Anti-spam
Anti-spam
The continuing increase in spam has resulted in rapid growth in the use of spam filter programs: software that examines incoming email, separating spam from genuine email messages. Unwanted e-mail can be filtered at the desktop, the network email server/email gateway, or the Internet Service Provider's email gateway. While network managers and ISPs can choose hardened email security appliances, services or software designed to interdict both spam and viruses, desktop users are frequently limited to a software-based solution.
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Anti-spam Related Products
The GB-Ware is a software firewall powered by GNAT Box System Software certified to ICSA 4.0 Corporate criteria. The GNAT Box System Software was designed from the ground up as an integrated firewall system with interoperability of features, easy installation and remote management. We supply the OS and firewall software - you supply the hardware.
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McAfee UTM Firewall (formerly Secure Computing SnapGear) is a complete office network-in-a-box Internet security appliance for small and medium-size businesses (SMBs). It features wide-area networking tools that you would normally only see with enterprise-class devices. Because the last thing SMBs need is another single-purpose security appliance to add to their network.
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The GB-250 and GB-250e Firewall UTM Appliances are GTA's entry level systems that provide big security for smaller business offices. Designed and priced to meet the needs of smaller organisations, the GB-250 and GB-250e include the same security and UTM features of our larger enterprise firewall UTM appliances, but scaled to fit the needs of offices with fewer than 50 employees.
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The GB-3000 Gigabit Firewall UTM Appliance is Global Technology Associates' flagship appliance. It offers the highest throughput and most comprehensive feature set in GTA's product line. The GB-3000 provides powerful network security and strong performance by delivering world-class protection and gateway threat management capabilities in a single dedicated appliance.
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Protect your Internet gateway, mail and file servers, desktops, laptops, and mobile devices with this fully integrated, centrally managed security solution. Multilayered security provides maximum protection from viruses, spyware, spam and blended threats, including web-based attacks.
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Keep your data confidential and your employees safe while interacting with rich Internet content. Trend Micro Enterprise Security for Gateways integrates virtualized web and messaging gateway security - proven to maximise protection while minimising complexity and lowering total cost up to 40 percent.
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Trend Micro Mobile Security protects smartphones and PDAs from data loss, infections, and attacks from a central enterprise console that can also manage desktop protection. Encryption and authentication defends data integrity on lost or stolen devices. The anti-malware features block viruses, worms, Trojans, and SMS text message spam. Built-in firewall and IDS protects against hackers, intrusions, and denial-of-service attacks - potential threats to the increasing number of Wi-Fi-enabled mobile devices.
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Small to mid-sized businesses don't need to pay high prices for powerful email security. WatchGuard XCS 170, 370 and 570 Appliances are affordable, complete email security solutions that defend against inbound threats including viruses, spam, blended threats, phishing, spyware and network attacks. Block 98% of unwanted traffic at the perimeter and boost your email security and performance without breaking the bank.
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Anti-spam Related Industry News
Anti-spam laws baffle UK.biz Businesses are in the dark over anti-spam laws, with 83 per cent ignorant of legislation aimed at stopping junk emails, a new survey has revealed. The research, conducted by software firm Clearswift, found that although just 16 per cent of businesses were aware of laws against spam, a massive 92 per cent felt current rules were not tough enough to stop unwanted emails.
The UK government introduced anti-spam measures last year, after complaints from small firms t......
[more] Spam virus 'hijacks' computers Spammers are sending out viruses that take over people's computers and turn them into junk mail machines, say experts. It is a worrying new development in the ongoing war against spam and could see a huge rise in the amount of unsolicited messages in inboxes worldwide.
In a worst case scenario, it could overwhelm the entire internet system warn experts.
UK spam filtering firm MessageLabs has found what it believes is the first example of a virus that has be......
[more] Spam fuels boom in secure content market Junk mail is an increasing problem but the search for an effective cure remains fraught with difficulties. That's the message we take from a slew of recent surveys on the subject.
Market watcher IDC predicts that anti-spam products will be a key driver for the secure content management (SCM) software market which it expects to grow by 19 per cent a year to reach $6.4 billion in 2007.
"Virus infection is still the main concern regarding corporate......
[more] Microsoft aims to make spammers pay Despite efforts to stem the billions of spam e-mails flooding inboxes, unwanted messages are still turning e-mail into a quagmire of misery. Spammers send out tens of millions of e-mails to unsuspecting computer users every day, employing a myriad of methods to ensure their pills, loans and "requests for our lord" pleas fox e-mail filters.
Some are even turning to prose and poetry to fool the technological safeguards people put in place.
But a group o......
[more] EU anti-spam laws are OK It's just over a month since new anti-spam legislation was introduced into the UK with almost universal condemnation that the new laws would have a limited effect in the fight against junk email. The £5,000 fine for offenders has been branded by some experts as an "inadequate deterrent". And even those who've welcomed the new legislation - which is part of an EU-wide directive - doubt it will have any real impact on combating spam.
For although there is one EU anti-s......
[more] Sophos beats rivals in VeriTest analysis Sophos Anti-Virus provides most frequent virus updates, fastest scanning speed and shortest installation time Sophos, a world leader in anti-virus and anti-spam protection for businesses, today announced that in a competitive analysis of enterprise anti-virus applications conducted by VeriTest, a division of Lionbridge Technologies, Sophos Anti-Virus led competitor solutions in several key areas including most frequent virus updates in both manual and aut......
[more] Spam may be wiped out by 2006 Internet users beware -- within a couple of years you may have fewer opportunities to reduce your debt or increase your penis size Unwanted "spam" offers currently account for more than half of all e-mail traffic, but at least two high-tech executives say the torrent of pornography and unbelievably low mortgage rates could slow to a trickle by 2006.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates predicted the demise of unsolicited commercial e-mail at the World Economic Forum in D......
[more] 'Clean up this Internet effluent now' Messagelabs CTO Mark Sunner claims that ISPs allowing unfiltered traffic to flow to customers is like a water authority pumping out raw sewage We are losing the malware war. Conventional antivirus and anti-spam countermeasures seem ineffective against an increasingly sophisticated enemy. The argument is that server- and client-side solutions draw the battle lines far too deeply inside their own territory, robbing computing, bandwidth and other resources. Wha......
[more] Spam, scam, spoof and spyware: beware epidemic in Internet empire Spam, the circulation of unwanted electronic messages, is dangerous and expensive for businesses and individuals and is growing uncontrollably on an epidemic scale So says an official report prepared for an OECD-EU meeting on Monday and Tuesday. Confidence in the entire environment of Internet communications and electronic commerce is at risk.
A simple answer is not at hand, says the report which has just been declassified by......
[more] Governments must act together to curb spam Only coordinated action by governments can curb the alarming rise in unsolicited bulk e-mails, or spam, a high-level seminar in Brussels was told. The two-day meeting, organised by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Commission (news - web sites), was being held after the Mydoom e-mail worm infected more than one million computers around the world.
Mydoom underlined the vulnerability of computer systems......
[more] EC draws line in spam sand The EC is calling for greater international co-operation in combating spam Speaking at this week's OECD workshop on spam in Brussels, Commissioner Erkki Liikanen said the OECD should "rapidly agree" a five-point framework to promote effective legislation against spam. This programme calls for co-operation between enforcement agencies, self-regulation by industry, technical measures, legislative action and greater consumer awareness.
The OECD workshop on spam coinci......
[more] Shoppers spend less online because of spam Experts says spam is hurting online businesses and could stunt the Internet economy's growth The exponential growth of unsolicited junk email -- spam -- is shaking consumer confidence in the Internet and may hamper growth of the e-economy, officials have told a global anti-spam meeting.
A survey published by consumers group the Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) showed 52 percent of respondents were shopping less on the Internet or not at all b......
[more] US anti-spam law fails to bite US legislation designed to stem the tide of junk e-mails has had little impact on spam, say experts US e-mail filtering firm Postini said the Can-Spam Act had only made a slight dent in the amount of unwanted mail.
It found spam accounted for 79% of all e-mails it processed in January, down from 80% in December 2003.
Critics of the US law had predicted it would do little to stop spam and may even encourage some businesses to start sending unsolicited messag......
[more] China Cracks Down on Spammers Authorities want to block more than porn and pitches, while feeling pressure to stop spam sent from China. The Chinese government is ratcheting up its efforts to fight unsolicited e-mail in a campaign with a distinctly political flavor, but officials face an uphill battle controlling spam.
The Ministry of Public Security (MPS) has announced a joint campaign with the country's Ministry of Education (MOE) and Ministry of Information Industry (MII) to end spam in......
[more] Your computer could be a 'spam zombie' Next time you're looking for a culprit for all that junk mail flooding your inbox, have a glance in the mirror. Spammers are increasingly exploiting home computers with high-speed Internet connections into which they've cleverly burrowed.
E-mail security companies estimate that between one-third and two-thirds of unwanted messages are relayed unwittingly by PC owners who set up software incorrectly or fail to secure their machines.
David Lawrence, 4......
[more] EU's anti-spam laws in chaos It was supposed to tackle spam but is turning into a laughing stock. A study by the Institute of Information Law (IViR) at the University of Amsterdam has revealed that the EU’s much-vaunted anti-spam legislation, Directive 58, is fast turning into a legislative disaster.
The Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, to give it its full name, was supposed to have been adopted by EU member states by October 2003, but according to the IViR, only 7 of 15 h......
[more] Sophos Announces Opening of North American Virus Lab Sophos, a world leader in anti-virus and anti-spam protection for businesses, today announced the opening of its North American virus lab. Sophos currently operates full-time virus labs in the United Kingdom and Australia and a spam lab in Vancouver, Canada. With the addition of its Lynnfield, MA-based virus lab, Sophos will be able to further extend protection for its customers worldwide.
As the threat of viruses continues to escalate alo......
[more] Lawmakers Launch New Anti-Spyware Bill Two champions of last year's Can Spam Act have introduced legislation in Congress to outlaw invasive software such as spyware and adware from being secretly installed on computers.
Currently, these type of programs often piggyback on downloaded files without the user's consent, transmitting information about Internet traffic patterns and generating pop-up advertisements.
Known as Spyblock (Software Principles Yielding Better Levels of Consumer Know......
[more] UUNet tops spammer-hosting super league UUNet hosts more spammers than any other ISP. It has 151 listings on the Spammers Block List (SBL), including 34 known spam gangs with ROKSO records, according to the anti-spam organisation Spamhaus' records for February 2004. The second worst offender, Chinanet-QD, has 82 entries on the SBL. It hosts Alan Ralsky, listed as the single worst spammer on the ROKSO list.
Banning unsolicited commercial email is a simple matter, Spamhaus says. it has example......
[more] Earthlink to test sender authentication ISP (Internet service provider) Earthlink Inc. will soon begin testing new e-mail security technology, including Microsoft Corp.'s recently released Caller ID technology, a company executive said.
