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“And now a word from our sponsor, Trinity Cyber. Detection and response was failing before AI. Now it's breaking under the speed and scale of AI-driven threats. That's the reality Trinity Cyber was built for.”From the transcript
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Hacking Humans — spam (noun) [Word Notes]. Machine-transcribed; use the interactive transcript above to jump the player to any line.
You're listening to the CyberWire network, powered by N2K. And now a word from our sponsor, Trinity Cyber. Detection and response was failing before AI. Now it's breaking under the speed and scale of AI-driven threats. That's the reality Trinity Cyber was built for. The Trinity Cyber platform analyzes network sessions in real time, removes malicious content in line and provides unified control across users, applications, devices, networks, and AI. By bringing protection and policy together, Trinity Cyber helps security teams reduce risk, simplify operations, and stop threats before they become incidents. Learn how at TrinityCyber.com. The Trinity Cyber is a very important tool for AI-driven threats.
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Spelled S for Solicit, P for Pesky, A for Annoying, and M for Maddening. Definition. Uncelicited, unwanted, and sometimes malicious electronic messages indiscriminately transmitted to a large number of people. Example Sentence. Example Sentence. The user deleted all the spam emails. Origin and Context. According to Brad Templeton in his excellent blog about early internet history among other things, back in 1978, an aggressive deck marketer named Gary Thurick launched the first internet unsolicited bulk email campaign
to roughly 400 ARPONET prospects and the idea of spam was born, although we hadn't named it yet. Complaints to Thurick's boss came in immediately though and he never did it again. Still, he received $13 million in sales from this one air quotes here, Mistake. The term spam, according to the Eater website, originated in 1937 referring to a brand of canned meat, a six ingredient food product, where the apocryphal myth claims that the term is an acronym for scientifically processed animal matter. Eater claims the real name stands for Spiced and Him. It's unclear exactly when the internet community started referring to unsolicited junk messages as spam, but it likely started back in the 1980s with the Mudder community. Templeton describes muds as multi-user dungeons. In the early days, they were usually text-based, but essentially real-time multi-person environments. Shared worlds where users can chat, move around, and interact with locations and objects. Modern mud successors include EverQuest, World of Warcraft, and The Sims Online.
But even back in those early days, some mudders just wanted to annoy people. According to one player back in 1990, Andrew Plotkin, Digital spam refers to a Monty Python skit where Viking sing spam at a lady who floats down from the ceiling in a restaurant where they serve spam with everything. Yes, the skit is as absurd as it sounds, and for Monty Python fans, it's hilarious. According to Plotkin, the verb to spam would be to send lots and lots of useless information. In particular, the word spam repeated over and over again to mudders in the game. Today, some marketers use Digital spam, not the scientifically processed animal matter, to advertise their products, but these messages can also be malicious. Thread actors use spam to distribute fishing links and malware in mass. Even non-malicious spam can have a negative impact, though. According to ProPoint, the receipt, processing, classification, and disposal of spam and unwanted mail consumes system and employee bandwidth, creating a service quality issue. I'll say.
Nerd reference. For those interested in muds, the Cybersecurity Cannon novel The Blue Nowware by Jeffrey Deaver is a cyber thriller set in the time of the 1990s internet bubble, where the good guy and the bad guy hackers use a very specific mud to track each other down. The skit that Plotkin referred to is from a popular BBC TV show called Monty Python's Flying Circus, that aired from 1969 to 1974, and not for nothing. Plotkin signs his foreign post with this statement. A man who doesn't know his Monty Python is not a man worth talking to. Well said sir. What you got then? Well, there's egg and bacon? Egg sausage and bacon? Egg and spam? Egg bacon and spam? Egg bacon sausage and spam? Spam bacon, sausage and spam? Spam egg, spam, spam bacon and spam? Spam, spam, spam egg and spam? Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam?
Oh, no, it's not that I'm doing all crevettes for the moon, I saw it, I saw it, I saw it with a couple of cratty brownies, and I cried in the pot and spanned. I did like anything without spam in it. Word notes is written by Tim Noidar, executive produced by Peter Kielping and edited by John Petrick and me, Rick Howard. The mixed sound design and original music have all been crafted by the ridiculously talented Elliott Peltzmann. Word privilege that N2K and podcasts like Word Notes are part of the daily intelligence routine of many of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector, as well as the critical security teams supporting the Fortune 500 and many of the world's pre-eminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies. N2K's strategic workforce intelligence optimizes the value of your biggest investment, people. We make you smarter about your team while making your team smarter. Learn more at n2k.com.
And thanks for listening. And now, a word from our sponsor, SpectorOps. Today, AI is rapidly adding non-human and agentic identities to modern enterprise environments, creating new trust relationships and attack paths. Bloodhound Enterprise helps defenders map attack paths across AWS and hybrid environments as one connected graph. Identify the choke points that matter most and bring trusted attack path intelligence into approved AI workflows with Bloodhound Hunter. See how SpectorOps helps teams secure the most important and most important and important information. And bring trusted attack path intelligence into approved AI workflows with Bloodhound Hunter. See how SpectorOps helps teams secure the AI-driven identity era at SpectorOps.io.
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