zero-hour virus protection technology first started catching these emails on July 20.
July Breaks Record in Virus Attacks
Spam Levels Remain High: April showed peak spam volumes for 2008, but the overall level of spam remains high this summer. The average user has received 133 spam messages per day this year. Our statistics show that the average unprotected user would have received 36,000 spam messages in 2006 and 36,000 in 2007. This year’s July total shows a 68% growth rate over the same time in 2007. In short, spam attacks in 2008 have not let up from previous years.
Viruses tend to increase during the summer months, and August is already showing some new types of viruses. On August 5, we saw a large inflow of messages with an encrypted .RAR attachment. The overall 2008 trend has been a decrease in the use of attachments, so this new virus is confirmation that spam doesn’t follow trends for long.
These examples are also a good reminder about the importance of educating our colleagues, friends, and family on how to safely interact with email — namely, that we should all be careful about clicking on links in emails, even if those messages appear to be from people or organizations we know.
Hah! what in the world would that many people be doing to end up at my blog you wonder? Yes, well so do I! In fact for the last 3 months the number of visitors has increased by roughly 30% each month. If i break it down, really there is one post responsible for all this traffic: “AGENT” Picolax.
This has taught me two things. Firstly, if you are indeed out to get organic search engine traffic it is vital that you optimize your post with keywords and phrases. Secondly, it’s pretty easy to get traffic if you simply jump on a bandwagon or if you have your finger on the pulse.
The other big traffic magnets were the following, most popular at the top.
Interestingly enough, The Schweppes: Burst post did not do as well as i would of expected seeing tho it was a very successful ad, even won a Gold Lion at Cannes this year. Obviously this is because i didn’t really SOE my blog post for that particular entry therefore i don’t rank at all well in Google.
Currently i have 5 other blogs running all in different niches and i’m experimenting a bit with “finger on the pulse” style posts. So basically what i am doing is checking the usual places like digg and stumbleupon and trying to mimic the most popular posts. With the picolax post it was a bit of a fluke and seeing tho this blog is one of the only places that forum post is archived it draws quite a bit of traffic. Imagine if that was for something with a few more searches per month! Currently there is only 11,500 results in google and it does not have enough search volume to show graphs in google trends! You can see the potential here.
Mostly the picolax traffic originates from forums, and mostly UK based. What i might do is edit the post to include localized names for the laxative and see what happens!
Of course when you find one of natures greatest mysteries and you’re American, the first thing you should do is kill it. Now to the untrained eye that up there might just look like a stinking pile of wet shag carpet with a gorilla mask and some uncooked sausages, but to seasoned Big Foot hunters like Mathew Whitton, Tom Biscardi, and Rick Dyer, this is in fact a 7 foot tall Big Foot carcass they found somewhere in Georgia. And now it’s in a freezer.
Here are some of the vital statistics on the “Bigfoot” body:
*The creature is seven feet seven inches tall.
*It weighs over five hundred pounds.
*The creature looks like it is part human and part ape-like.
*It is male.
*It has reddish hair and blackish-grey eyes.
*It has two arms and two legs, and five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot.
*The feet are flat and similar to human feet.
*Its footprint is sixteen and three-quarters inches long and fiveand three-quarters inches wide at the heel.
*From the palm of the hand to the tip of the middle finger, its hands are eleven and three-quarters inches long and six and one-quarter inches wide.
*The creatures walk upright. (Several of them were sighted on the same day that the body was found.)
*The teeth are more human-like than ape-like.
*DNA tests are currently being done and the current DNA and photo evidence will be presented at the press conference on Friday, August 15th.
One of the most reputable new sources in the world, Fox News has a story on youtube.
So apparently they had the thing in a freezer and they tried to get it to freeze in a block of ice by filling the freezer with water which broke it. Deary me.
I wonder what this will yield. Surely just some viral marketing campaign. Sure is working so far!
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