Earthlink will be experimenting "very soon," with "sender authentication" technology including Caller ID and a similar plan called Sender Policy Framework (SPF). The Atlanta-based ISP will be evaluating other e-mail security proposals as well, but is not bac......
[more] Spam is 10 Today marks the tenth anniversary of what is generally considered the first spam message. On this day in 1994, US law firm Canter and Siegel posted a message on several Usenet newsgroups advertising its services to people interested in participating in the US Green Card lottery.
These days we'd barely bat an eyelid at such a message but at the time it was considered as appalling breach of "netiquette" - the unspoken rules of polite behaviour online. It was the cyber equivalent of......
[more] Major ISPs to Stand Firm on Anti-Spam Fight Looking to show a unified front against spam, the nation's top e-mail and Internet service providers -- America Online, EarthLink, Microsoft, and Yahoo! -- are expected to outline their efforts in stopping unwanted e-mail at its source.
Representatives from the coalition are scheduled to appear at a press conference Wednesday morning in Washington D.C. to talk about their collaborative efforts. The coalition is based on an anti-spam industry allia......
[more] We're just innocent techies, say accused spammers Lawyers for a Florida firm accused of inundating AOL users with spam have hit back with a motion seeking to dismiss the lawsuit.
According to dismissal papers filed yesterday, AOL's lawsuit against Connor Miller Software in Orlando federal court is "essentially the same" as a case "dismissed" by a Virginia judge last December.
The defendants' lawyer, Seth Berenzweig of law firm Albo & Oblon, says that Judge Claude Hilton of Virginia "con......
[more] Bagle turns to anti-spam trick The latest Bagle variants are hiding their passwords in graphic files in a new ploy to avoid detection by antivirus software Three new Bagle variants (N, O and P) discovered over the weekend differ from previous incarnations because they use an anti-spam trick to try and avoid detection by antivirus software, but experts believe that the attempt won't succeed.
The Bagle worm installs a back door on infected systems and could allow the machine to be used as an em......
[more] ISP Gets Tough With 'Zombie' Customers Broadband provider Comcast is taking a tough new approach to targeting "spam zombies" -- those virus-infected, unwitting spam-sending computers among its broadband base.
The ISP is telling customers to get virus-scanning and firewall software loaded or risk losing their high-speed connection until the problem of virus infections on their computer is fixed.
In recent weeks, the cable broadband giant has been alerting surprised customers to the probl......
[more] Spam reduces faith in email Users increasingly put off by proliferation of offensive junk mail The growing problem of spam is taking a heavy toll on US internet users' perception of the safety of email.
According to a survey by cyber-monitoring group Pew Internet and American Life Project, 63 per cent of users are becoming less trusting of emails, while over a third claim to have cut back their use of email as a communication tool.
The majority of those surveyed indicated that the volume of......
[more] Technology solution to slicing spam lags Lawsuits filed by some of the Web's biggest players against junk e-mailers have portrayed an industry united in the war against spam--but there are few signs of collaboration in developing technology standards that could be more effective in slowing the deluge. America Online, EarthLink, Microsoft and Yahoo scored a major publicity coup earlier this month, when they launched their first joint legal assault against spammers. The suits claim that hundreds......
[more] New .mail top-level domain offers hope for spoiling spam The Internet's governing body is considering a proposal for a .mail top-level domain that could be a powerful new weapon in the fight against spam.
The Anti-Spam Community Registry has asked ICANN (Internet Corporation for the Assignment of Names and Numbers) to include .mail in the next batch of new TLDs, which are expected to be introduced later this year.
The domain will be restricted to the operators of mail servers, and will allo......
[more] AOL blocks spammer sites AOL's latest shots in the anti-spam campaign might cause problems with their customers.
According to the Washington Post, AOL has blocked access to sites peddled by spam email, the only problem is that some of its customers want to visit them.
A legal eagle contacted by the Post said that while the move might help AOL stem spam, some still want what spammers sell. Other legal experts are a little worried that AOL’s paternalistic attitude might break many free speech......
[more] SurfControl Helps Companies Strategically Manage Spam and E-Mail Threats Through New Online Tool ROI Calculator for Anti-Spam Tools Helps IT Managers Quantify and Communicate the Costs and Benefits of E-mail Filtering Solutions SurfControl, the world's number one Web and e-mail filtering company, today announced the availability of a free online resource to help corporate IT managers quantify the cost of spam and assess the business value of e-mail filtering solutions.
According to a recent stu......
[more] Trust me I'm clean, claims virus The latest in a long line of NetSky variants, Netsky-P, tries to lull users into a false sense of security by containing spoofed disclaimers from anti-virus firms.
NetSky-P, first spotted over the weekend, was programmed to begin mass mailing yesterday. After encountering only a few copies of the virus during its "seeding" period, email filtering firm MessageLabs blocked 200,000 copies of the worm yesterday afternoon.
Like previous versions, NetSky-P is......
[more] Postini antispam patent could cause headaches A patent granted to managed e-mail security company Postini Inc. in the U.S. could pose problems for the company's competitors and others in the managed e-mail services market, experts warn. If enforced, the patent, which covers an e-mail "pre-processing service" could grant Postini legal ownership of a wide range of antispam and e-mail security methods. However, some industry experts doubt that the patent, filed in September 2000, will stand up to......
[more] TM domain leads anti-spam charge The registry running the top-level .tm domains is leading the charge against spam by adding the SPF protocol into all its domains' DNS records.
While a large number of ISPs, big online names, anti-spam companies and a few domain registrars have added SPF and so helped verify that an email message comes from the address it says it does, TM Domain Registry’s general manager Paul Kane tells us this is the first time an actual registry has included the protocol.......
[more] SpamHaus lobbies for .mail TLD The SpamHaus Project wants the Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to approve its application to launch a ".mail" top-level internet domain (TLD) and provide a trusted-sender system for email. Technically the plans should be fairly straightforward, but political issues are another matter.
One of ten applications for new TLDs, .mail would act as a "reputation service", providing a way for email recipients to ensure that incoming mail is sent by......
[more] Big Business of Fighting Spam to Get Bigger The mostly fruitless fight against unsolicited commercial e-mail has created many headaches along with a billion-dollar industry to fight it.
The Radicati Group, Palo Alto, CA, this week estimated that the market for spam-fighting software and other measures will reach $979 million this year, thanks to a 50 percent rise in demand over the past 12 months. The researcher forecasts that the market will reach $1.7 billion by 2008.
The high stakes in......
[more] Spam being rapidly outpaced by 'spim' While the torrent of unsolicited spam emails continues to rise, it is being far outpaced by the surge in unwanted messages sent to the users of instant messaging programs, analysts have warned.
The volume of so-called "spim" is set triple in 2004, according to a new report from the Radicati Group, a technology market research firm in Palo Alto, California.
The company projects that 1.2 billion spims will be sent, 70 per cent of which are porn-related.......
[more] Florida firms accused in spam lawsuits Internet service providers are stepping up their efforts to curb the flow of junk e-mails by going to court. Nine Florida companies alleged to be spam operations have been sued in the past month The ''Alabama spammers'' used dozens of phone lines in the Birmingham area, but they never set foot in the state.
The spammers used those Alabama lines to send about 250 million e-mails that advertised adult dating services and herbal Viagra pills. The group of 1......
[more] Blockage for spam filtering vendors Predicted shake-out in sector to leave fewer than 10 firms in business More than 30 enterprise spam filtering vendors will no longer be in operation or will have changed their focus by 2005, leaving fewer than 10 still in business, according to analyst Gartner.
Its Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Spam Filtering report has claimed the industry will see "dramatic consolidation" during the first quarter of 2005, as various vendors either fail, are acquired or thri......
[more] Spam’s cost is hitting schools and taxpayers Once fodder for late-night laugh lines, the volume of unsolicited e-mail is growing so quickly in the US that other people’s spam, as it’s most well-known, is costing you money. This is most clearly true in the case of government, school districts in particular.
Taxpayers in the Pottsgrove School District, for example, have spam at least partly to thank for the recent vote to spend more than $188,000 on upgrading the district’s computer system.......
[more] Internet users prepared to pay ISPs for better spam protection Internet users are prepared to pay extra to their ISPs in return for protection against spam and 'malicious Web content', according to a new survey.
MORI found that the majority of Web users look to their ISPs to block spam, viruses and obscene websites for which 45 per cent are prepared to pay as much as £2 extra per month. Twenty-nine per cent believe the problem is so bad that they would pay an additional £5.
The survey, carr......
[more] Eliminating Spam Requires Team Effort Online sales pitches for home mortgages, human growth hormones, dating services and, in some cases, hardcore pornography are deluging e-mail inboxes. This flood of so-called spam now reportedly accounts for more than half of all e-mail.
Spam is more than just frustrating; it can contain computer viruses, worms or other malicious code that is designed to damage computer networks, files and hard drives. Some spam is designed to download programs onto reci......
[more] The Red, White and Blue of Spam Despite increased legislation and hyper vigilance by IT companies, one industry report says spam has not been canned and the "phishing" industry is now booming.
But to put the blame on Russian hackers or Nigerian royalty would be a false notion.
The report issued by Commtouch Thursday is an analysis of e-mail activity for the month of March. The findings: three months after the CAN-SPAM law was enacted, it's seen no slow-down in spam volume. In fact, the......
[more] SPAM : the unintended consequence of ecommerce One of the problems of doing business online -- spam -- has been spawned by of one of its greatest benefits: email. Unwanted commercial email (junk mail in some lexicons, spam in most) has grown 115% in the last year, from 15 billion email messages to a projected 35 billion this year, according to a study from the Radicati Group.
But Radicati may have been behind the curve. Brightmail, which provides gateway spam protection to 7 of the 10 largest......
[more] "Lighthouse Afghan" fools Outlook spam filter Spammers using hidden words to slip through Bayesian filter… Spammers are inserting hidden words into their email messages to fool Microsoft Outlook's built-in anti-spam technology.
As spam-filtering technologies become more common, spammers have altered the construction of their messages to avoid detection. Although spam is very simple for a human to spot, the artificial intelligence systems used by junk filters rely on spotting obvious keywords......
[more] Wrapping up the messaging and spam tour That's it - the four-city Network World Messaging and Spam Tour is over. If you were one of the attendees, thanks for coming. If you weren't, well, you missed some great events.
One thing we do at these events is award a stupendous, fantastic prize for the best question put to the panel, and on this tour we got some great questions!
Looking back, it is interesting to identify the queries that were asked most often. Three questions were more common......
[more] Could NZ become a spam haven? New Zealand has rocketed to the third largest producer of spam in the region, according to anti-spam company Brightmail.
Spam claiming to originate from New Zealand accounts for 14% of the region's spam production, up from only 2% in January. The biggest offenders are China and Korea with 34% and 30% respectively. Japan is fourth with only 8%.
Brightmail, which provides anti-spam filters to both Telecom and TelstraClear in New Zealand, tracks email traffic t......
[more] Half of all email is now spam According to a recent Yankee Group report titled E-Mail Security Solutions Providers Seek to Stop Spam and Viruses at the Perimeter, half of all e-mail sent today is spam.
The report also claims that the challenge of filtering unwanted messages at the edge of U.S. businesses has created a $140 million market.
It's no secret that spam is a huge problem that the industry and governments are still trying to solve.
"Legislation alone is not sufficient; we a......
[more] U.S. woman joins brother as "spam" defendant The family that spams together, stands together -- stands trial, that is, according to charges filed Wednesday.
Virginia authorities said a North Carolina woman would join her brother as a defendant in a "spam" e-mail case that could net each up to 20 years in prison.
Jessica Jaynes of Raleigh, North Carolina, was charged with violating Virginia's anti-spam law and will stand trial in September, state attorney general Jerry Kilgore said.......
[more] Va. arrests third person in spam dragnet A third person has been arrested in connection with an illegal e-mail operation, the state attorney general announced Wednesday.
Jessica Jaynes, who is also known as Jessica DeGroot, was indicted by a grand jury in Loudoun County on Wednesday. Jaynes is charged with four felony counts of using fraudulent means to send illegal unsolicited bulk e-mail, commonly known as spam.
Jaynes is the sister of Jeremy Jaynes, who was arrested in December on simi......
[more] Germany moots jail for spammers Germany's ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD) is mooting tough sanctions for spammers. These would include big fines for spammers and the companies which use their services, and prison sentences for the worst offenders.
Ulrich Kelber, an SPD MP who is promoting the draft law, says that small fines will not deter the top 50 spammers. "In the event of repeated violation we need really hard sanctions," he said. The law could be a signal to other countries, too,......
[more] US FTC says pornographic "spam" must be labelled Pornographic "spam" e-mail will have to contain a warning on the subject line so Internet users can easily filter it out, the Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday.
Starting May 19, sexually explicit e-mail will have to bear a label reading "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT:" and the messages themselves will not be allowed to contain graphic material, the FTC said.
Outrage over unsolicited pornography and other forms of junk e-mail spurred Congress to p......
[more] Company warns of bugged spam messages Spam beacons relay back to the spammer whenever a message is opened, company says Hidden code in e-mail messages is increasingly being used to track the success of unsolicited commercial ("spam") e-mail campaigns, according to a warning by an antispam technology company on Tuesday
MX Logic Inc. of Denver, said that up to 50 percent of all spam released in the last year is bugged with so-called "spam beacons" that send a coded message back to the spammer w......
[more] Google's spam plan forwarded to lawyers A message to a spouse confessing to having dented the car would arrive with links to panel beaters. An email from a friend suggesting dinner would land studded with offers from restaurants.
This could be the future of free email services if the search engine behemoth Google has its way. Personal messages would be scanned and loaded with advertising relevant to their content before they have even been read by their intended recipients.
It's the price......
[more] Viruses In 47% Of Junk E-mails According to a survey conducted by Kingsoft, one of China's leading software companies, 47% of all the junk e-mail received by China's Internet surfers contain viruses. Of the 83,641 Internet users that answered the Kingsoft questionnaire, 54% said they are receiving one to five junk e-mails a day on average, and 37% are receiving five to 20 unsolicited mails.
In the second half of March, Kingsoft handed out its anti-spam questionnaire to 100,000 people in mor......
[more] Spam-buster SurfControl in $14.7 mln U.S. purchase British tech firm SurfControl Plc unveiled a deal to acquire U.S.-based Messagesoft for up to $14.69 million on Monday, in a bid to cement its hold on a growing market for software that filters junk emails.
SurfControl, whose software helps to keep computers free of unwanted Web content like pornography and junk emails, said the purchase would give it access to California-based Messagesoft's technology and its Chinese sales and distribution......
[more] 5 years ago: Europeans petition parliament for end to spam 20.04.1999: Graham Watson MEP today launched an attack on email spammers in the European Parliament when he presented the Legal Affairs Committee with a petition calling for an end to junk email.
The petition - signed by 24,000 European internet users - calls for an end to unsolicited email, which Watson described as an invasion of privacy and a huge waste of time and money. Watson said the petition is an example of online democra......
[more] Study Says Anti-Spam Efforts Yield Rapid Returns IDC says a company with 5,000 users can save $783,000 annually by implementing an anti-spam system. A study by research firm IDC should prompt smiles among anti-spam vendors. The report, titled "The True Cost Of Spam And Value Of Anti-Spam Solutions," notes that spam comprised 32% of all E-mail messages last year, double the percentage in 2001.
IDC's 32% figure is significantly lower than spam estimates put forward by anti-spam vendors such as B......
[more] Spamhaus breaches great firewall of China Monitoring project works with Chinese authorities to crack down on spammers Anti-spam organisation Spamhaus is taking its crusade to China following an invitation from the Chinese government.
After the US, more spam is sent from China than any other country, and Spamhaus hopes to persuade the Chinese authorities to implement effective anti-spam legislation and technologies.
A team of Chinese volunteers will monitor spammers and report back to the UK......
[more] Spam showing little sign of abating Companies won't stop spamming - employees won't stop complicating matters... Two factors are combining to ensure that combating spam will continue to be a near-impossible task - the fact that companies are happy to continue flouting anti-spam legislation and the fact that a lack of education among end users is set to keep aggravating the issue.
However, blame for the latter issue can hardly be laid at the feet of employees when 57 per cent of companies......
[more] Spain hit by spam pain Government ISP blocked by anti-spammers State run ISP Telefonica De Espana (TDE) has been blocked from a large number of US web sites.
TDE is the most prestigious spammer on the Abusive Hosts Blocking List (AHBL), which is used by American ISPs to identify the worst spammers in the world and block them.
According to the AHBL TDE users are flooding the world with thousands of junk advertising emails and dodgy financial scams.
It is rare for a whole ISP to be bloc......
[more] 'Ineffective' spam law ignored by EU countries Directive has no jurisdiction over spam from overseas... The EU's anti-spam directive, which was passed in July 2003, has been ignored by most EU member states because it will not stop the spam problem, according to research published by the Institute of Information Law (IvIR) at the InfoSecurity exhibition in London on Tuesday.
In its directive on privacy and electronic communications, the EU last year stipulated that all member countries shoul......
[more] Europe drags heels in war on spam Infosecurity Europe 2004, The shortcomings of Europe's war against spam are highlighted in a study of anti-spam legislation published today. The Institute for Information Law (IViR) of the University of Amsterdam and security firm Sybari Software looked into the law regulating unsolicited commercial email (i.e. spam) in the EU. Special emphasis was placed on the EU's July 2002 Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications.
Their report reveals weak spots......
[more] Employers could be sued for porn spam E-mail porn spam in the workplace could land European employers in court for fostering a hostile work environment, a Dutch researcher says.
The broad wording of new European anti-spam legislation opens up a new breed of legal snares for Europe's corporate sector, according to Lodewijk Asscher.
"European employers must be aware of the risk of new computer-related liabilities," said the researcher for the University of Amsterdam's Institute for Info......
[more] Malicious spam on the rise says Brightmail Anti-spam filtering company Brightmail is warning users about an increase in malicious spam following the introduction of anti-spam legislation in a number of jurisdictions.
Brightmail, which has filters on around 25% of the world’s email addresses, is used by both TelstraClear and Telecom’s Xtra and so covers around 85% of New Zealand’s email.
Brightmail vice president for Asia Pacific, Garry Sexton, says that with the introduction of anti-spam......
[more] Spam deluge nearly sinks e-hosting business A Bellevue company that has been trying to protect residential and business Internet users from unsolicited commercial e-mail likely was targeted by a major spam operation for that very reason, its founder said yesterday.
Lee Wright said ModoMail is still struggling to survive after being besieged by forged e-mails — at one point receiving 300 a second, clogging his system.
Messages hawking bogus diet patches and penis enlargement pills were b......
[more] Government talks tough on spam DTI considers 'serious enforcement' of e-privacy legislation The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) is looking to strengthen the UK's defences against spammers.
"Spam is not going to be stopped with simple regulation," said Jean-Jacques Sahel, deputy head of international communications policy at the DTI.
"We need to take a more pragmatic approach and seriously enforce the [European] directive [on e-privacy]. Maybe we need to give the Information Commissio......
[more] Bill Gates 'can't stop spam' More than 80 percent of security professionals do not believe that Bill Gates' crusade against spam will solve the problem, according to a survey A survey of IT security professionals conducted at the Infosecurity show in London this week revealed that more than 80 percent of people do not think that Bill Gates' pledge to eliminate spam within two years is realistic.
In June 2003, the Microsoft chairman called for cooperation between government and corporations to......
[more] UK Companies Warned to Filter Spam A Dutch researcher has warned British businesses that a clause in the European anti-spam law could hold businesses accountable for porn showing up in corporate email accounts.
Researcher Lodewijk Asscher, from the University of Amsterdam's Institute for Information Law, says the anti-spam legislation is comprised of broad wording and some porn might be slipping through. Employers could be held responsible if porn at work prompts a staff member to launch a......
[more] US goes after NZ spammer The US Federal Trade Commission has filed a legal action against Global Web Promotions, a spam enterprise that operates out of Australia and New Zealand, as part of its first criminal prosecution under the new US federal anti-spam law.
The action is half of a two-part action underway by the FTC.
In the first, the FTC filed a complaint against Detroit-based spam operation Phoenix Avatar. That complaint was developed in a joint investigation with the US Attorney’s O......
[more] Most Spam Web Sites Hosted in China While most spam comes from the US, the web sites they advertise are mostly hosted in China, according to numbers released yesterday by Commtouch Software Inc, a small anti-spam software vendor.
Commtouch said that in April 71% of the URLs found in spam directed to web servers in China, compared to 22% that were in the US. Brazil, a notorious haven for malicious hackers, came third, with 2.2% of sites.
However, only 6.2% of spam actually was sent from IP......
[more] Court halts spammer's anti-spam company gag Spam King's crusade takes a knock A district court judge has rescinded a temporary restraining order against anti-spam operation SpamCop, in an early blow to a case brought by self-professed "Spam King" Scott Richter.
A Northern California District Court judge issued a temporary restraining order last week to prevent SpamCop from interfering with messages sent by alleged junk e-mailer OptInRealBig.com, whose owner and president is Richter.
The......
[more] SurfControl Says 'Brand Spoofing' Spams Up Nearly 500 Percent Since January 'Brand spoof' spam scams increased nearly 500 percent since January, and by 51 times since May 2003, SurfControl, the world's number one Web and e-mail filtering company, reported today. The company also warned individuals and companies to beware of a new dirty trick employed by brand spoof spammers -- a fake address bar that appears in an e-mail recipients' Web browser -- that makes
these e-mail scams look even more......
[more] E-Mail Scammer Gets Four Years An Internet scammer who used e-mail and a fraudulent Web site to steal hundreds of credit card numbers was sentenced to almost four years in jail Tuesday, one of the stiffest-ever penalties handed down for online fraud.
Houston, Texas federal court Judge Vanessa Gilmore sentenced Houston resident Zachary Hill to 46 months in jail for his role in duping consumers into turning over 473 credit card numbers.
The Justice Department said the sentence is "one of,......
[more] Can Spam Not Working, But FBI Poised to Bust Gangs Spammers and anti-spammers don't think the US CAN-SPAM Act is working, but for different reasons, it emerged during a Congressional hearing yesterday, at which the FBI also said it is closing in on spam gangs with potential ties to organized crime.
Jana Monroe, assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division, told a hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee yesterday that the FBI's Operation SLAM-Spam has identified 100 spammers, targeted 50......
[more] Secure E-Mail Specs Could Merge Microsoft meets with SPF author to craft a technology standard. After submitting its Caller ID e-mail authentication specification to a standards body, Microsoft is discussing merging its spec with another, called Sender Policy Framework, or SPF.
E-mail experts from Microsoft will spend a weekend meeting with SPF author Meng Weng Wong of Pobox.com, looking for ways to merge the closely-related Caller ID and SPF standards, according to Wong.
"Basically, we'......
[more] Spam clogs German government's e-mail system German parliamentarians and government employees experienced long delays with their e-mail delivery earlier this week, following a flood of spam that clogged the government's e-mail system, a spokesman at the Federal Ministry of the Interior said Friday.
"We aren't having any difficulty so far today but, yes, we have had problems this week," the spokesman said, declining to say whether the flood of unwanted e-mail was the result of a targeted att......
[more] Two thirds of emails now spam: official Spam hotspots are emerging as the global levels of junk mail worldwide continue to increase. More than two thirds (67.6 per cent) of the 840m emails scanned by filtering firm MessageLabs last month was identified as spam. MessageLabs figures also indicate significant regional variations and spam "hot spots", despite attempts to deter spammers through legislation.
Currently, email traffic sent to the United States, the UK, Germany, Australia and Hong K......
[more] Porn spammers ignore new labelling rule Senders of pornographic spam are failing to comply with a new US rules that require a warning in the subject line Spammers flooding the Internet with pornographic solicitations apparently are not abiding by a new federal rule that took effect last week.
Not only did illegal sexually-explicit spam fail to slow down after the regulations took effect on 19 May, but pornographic email measured by one anti-spam company jumped from about 2 million messages i......
[more] Spam surge 'turning Britain into e-pariah' Criticism of the UK's spam laws is growing nearly as quickly as the problem of junk mail itself The government's failure to give businesses protection from unsolicited commercial email risks turning the UK into an Internet outcast, according to one of its political opponents.
Michael Fabricant, the shadow minister for economic affairs, claimed this week that Britain's anti-spam laws need to be strengthened, given the continued rise in the amount of......
[more] Spam Trojans a Growing Problem for ISPs Most Spam Now Originating from Residential Broadband Networks Worms, Spam Trojans to Blame Spam traffic created and routed by spam "trojans" is clogging ISP mail servers, forcing unplanned network upgrades and stoking antagonism between large and small ISPs, according to an analysis by Sandvine Incorporated. Spam trojans are likely responsible for up to 80% of all spam.
What used to be merely a nuisance is becoming a major headache for service provider......
[more] Zombie PCs generate 80 per cent of spam Majority of junk mail coming from home PCs infected with spam Trojans Four-fifths of the spam clogging ISPs' mail servers and affecting businesses emanates from so-called zombie home PCs infected with spam Trojans, according to security firm Sandvine.
The company found that Trojans, typically installed surreptitiously by worms or spyware, exploit vulnerabilities to bypass normal email routing and drop spam messages directly into end user machines.......
[more] ITU to hold spam summit Telcos and ISPs invited to tackle growing menace of junk email The world's leading telcos and internet service providers will gather in Geneva next month to discuss the development of an anti-spam framework.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) will serve as a forum for governments, regulators and consumer groups.
Because spam is a potential threat to digital services and a "significant and growing problem for users, networks and the internet as a whole......
[more] Spam landscape bleaker than ever Columnist Jonathan B. Spira says now that CAN-SPAM has made the problem worse, e-mail is losing its value because legitimate messages are outnumbered sour sales pitches. It is perhaps no coincidence that, while spam e-mail volume is increasing seemingly without bounds, more and more of my correspondents have commented that they "missed" an important piece of e-mail.
This led me to study the impact that the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography......
[more] Microsoft calls for outbound filtering against spam In its continuing fight against unsolicited commercial e-mail, Microsoft plans to filter outgoing messages on its consumer mail services and is busy developing new "proofing" technologies, the software maker's chief spam fighter said Thursday.
The fight is also one against the clock. Microsoft last year set a two-year goal to make spam a problem of the past. There are 19 months left, Ryan Hamlin, general manager of Microsoft's Security Tec......
[more] Zombie PCs spew out 80% of spam Four-fifths of spam now emanates from computers contaminated with Trojan horse infections, according to a study by network management firm Sandvine out this week. Trojans and worms with backdoor components such as Migmaf and SoBig have turned infected Windows PCs into drones in vast networks of compromised zombie PCs.
Sandvine reckons junk mails created and routed by "spam Trojans" are clogging ISP mail servers, forcing unplanned network upgrades and stoking......
[more] Microsoft's anti-spam plan 'hijacked by zombies' Microsoft's plan to reduce spam by forcing an email sender's machine to solve a puzzle may be defeated by the Internet's army of zombie PCs, say security experts One of Microsoft's plans to fight the spam epidemic is unlikely to adversely affect spammers or reduce the quantity of spam, according to security experts.
Microsoft's chairman Bill Gates has been calling for the IT industry to work together and eradicate the spam problem. About six m......
[more] United front against spam urged The European Commission has urged the computer industry to sort out its anti-spam strategy. Lack of co-operation between all those tackling spam was holding back efforts to stem unwanted commercial messages, said EC official Philippe Gerard.
At an anti-spam meeting in London, he said it was up to industry to do its part now that laws were in place to prosecute spammers
Junk mail accounts for nearly 70% of e-mails worldwide, say experts.
"We see differ......
[more] EU attacks anti-spam industry A senior European Union official has berated the anti-spam industry for failure to agree a common strategy. Philippe Gerard said that lack of co-operation was handicapping the fight to hold back the junk mail tsunami.
"We see different initiatives going in all different directions and the effectiveness is maybe not there," Gerard, an official with the EC's Information Society directorate, told an anti-spam meeting in London. The BBC reports that Gerard said tha......
[more] Firms won't pay extra for spam filters Few European companies willing to pay more to their ISPs for protection The problem of spam continues to get worse - but few European companies are willing to pay extra to their Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for protection.
Ian Fogg, senior broadband analyst with Jupiter Research, said that virus writers and spammers are increasingly working together, so services that deal with these problems can be bundled together naturally.
But speaking at th......
[more] Spam Explosion Set Off by Russians Russian gangs of spammers are so prolific that by December, junk e-mails could account for 90 percent of all messages sent via the Internet -- and Moscow does not want to do anything about it, a leading anti-spammer said Wednesday.
Steve Linford, director of London-based Spamhaus, a research and lobby group that works closely with U.S. and European law enforcement agencies, said that Russian computer gangs are directly responsible for some two-thirds of th......
[more] Microsoft Lays on More Spam Lawsuits Microsoft Corp has added eight more US lawsuits to its anti-spam enforcement campaign, meaning the firm now has filed over 80 separate cases related to alleged spamming activities over the last few years.
This week, the company used the US federal CAN-SPAM Act and its local Washington state spam statute to sue potentially dozens of individuals and companies, all of which are currently listed as "John Doe" defendants.
The complaints allege that the de......
[more] Spam gangs exploit UK legal loophole Britain seen as soft touch by groups from continent who can bombard the country's email inboxes with impunity, warn campaigners. Gangs of European spammers are moving to Britain to exploit a legal loophole which allows them to bombard email inboxes with impunity, anti-spam experts warned yesterday.
Campaigners have claimed the gangs are moving from countries such as Italy, where they face severe financial penalties or prison, to Britain, where the most they......
[more] Justifiying anti-spam costs Analyzing the toll unwanted e-mail takes on productivity, bandwidth, storage and support aids your attack. If spam has a bright side, it's that the universal annoyance this unwanted e-mail causes everyone from the loading dock manager to the chairman of the board makes it easier for IT to win spending approval for tools to help fight the beast.
Spam's strain on corporate coffers isn't just in lost productivity, which some companies report can be in the hundreds of......
[more] Canadian spam king won't send more e-mail A Canadian man accused of being one of the world's biggest spammers has agreed to stop sending the junk messages and plans to educate children about the dangers of the Internet, a newspaper reported Tuesday.
In March, Yahoo! Inc. sued Eric Head, his father and brother as part of a worldwide industry crackdown on hundreds of people sending unsolicited e-mail, or spam.
Yahoo alleged the three men ran a huge spamming operation and sent more than 94......
[more] Outlook's security compromised by spammers Spammers have found a way to bypass Outlook 2003's anti-spam security by embedding images into their emails Spammers who send pornographic pictures in the hope of enticing the recipient to signing up to an adult Web site have discovered a way to bypass Outlook 2003's security features, which are designed to stop potentially offensive content being automatically displayed in the preview window.
The latest version of Microsoft's Outlook was built with......
[more] Spammers start to use spyware Spammers have started to use hacking software that hides itself on your computer collecting information about you and what you do on the internet.
According to email security firm MessageLabs, ‘spyware’ is being installed to automatically send personal information about the PC’s owner back to the spammer.
Spammers then incorporate the personal information into spam emails to send back to the victim, who might be less suspicious of the emails because they ap......
[more] ISPs Gang Up on Spammers Even unwitting spammers could lose Internet access under tough proposal. An industry organization representing heavyweight e-mail providers Yahoo, Microsoft, America Online, and EarthLink have teamed on recommendations for ending spam, including cutting off the senders' Internet access.
A Statement of Intent, released Tuesday by the Anti-Spam Technical Alliance (ASTA), lists suggestions and "best practice" recommendations for ISPs, e-mail service providers, governmen......
[more] Spammers use your cat's name to sell you Viagra Spammers are using spyware to steal personal information -- such as a pet's name -- so they can send spam emails with personalised subject lines Spammers have started using spyware to steal personal information so they can customise the subject lines of unsolicited emails to increase their chances of being read.
Research by email security firm MessageLabs has revealed that spammers are targeting companies and individuals with unsolicited messag......
[more] Spam is making computers sick Spam overload is making computers sick and driving users mad. Research commissioned by Yahoo finds that the average British PC has nine 'sick days' per year, two more than the average for workers.
Six of these are wasted battling with spam and three more days are lost due to viruses.
Nearly half of British computer users find dealing with junk e-mails more stressful than traffic jams and the majority want service providers to act.
Lethargy
Over half o......
[more] Spam costs businesses millions every year: report Businesses without anti-spam solutions lose around US$4.1 million in productivity each year for firms with 5,000 e-mail users. This is according to IDC's white paper titled What you can do and should do about the rising cost of spam. The paper details how spam works, the relative cost of spam, the impact of spam and how to assess solutions and outlines tactics to help businesses fight spam.
According to IDC, e-mail users in organisations wit......
[more] US, UK and Australia sign anti-spam act The UK, US and Australia are combining forces to combat spam. They have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to promote joint enforcement and investigation of spammers across the three countries.
Stephen Timms, the UK communications minister, today called on other countries to join the trio in their anti-spam crusade. He said the MoU is "not going to solve spam overnight but it is going to help. It reinforces our determination to tackle spam with......
[more] China remains haven for spam Web sites The number of unique new unsolicited e-mail - spam - messages has risen 42% from 350,000 per day at the end of 2003 to 500,000 a day by the end of June, according to anti-spam vendor Commtouch Software.
And while 49 countries have been identified as hosting Web sites referenced in spam e-mails, China is still the host for 73.5% of such sites, Commtouch said in a statement Wednesday. Spammers include those site links to provide more information regardin......
[more] Junk mail host nations named and shamed Five countries are hosting the overwhelming majority - a staggering 99.68 per cent - of spammer websites, according to a study out yesterday.
Most spam that arrives in email boxes contains a URL to a website within an email, to allow users to buy spamvertised products online. While 49 countries around the world are hosting spammer websites, unethical hosting firms overwhelmingly operate from just a few global hotspots. Anti-spam vendors Commtouch recko......
[more] Spam could drive millions from Internet Millions of users may abandon the Internet and phone messaging systems unless governments and software companies join forces to block the spread of spam, say key figures in an anti-spam drive.
The global battle against spammers who use the Internet to disseminate pornography, distribute unsolicited sales pitches and engage in the new menace of "phishing" can be won in two years, officials running a three-day U.N. meeting told a news conference on Tuesda......
[more] ITU wants spam dead within two years Conference delegates call for international co-operation to defeat 'epidemic' Delegates at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) spam conference have called for standardised, tougher worldwide anti-spam legislation, which they believe could stamp out junk email within the next two years.
The ITU has brought together regulators from 60 countries and a number of international organisations, including the World Trade Organisation and the Cou......
[more] ISPs look inward to stop spam Many major ISPs recently have come to this realization about the fight against spam: They are both part of the solution and part of the problem.
Every U.S. ISP uses anti-spam techniques to catch unwanted messages coming into their networks before they reach users. Recently, thanks to the urging of industry groups and coordination among providers, ISPs also are taking measures to limit the spam emanating from their networks. While no one is declaring the war......
[more] New SurfControl Resources Help IT Managers Increase the Value of IT Investments Deployment and Best Practices Guides Help Reduce Vulnerabilities and Optimize Network Resources Despite predictions for increased IT spending in 2004, many network managers are still facing pressure to help lower the total cost of ownership of the corporate network infrastructure, reported SurfControl (London: SRF), the world leader in enterprise Web and e-mail filtering. In response, SurfControl today introduced Su......
[more] 'Spam King' escapes $20m fine - by $19.95m 'I will be a good boy from now on, honest…' Last week, self-proclaimed Spam King and ladies underwear seller Scott Richter, was staring down the barrel of a $20m fine courtesy of New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer. Now, Richter has agreed to play by the rules and Spitzer has agreed to drop his price by £19.95m.
Richter, proprietor of 'email marketing' company OptInRealBig.com - dubbed the world's second most prolific spammer by anti-spam organi......
[more] Australian law claims spam success Legislation designed to cut back on junk emails and texts appears to be having some success Down Under The Spam Act 2003 has led to the closure of several major Australian-based spammers, the Australian communications Authority (ACA) claimed today.
Acting ACA chairman Dr Bob Horton said that the thwarted spammers had reacted to an ACA warning in late March that the Act was due to come into force in April and that they would need to comply with it.
"The ACA’......
[more] Some People Like Spam According To Poll That everyone hates spam is considered a universal truth. A new poll suggests that the hatred isn't as universal as thought. According to a Yahoo Mail global survey of 3,100 Internet users, 20 percent of U.S. residents report buying products from spammers and upward of 30 percent have responded to spam.
The survey, conducted in May, give spammers cause for joy. The industry generally considers a response rate of 0.5 percent superb for spam messages. Alt......
[more] IBM Research Joins Fight Against Spam IBM Corp.'s research arm on Friday will debut a new spam filtering test platform called SpamGuru at the first Conference on E-Mail and Spam in Mountain View, Calif.
The new offering will make its way to the enterprise with the release of IBM's Lotus Workplace Messaging 2.0 product later this quarter.
SpamGuru, which is designed to work with other anti-spam products already on the market, is a server-based product that combines a number of spam-blocking t......
[more] Think Globally, Block Locally Spam is a global problem: Even though most of it originates in the United States, the bulk of it is sent from overseas on behalf of American spammers. Is law or technology the best way to solve the problem?
That's the question considered by privacy experts at a conference called "International Spam Law & Policies: The Global Case." Most speakers firmly came down against legislation, promoting a mix of private legal action and technology.
The conference, hel......
[more] Dutch telecom watchdog to take on auto-diallers, spyware Although its anti-spam activities have somewhat stolen the limelight, OPTA, the Dutch telecoms regulator, is starting to deal with other unlawful internet activities—like the surreptitious placement of cookies, auto-diallers and spyware on the hard drives of unsuspecting computer users—and is gearing up to handle complaints and pursue offenders.
Part of the Telecommunication Act stipulates that it is illegal to covertly access personal......
[more] Pupils bear spam e-mail overload The majority of e-mail messages being sent to school children in London are spam. The first week of a project to filter the e-mails travelling across the London Grid for Learning has revealed that 75% of the messages are junk.
The most popular subjects for the spam were the drugs Viagra and Valium. Much of the remaining mail was pornographic.
The network provides more than a million school children access to net-based learning aids.
Drugs and porn
The London......
[more] Spam is born in the U.S.A. The vast majority of spam originates in the United States and this summer, like last, much of it is pornographic in nature. Nearly 86 per cent of all spam messages sent since May 2004 came from the United States, according to e-mail security firm CipherTrust. This indicates spammers are finding ways around that country's anti-spam legislation.
U.S. spam-sending computers have been quite busy, as just 28 percent of IP addresses used to send spam are located in the co......
[more] Better checks to stop spam An open-source anti-spam group is pioneering technical changes to the email system Open-source anti-spam specialist ASSP this week became the latest software developer to implement the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) anti-spam scheme.
Beta versions of ASSP with SPF support are currently being tested, and SPF is set to be included in the next version of ASSP, expected soon. SPF extends the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and Domain Name System (DNS) so systems do no......
[more] Somebody else's spam It's very depressing how almost every conversation about the Internet devolves into a discussion of how to combat spam. It's even more depressing how much worse spam keeps getting. And more depressing again still that despite the many technical conferences currently being conducted on the subject, how ineffective most current strategies seem to be. This week, LINX – the London Internet eXchange, through which about 90 percent of the UK's Internet traffic passes – announced......
[more] Can IT keep up with malware authors? Web users and technology professionals alike are both battling a flood of malicious software - and it increasingly looks like the 'bad guys' are winning Are malware authors now too far ahead of information security professionals for the latter to ever recover?
Indications are information security professionals -- and ordinary users of information and communication technology -- are increasingly on the back foot.
A new report from a United States-based rese......
[more] DIY phishing kits found on the internet Further rise in attacks likely with easy-to-use kits free to download Do-it-yourself phishing kits are being made available for download free of charge from the internet, security watchers have warned.
Security company Sophos said that the availability of such kits, which require no technical knowledge to use, means that anyone with web access can potentially launch their own phishing attack and attempt to defraud unsuspecting computer users.
The DIY kit......
[more] Stopping spam at the source New antispam technology standards are on the way that promise to hit spammers where it hurts the most--their wallets. At issue is the ability to authenticate the original source of e-mail messages, a major hole in the current system that allows spammers to easily forge return addresses and hide their tracks.
This month, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) reviewed several e-mail authentication proposals, agreeing to fast-track a submission from Microsoft know......
[more] US charged as largest spam producer Anti-spam laws appear to have little impact, research claims The United States is the biggest creator of spam emails, according to a new survey by anti-spam and virus protection firm Sophos.
Despite the introduction of anti-spam legislation nine months ago, America tops the table of the world's 12 worst offenders, producing more than 42 percent of all junk email reaching inboxes.
More than 40 per cent of spam is being distributed using 'zombie computers,' wh......
[more] Arrests made for spam, ID thefts Federal and state law enforcement agencies have arrested or charged dozens of people with crimes related to junk e-mail, identity theft and online scams in recent weeks, according to several people involved in the actions.
The cases, which have been brought by law enforcement offices around the country and without publicity, are expected to be announced by Attorney General John Ashcroft in a news conference in Washington on Thursday.
This year, federal authori......
[more] US cracks down on spam mountain John Ashcroft, the attorney General of the US, is expected to announce on Thursday dozens of lawsuits against alleged spammers following a low key campaign against the practise across the US. The arrests have been made over the last few weeks as part of a coordinated effort to crack down on spamming, dubbed Operation Slam Spam.
The New York Times reports that the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has given significant funds to the campaign. The DMA is wants to......
[more] Aussie PM hires firm to spam electorate Australian Prime Minister John Howard has admitted hiring his son's company to send party political emails to voters, which opponents says violates the spirit of the country's Spam Act The government agency charged with policing Australia's anti-spam legislation has ruled out investigating a spamming scandal involving the Prime Minister, John Howard and his son, Tim Howard.
However, the Australian Communications Authority said the matter would be "discus......
[more] SurfControl reports new spam scams SurfControl technical researchers reported a fresh rash of spam scams in August that use new techniques and current events to dupe computer users.
Google's IPO and the Olympics are being used as bait to lure users into clicking through to new scams.
The anti-spam company found one scam that asks users to download the latest Google Toolbar, saying that it will stop pop-ups and spyware.
SurfControl technical staff says the downloaded program has all the signs......
[more] First 'warspamming' case reaches court A landmark case in America could establish that spammers really do take advantage of insecure wireless networks A US citizen is thought to have become the first person to be accused of hacking a wireless network in order to send spam.
Nicholas Tombros, 37, is charged under the US CAN-SPAM act, which aims to clamp down on unsolicited junk mail. Prosecutors allege that Tombros used a laptop to sniff out insecure residential wireless access points in a Los An......
[more] Spam frittered away by FBI diet US Operation Web Snare may be responsible for drop in junk mail volumes An American cyber-crime initiative may be helping to limit volumes of spam and viruses, according to MessageLabs.
The security firm has reported a 10 per cent fall in the amount of spam it has seen hitting mailboxes in August, and that the proportion of emails carrying viruses dropped about half a per cent during the same month.
Of all email scanned by MessageLabs' anti-spam service, 84.2 pe......
[more] Spammers get the boot from web host See, it can be done... ISPs take note... Web hosting and connectivity company Savvis Communications has cancelled about 40 accounts, at a cost of as much as $2m per month, from businesses that were earmarked as spammers and believed to be among some of the worst bulk-mailers.
Savvis halted the accounts after anti-spam organisations notified the company that it was providing web hosting services to known unsolicited emailers. The spammers in question were lis......
[more] Leader: Spam sufferers - show some more patience "Miraculous weight loss pills" meet "unmiraculous wait gain policies"... The latest attempt to out-legislate the spammers was launched in London today with pleas to the media to bite our tongues when it comes to the - with hindsight justified - cynicism which met previous initiatives. We are trying. Honest.
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is sitting down to talk with the EU, the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and the UK information commission......
[more] China wears spam hosting crown China heads list of spam hosting countries but the U.S., U.K., Brazil and Romania lead the world in sending phishing and fraud emails, according to a report on spam trends in September by Commtouch Software Ltd., of Mountain View, which sells proprietary anti-spam products.
The hurricanes which struck Florida apparently decreased the amount of spam being sent, according to Commtouch, which said it bases its report on its analysis of "hundreds of millions" of spam......
[more] Spam crackdown signs up 15 countries Finland, Norway, Sweden and Ireland are ready to show they mean business. China and Russia sadly absent... An impressive 15 countries have signed up to the 'London Action Plan on Spam' - the first fruit of the anti-spam enforcement summit which began in London yesterday, jointly hosted by the Office of Fair Trading and the US Federal Trade Commission.
Among those on the list are representative bodies from Australian, Korea, the UK and importantly the US, whi......
[more] Spam: the digital epidemic of the XXI century Spam or unsolicited commercial email has become a real epidemic that, as well as slowing down users’ communications, also has a significant financial impact in corporate environments.
According to Spam Filter Software Review, in 2002, in the United States alone, junk mail cost businesses almost 9 billion dollars. What’s more, in 2003, 40 percent of the emails circulating around the Internet were spam and each user received an average of 2,200 spam......
[more] CyberGuard polishes Webwasher appliance New content security device incorporates software functionality Network security vendor CyberGuard has launched its first Webwasher appliance following its acquisition of the German software vendor earlier this year.
CyberGuard bought Webwasher for $40m in May in a bid to add functionality to its appliance range.
The CyberGuard WW1000 Content Security Appliance, aimed at the medium to large corporate marketplace, integrates Webwasher's Content Security M......
[more] Hackers use Google to defeat anti-spam measures Fraudsters running a phishing scam are using Google redirects to beat anti-spam tools and claim new Yahoo email accounts for themselves Antivirus experts have discovered a phishing email that redirects users three times through Google to a fraudulent registration Web site in order to beat antispam technology.
The email purports to be from Yahoo administrators and attempts to dupe users into signing up for new email accounts with the company. But u......
[more] Experts say spam fight needs to be more strategic The fight against spam to date has been too tactical and not strategic enough, according to experts at the Next Generation Networks conference.
"There's too much of the thinking, 'I've got a problem. How do I stop it from hurting me?'" says Phillip Hallam-Baker, principal scientist at VeriSign. The thinking ought to be how to stop spam in general, he says.
"It's a public health problem. We have to look for ways to stop the infection from sprea......
[more] Was Microsoft's e-mail message spam? Some people who got it think so For a year, Microsoft Corp. has extolled the virtues of the Can-Spam Act, which Congress passed in late 2003 to crack down on purveyors of unwanted bulk e-mail. The company, with other Internet and marketing firms, helped craft the act and has sued several spammers under its provisions.
But Bob Poortinga thinks the software giant is engaged in its own spamming.
Last week, Poortinga got a lengthy "executive letter" from Micros......
[more] Websense Enterprise Version 5.5 gains key safeguards In Websense Inc.'s Websense Enterprise Version 5.5, the Internet access control vendor has effectively added real-time Internet attack protection to its list of dos and don'ts.
Websense Enterprise 5.5 was released last month. Although the real-time database updates, along with a mobile client for laptops, are new, the foundation of Websense Enterprise 5.5 has been around for some time.
Websense Enterprise 5.5 is priced starting at $15 per y......
[more] Hackers nobble Lycos anti-spam plan Lycos vigilante attack on spammers has been hit by a vigilante attack. Spammers are suspected.
Lycos was offering a screensaver which, once downloaded, would launch a Distributed Denial of Service attack against spam websites. A DDS attack makes constant requests to a specific part of a website until it gets overloaded and falls over. Such attacks are illegal in most countries. Security firm FSecure advised people not to download the program because of legal......
[more] Lycos army shoots itself in foot? The Lycos zombie army may have been the victim of its own strength, an antivirus expert believes Lycos may accidentally have launched a denial-of-service attack against its own anti-spam campaign Web site, "Make Love Not Spam".
According to security company F-Secure on Thursday, one of the Web sites Lycos targeted in its zombie army attack -- www.mortgage.info -- redirected traffic back to www.makelovenotspam.com. This means that Lycos could have targeted its o......
[more] Microsoft sues seven sex spammers Emails in violation of the 'brown paper wrapper' rule Microsoft today began an anti-spam blitz by filing seven lawsuits against hackers who allegedly used PCs infected with Trojans to send sexually explicit spam email that violated the Can-Spam US anti-spam law.
"Sexually explicit materials and publications for sale in stores are required by law to be covered from view with a brown paper wrapper, and it is important that consumers are protected online in the sa......
[more] Security is just a mouse click away Next time an e-card with a jolly message drops into your computer's inbox, think before you click it open – it could be a virus which will implant itself in your machine and spread before you even realise it.
Computer users across the world are struggling against a rising tide of viruses and spam which corrupt data, slow down or take over systems and fill inboxes with junk. Viruses are mutating and spreading so fast that anti-virus software cannot keep up.......
[more] Trojan program poses as anti-spam screensaver A program that spies on keystrokes and mouse clicks to capture passwords and other personal information from computer users has begun circulating disguised as a screensaver purporting to attack spam-related websites.
This “Trojan horse” program is the latest twist in a controversial saga that began with the release of an anti-spam screensaver by Lycos Europe on 30 November. The www.makelovenotspam.com screensaver aimed to clog up the bandwidth of s......
[more] One in five Brits 'buy software from spam' More than one in five British consumers (22 per cent) has purchased software in response to spam email, a study by Forrester Research claims. The study - sponsored by the Business Software Alliance - found that a substantial minority of punters are quite happy to make junk mail purchases across a broad range of products.
Other popular junk mail purchases included clothes and jewellery (23 per cent), leisure and travel (20 per cent), finance (18 per ce......
[more] Spam rage causes radio reporter to lose her job A Philadelphia radio reporter has quit her job after leaving an angry voicemail with an online lobbying group she believed were spamming her.
27-year-old Rachel Buchman, a freelance reporter for WHYY-FM in Philadelphia, said she became increasingly incensed by what she believed to be unsolicited junk emails from conservative organisation laptoplobbyist.com.
Buchman gave her work number at WHYY-FM in the voicemail message, which led laptoplobbyis......
[more] Microsoft Buys Anti-Spam, Anti-Spyware Software Company Microsoft has bought a software company that makes anti-spyware and other security applications. Details of the purchase of Giant Company Software Inc. are hard to come by, but Microsoft says a free beta app based on Giant software will be available for Windows customers in a month.
The application is being described by Microsoft as a tool that will protect against spyware as well as detect and remove spyware already on a PC running Wind......
[more] Microsoft sues seven spammers for Can-Spam Act violations Microsoft has filed seven lawsuits against senders of bulk e-mail for failing to label sexually explicit messages as required by the federal Can-Spam Act, the company said Thursday. The lawsuits, filed in Washington State Superior Court in King County, allege that the defendants violated Can-Spam's "brown paper wrapper" requirement, which calls for labeling sexually oriented content as "Sexually-Explicit" in the e-mail subject header and......
[more] AOL spam case: Judge rejects guilty plea Not conviced theft of email addresses contravenes Can-Spam Act... A district judge in New York has refused to accept a guilty plea from a former America Online employee charged with stealing 92 million email addresses from the online giant, citing vagueness in the prosecutors' argument that the theft violated the federal Can-Spam Act.
US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein on Tuesday postponed the hearing in hopes of consulting with lawmakers in Washington,......
[more] FBI backs transatlantic anti-spam summit A delegation of British MPs heads over to Washington next month to discuss information security with US politicians.
During their three-day trip to Washington, the MPs aim to help set the agenda for international policy on internet security issues, including spam, viruses, zombie computers, rogue diallers and denial of service attacks.
Claire Hobson, DTI head of UK Telecoms Policy, who leads the Government’s anti-spam policy, will join members of All-P......
[more] Germany gets tough on spam Penalties of up to €50,000 face spammers according to draft proposals of a new German law. Under the new plans the Act for the Use of Tele-Services will be expanded to encompass new spamming legislation.
"Penalties are always good, although in this case we'd like them to be a bit higher. €50,000 will allow the professional spammers to keep on spamming because they can offset that sort of fine." said Steve Linford director of anti-spam service Spamhaus. "But I do thin......
[more] Project Honeypot aims to trap spammers A blow-by-blow account of how one of the world's most prolific senders of spam email was tracked down and prosecuted had an audience of spam fighters on the edge of their seats last week.
After years developing anti-spam technology and drafting legislation to outlaw spammers, the delegates at MIT's annual Spam Conference in Boston were overjoyed to see the culprit nailed. "A successful trial with all the time and resources we're spending on this issue jus......
[more] Spammers 'tricking ISPs' into sending junk mail A massive spam spike is predicted, and one expert says that 'it's the beginning of the email meltdown' Spam levels are about to skyrocket, according to experts who warned this week that spammers have developed a new way of delivering their wares.
According to SpamHaus -- an anti-spam organisation which compiles blacklists blocking eight billion messages a day -- a new piece of malware has been created that takes over a PC and then uses it to send......
[more] Spam plateaus - but worse times to come? The reports of spam's death have been greatly exaggerated... The level of spam hitting users' inboxes has reached a plateau, showing little increase in recent months, leading some in the industry and the media to predict we may be on the verge of a meaningful decline in volumes of unsolicited mail.
But any celebration is misguided and more than a little premature according to those working at the coal face, with one anti-spam expert warning it could eve......
[more] Spam E-Mail Set To Rocket The SpamHaus project, a global anti-spam group, says spam e-mails could pile up in the next few months as junk mailers have adopted a new spamming technique. They have found a way to send massive amounts of spam via ISPs directly, instead of going through individual machines.
Normally, once a spam IP address has been found, that computer or hosting company is blacklisted and mail is restricted in order to stop the flood of junk e-mail.
But by targeting the big ISPs......
[more] Spammers' ISP attacks 'all hype and bluster' Industry hits back at zombie claims from SpamHaus Security vendors have accused anti-spam experts at Spamhaus of hyping a trick that allows spammers to take advantage of internet service providers' mail servers.
Earlier this week Steve Linford, director of Spamhaus, warned that email infrastructures were on the verge of collapse because a new worm is forcing zombie computers to relay spam via ISPs' mail servers. This, Linford said, is a huge problem......
[more] MCI 'makes $5m a year from spam gangs' Spamhaus has slammed MCI for hosting a website selling spamming software that is allegedly integral to the illegal trade in compromised PCs. The site - send-safe.com - sells spamware called Send Safe which uses broadband-connected PCs infected by viruses such as SoBig to distribute junk mail.
More than 70 per cent of spam comes from PCs infected with viruses or trojans, according to Spamhaus, a leading anti-spam organisation. By using compromised machines......
[more] 13 EU countries link up to fight spam Anti-spam enforcement authorities in 13 European countries have agreed to work together when investigating complaints about cross-border spam from anywhere within the EU. The countries are Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands and Spain. The idea is to make it easier to identify and prosecute spammers anywhere in Europe.
Viviane Reding, information society and media commissi......
[more] Microsoft acquisition adds to anti-virus, anti-spam arsenal Microsoft last week made another acquisition to strengthen its anti-virus and anti-spam strategy and signal corporate customers that it plans to increase protection for desktops and servers.
The question now is how will Microsoft pull together all the disparate technology it has acquired and been developing over the past 18 months? Microsoft bought anti-virus and anti-spam vendor Sybari Software for an undisclosed sum last week, addi......
[more] Earthlink files latest spam lawsuit Earthlink continues the corporate backlash against spam by launching four lawsuits against alleged spamming outfits. The lawsuits, against defendants in California, Florida, Nevada and Washington, accuse the spammers of violating several state and federal laws including the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (Can-Spam).
But although welcomed, some have questioned whether the lawsuit will be successful.
"It's good news," s......
[more] IT security industry faces a tough 2005 Days of wine and roses over as corporates streamline security budgets This year will mark a period of reckoning for the IT security industry as spending begins to decline, Gartner has predicted.
Victor Wheatman, managing vice president at the analyst firm, told the RSA Conference in San Francisco that by 2006 security spending will have dropped to four or five per cent of corporate IT budgets. In more efficient companies it could drop lower with no harm t......
[more] UK lectures China on spam The British Government is to host a debate in which China and the rest of Asia will be urged to toughen up on spam. The event, organised by the Department for Trade and Industry (DTI), will take place on Tuesday as part of a wider ecommerce forum. Representatives from China, Indonesia, Japan and the EU member states will hear from industry experts about the threat of spam.
"I've talked to the Chinese before, they are very attentive and take everything in but they don'......
[more] Industry unites against IM spam Days after the first arrest for instant-messaging spam, an innovative software product has been launched to help counter the menace of 'spim' Back in December, instant-messaging (IM) management company IMLogic partnered with security companies McAfee and Sybari (recently acquired by Microsoft) to build IMLogic's Threat Center, which aims to protect users from peer-to-peer and IM threats, such as viruses, worms, spim and malicious code. The centre monitors honeypot......
[more] Anti-spam spending set to soar Worldwide revenue to exceed $1.7bn in 2008, reports IDC As spam moves from nuisance to serious problem, spending on systems to fight the menace of unsolicited email will rocket, analysts have predicted.
According to a study by IDC, worldwide revenue for anti-spam packages will exceed $1.7bn in 2008 compared to $300m in 2003.
The analyst firm said that the development of spam from a mere nuisance to an increasingly serious and expensive problem is the driver behin......
[more] MCI divorces spam bride after 18 month affair MCI, the ISP formerly known as Worldcom, has finally booted off the website hosting spamming tool Send-Safe off its network. Send-Safe, written and run by Russian Ruslan Ibragimov, is the most popular vehicle used by spammers to distribute unsolicited marketing emails.
The news has been greeted enthusiastically by anti-spam campaigners who had been lobbying MCI to stop hosting the Send-Safe website for some 18 months.
"MCI kicked Send-Safe off its......
[more] SurfControl E-mail Filter Receives Five Star Stating From CRN E-mail Filtering and Anti-spam Solution Achieves CRN Test Center Recommended Status From Leading Reseller Publication SurfControl, the world leader in enterprise Web and e-mail filtering, today announced SurfControl E-mail Filter has received a Five Star Test Center Recommended rating from CRN. The SurfControl e-mail filtering solution, which enables businesses to protect people, systems, and information from spam, spyware, phishing......
[more] First spam conviction overturned Tech terms and spam laws confuse jurors One of the first felony spam convictions in the US has been overturned - and the judge thought jurors in the case were bamboozled by technological terms.
Jessica DeGroot was jailed along with her brother, Jeremy Jaynes, earlier this year after being convicted of spamming offences. Judge Thomas D. Horne ruled that there was no "rational basis" for DeGroot's conviction and added that the anti-spam law used to convict the pa......
[more] Mixed reaction to Microsoft spyware Good for consumers, but 'the enterprise won't touch it' Security firms at the CeBIT trade show in Hanover are giving mixed opinions about Microsoft's newly developed spyware products.
"We do not think that single-point protection products are much use," said Olaf Linder, director of Symantec's security services.
"You need a good mix of antivirus, anti-spam and anti-spyware to give effective protection. That is especially true in the enterprise sector."
Syma......
[more] CyberGuard snags anti-spam outfit Zix for $3.6m Security firm CyberGuard has bought the anti-spam, anti-virus and URL filtering business of Zix Corporation for $3.6m in cash. The deal - announced Monday, 14 March and approved by the boards of directors of the two companies - will see Zix's Web Inspector and Message Inspector products moved over to CyberGuard's portfolio.
The acquisition will give CyberGuard the opportunity to sell its Webwasher products to Zix's 1,600 enterprise customers and......
[more] Boston Celtics Select Aladdin eSafe for Powerful Anti-Virus, Web Security and Spyware Protection Aladdin Knowledge Systems today announced that the Boston Celtics basketball franchise chose Aladdin eSafe, the ultimate gateway-based security solution offering six comprehensive layers of content security that protect the team's entire administration from ever-growing Internet threats.
Known for dominating the NBA from 1957 to 1969 when they won 11 NBA Championships, the Boston Celtics hang more......
[more] IBM aims to spam the spammers New software is designed to help companies get a jump on hackers who try to breach computer systems via e-mail Electronic mail touting cut-rate Viagra or how to make big bucks working from home will get pitched right back to the senders by a free program from IBM Corp.
The program, announced Tuesday, will identify computers that originate unwanted e-mail, or spam, and bounce it back at the sender--in effect spamming the spammer. The program, designed for use by lar......
[more] Microsoft bankrupts the Spam King Scott Richter has filed for bankruptcy protection for his email marketing firm OptInRealBig.com, blaming a Microsoft lawsuit Scott Richter, self-confessed Spam King and one-time peddler of ladies' underwear, has filed for bankruptcy, with Microsoft cited as the main reason.
According to reports, Richter has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for his email marketing company, OptInRealBig.com.
Despite facing a $500,000 fine from New York attorney gener......
[more] We're getting used to spam. Apparently There's more of it, but it's less smutty. People are getting used to spam, even though there's more of it, because less of it is about sex and porn, according to a new survey.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project asked 1,421 random Internet users for their opinions about spam, e-mail and phishing scams. The data apparently showed that people seem to be less bothered by spam recently because they've seen a decline in the number about pornography.
If......
[more] New Spam Scam Exploits Pope's Death A new spam campaign is exploiting people's interest in and grief over the death of Pope John Paul II. The spam claims to offer readers a free collection of books written by the late pope. The email tells users to click on a link to receive the gift, but the link actually takes them to a Web site offering ''free money-making advice''. ''This is absolutely slimy,'' says Carole Theriault, a security consultant with Sophos, Inc., an anti-virus and anti-spam compa......
[more] Save us from spam The majority of UK consumers and small businesses are yet to deploy anti-spam filters. A poll of UK residential email users and SMEs published Monday found 57 per cent have no anti-spam filtering installed, leaving them unprotected from spam, key logging and phishing attacks. Four in five consumers (82 per cent) have anti-virus protection, predominantly desktop scanners.
Most consumers (60 per cent) polled in the survey from email filtering outfit Checkbridge reckon that thei......
[more] UK laws are failing to deter spam UK spam laws are failing to stop spammers, say campaigners. According to anti-spam organisation Spamhaus, loopholes in UK law render legislation useless in the fight against spammers. The majority of spam originates from the US but there are a handful of hardcore UK-based spammers. Since the law came into force over a year ago no UK spammers have been fined or prosecuted.
Loopholes
Internet service provider AOL is becoming frustrated by the lack of effective......
[more] Virus writers claim Blair's email account was hacked The Prime Minister's email account is the subject of a spam scam that can infect computers with Trojan horses. Don't fall for it Cybercriminals claimed on Friday that the Prime Minister's email account has been hacked, in the latest attempt to attack PCs with malware.
On the same day Tony Blair won a third term in government, a spam message was sent out stating that malicious hackers had penetrated his email account.
The email contains a l......
[more] Spam blacklisting for one million Telewest customers Telewest says action is "heavy-handed" but they can't say they didn't see it coming... One million Telewest customers have been blacklisted for sending spam by one of the most powerful anti-spam organisations on the web.
The Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS), whose blacklist is referenced by many anti-spam controls, imposed the block in response to the high number of Telewest customers whose machines have become compromised and ta......
[more] Save us from spam The majority of UK consumers and small businesses are yet to deploy anti-spam filters. A poll of UK residential email users and SMEs published Monday found 57 per cent have no anti-spam filtering installed, leaving them unprotected from spam, key logging and phishing attacks. Four in five consumers (82 per cent) have anti-virus protection, predominantly desktop scanners.
Most consumers (60 per cent) polled in the survey from email filtering outfit Checkbridge reckon that thei......
[more] ISPs urged to throttle spam zombies The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), along with more than 35 government agencies worldwide, announced an ambitious effort on Tuesday to get ISPs and other organisations to deliver the net from the plague of zombie spam networks. The group is encouraging ISPs to identify and quarantine customers whose PCs may have unwittingly been turned into spam zombies, under the control of hackers.
ISPs are also being encouraged to apply rate-limiting controls for email......
[more] Spam shame of the UK exposed Freedom of Information enquiry reveals those organisations who said you want spam into your work email... and the government listened... The UK is still dogged by the persistent problem of spam email and for all the government rhetoric there have been few real signs of any effective legislative easing of the situation.
silicon.com can now reveal this is due in part to the bungled consultation process that the DTI launched into addressing the spam issue after the pr......
[more] China signs anti-spam pact Slowly dealing with Internet menace The Chinese government has joined an international anti-spam effort started by the UK and US.
As the world's second-biggest source of unsolicited e-mail, the decision is hugely significant and comes ater months of discussion between UK and Chinese government officials. "We have long been keen to engage with China on the issue of spam," said Alun Michael, the UK's e-commerce minister.
According to the Department of Trade and Industr......
[more] Make our anti-spam tech the standard, say Yahoo! 'You won't regret it... ' An anti-spam technology that focuses on identifying forged email addresses has been proposed as a standard by Cisco Systems, Yahoo! and partners.
The companies, along with software makers Sendmail and PGP, submitted their DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) specification to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) this weekend. The IETF, a standards setting body, is expected to start discussing the technology during its......
[more] Sophos Introduces ZombieAlert Identifies 'zombie' computers on an organization's network; notifies customers if their IP addresses are listed in public Domain Name Server Blackhole Lists. Sophos, a developer of anti-virus and anti-spam software, today announced the availability of Sophos ZombieAlert, a new alert service that identifies 'zombie' computers on an organization's network.
Zombie computers are infected machines that give control to unauthorized and remote users, allowing them to send......
[more] Over 300 arrested in huge 419 scam investigation, Sophos reports 310 people have been arrested in Malaga, Spain as part of an investigation into a 300 million Euro ($363 million) lottery scam that attempted to rob innocent internet users out of their savings.
According to Spanish media reports, the FBI worked alongside Spanish authorities in what is believed to be the biggest round-up of so-called 419 or "Nigerian email" scammers.
Officers raided 166 properties, seizing 2000 cell phones, 32......
[more] U.K. Anti-Spam Policy Is Toothless The U.K. government and ISPs are doing little to tackle spam, according to the annual report from the Office of the Information Commissioner (ICO), according to a VNUnet piece in the E-Commerce Times. Apparently, no action was taken regarding the 600 spam complaints that the ICO had received in the previous 12 months. Thee ICO claimed that it lacks the necessary powers to pursue and prosecute spammers. It advises users to seek advice from their ISPs.
"This pr......
[more] Hackers Working On Cisco Exploit Late Friday, a law firm representing Internet Security Systems (ISS), the Atlanta security firm whose former employee disclosed a new attack technique on Cisco routers, forced some Web sites to pull copies of the worker's analysis.
And over the weekend, the Reuters wire service reported that hackers have started to work on a Cisco router exploit using former ISS employee Michael Lynn's information.
As expected, some sites were served Friday with legal letters......
[more] AOL in great spam bounty giveaway Want to know what it is like living the life of a successful spammer? A competition from ISP AOL is offering the bounty recovered from a spam conviction to help you find out. A Hummer H2 (gigantic military- car loved by ostentatious celebrities), $75,000 cash and $20,000 in gold are to be won in a competition on the AOL website beginning today [Wednesday]. The loot was recovered from Brad Bournival, a spam scourge who at the height of his powers delivered milli......
[more] UK soft on spam More must be done to fight junk emailers The UK government is embarrassingly soft on spammers. By its own admission, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is requesting stronger powers to tackle spammers and stop them sending unsolicited email.
Some reports say the ICO has received 600 complaints of spam over the last year but others say only 300 of those are 'actionable'. But what does 'actionable' really mean?
The ICO's current version of 'action' is to write to naughty......
[more] Phishers wheel out their latest scam; the little old lady Ebayers are being targeted by a new phishing scam designed to appeal to their better natures. Ebayers should be beware of a new phishing scam that masquerades as a message from a disabled little old lady.
According to experts at SophosLabs, the latest campaign centres around a plea for help allegedly from an 87-year old woman who is having difficulty using the popular eBay auction website. However, if recipients respond, they risk passin......
[more] UK failing to fight spam Anti-spam campaigners have branded the UK's anti-spam laws 'a waste of time and public money' as the Information Commissioner admits it hasn't prosecuted anyone for sending junk emails The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has admitted it fails to take legal steps against UK spammers while "successfully" enforcing regulations against 13 fax marketers.
The ICO, the UK's last official port of call to complain about spam, said it had received more complaints about il......
[more] Secure Computing buys CyberGuard for $295m Secure Computing is buying rival CyberGuard for $295 million.
Secure Computing expects to see revenue jump from $110 million per year to $200 million, said Mike Gallagher, senior vice president of product development. The company has warned of product changes and lay-offs.
"There is overlap in some assets," said Gallagher, pointing out that Secure Computing's G2 Sidewinder firewall competes directly with CyberGuard's Total Stream Protection line of f......
[more] Yahoo! accused of hosting thousands of phishing sites Anti-spam group Spamhaus says Yahoo! won't take them down... Yahoo! is hosting thousands of fraudulent websites that have domain names containing the words "bank", "PayPal" or "eBay", according to a leading anti-spam group Spamhaus.
Spamhaus claims Yahoo! is hosting almost 5,000 domain names using these words, many of which are linked to phishing scams.
Richard Cox, CIO at Spamhaus, said: "They are hosted on Yahoo! I just took three hot wor......
[more] Ireland celebrates first anti-spam conviction Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner, Billy Hawkes, has secured his first conviction for a breach of the country's anti-spam law. A similar law exists in the UK but the UK Commissioner, Richard Thomas, has taken no such action to date. Ireland is also considering stiffer penalties for spammers.
4's A Fortune Limited was found guilty of sending marketing messages to five mobile phones without the consent of the subscribers – in breach of Ireland's......
[more] Spam and scam 'could make internet unusable' The boom era of the internet - symbolised by the likes of Amazon, eBay and Lastminute.com - will soon be a thing of the past unless coordinated action is taken to improve security, Microsoft has warned.
An estimated £1.4 trillion was spent on e-commerce last year, and in Britain more than 11,000 new users come online every day. But the information superhighway is becoming so choked by spam, viruses and fraud that some experts believe it could become......
[more] Anti-spam user authentication is 'worse than useless' Claims that user authentication schemes will reduce spam are not just wrong but "wrongheaded", a security researcher warned on Friday.
User authentication schemes such as SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and Sender ID check if machines are allowed to send email from a claimed domain - a kind of caller line identification (more here on email authentication). But "this doesn't tell you who the actual sender was or the spaminess of a message," Ni......
[more] FBI shuts down 'number one spammer' A man alleged to be one of the world's worst spammers has been put out of business by the FBI, according to reports.
Documents unsealed earlier this month show that Alan Ralsky, a US citizen based in Michigan, had his operations effectively shut down by the FBI when agents raided his home and the home of his son-in-law in September.
During the raids, the Feds seized documents, disks and hardware belonging to Ralsky.
Ralsky currently appears as the world's......
[more] Spyware Overtakes all Internet Threats in 2005 Millions of dollars are being spent unnecessarily each month as North American businesses and consumers wrestle with what has become the biggest threat to security on the Internet. According to a study published last month, spyware issues now outnumber virus threats by more than 2 to 1. The same report said the average expenditure by large North American enterprises tops $130,000 USD per month.
"One of the reasons these users are spending so much......
[more] 'Spam' e-mail filters getting better - FTC E-mail "spammers" are aggressive as ever but Internet providers are getting better at blocking junk messages before they reach users' inboxes, according to a U.S. Federal Trade Commission study released on Monday.
The FTC found that spammers continue to "scrape" e-mail addresses from the Web using automated programs that look for the telltale "@" sign.
But up to 96 percent of those messages were blocked by the two Web-based e-mail providers used by t......
[more] Sober Tops November Virus Chart Security provider Sophos has revealed the top ten viruses affecting PCs around the world during the month of November 2005.
The report, compiled from Sophos' global network of monitoring stations, reveals that, despite being detected very late in the month, the Sober-Z worm has stormed to the top of the charts, and at its peak accounted for one in every 13 emails sent. The proliferation of Sober-Z has caused Netsky-P, the worm written by convicted German teenag......
[more] ISPs Making Progress on Spam Internet service providers are making progress in slowing spam, according to a recent Federal Trade Commission (FTC) study.
The report found that spammers continue to harvest e-mail addresses from public areas of the Internet, but addresses posted in chatrooms, message boards, USENET groups and blogs were unlikely to be taken.
"Indeed, some chatroom operators took proactive measures to prevent the harvesting of e-mail addresses posted by the FTC staff," the stud......
[more] Sophos: Gates will be proved wrong about spam Bill Gates' 2004 prediction that spam would be eradicated by 2006 is very unlikely to be fulfilled, Sophos has warned Bill Gates' prediction of January 2004 that spam would be "a thing of the past" within two years has virtually no chance of coming true, according to security company Sophos this week.
Sophos warned on Tuesday that spam will continue to be a major problem in 2006.
"Sophos believes that the rumours of spam's death have been greatly e......
[more] Timeshare spammer jailed Testimony from US ISP Earthlink has led to a one-year prison sentence for a notorious timeshare spammer. Peter Moshou was also ordered to pay $120,000 in compensation this week following his June conviction for violation of the CAN-SPAM Act. Moshou's criminal prosecution was among the first under US anti-spam legislation.
Moshou was charged with sending millions of spam emails in 2004 and 2005 seeking personal information by offering brokerage services for people inter......
[more] Sophos: Gates will be proved wrong about spam Bill Gates' 2004 prediction that spam would be eradicated by 2006 is very unlikely to be fulfilled, Sophos has warned. Bill Gates' prediction of January 2004 that spam would be "a thing of the past" within two years has virtually no chance of coming true, according to security company Sophos this week.
Sophos warned on Tuesday that spam will continue to be a major problem in 2006.
"Sophos believes that the rumours of spam's death have been greatly......
[more] Claim back £300 per spam Net expert Nigel Roberts has won a landmark legal victory by chasing down a UK spammer and winning £300 in costs.
Roberts, who runs his own Internet business as well as the Jersey and Guernsey country code domains, used his legal know-how to apply EU legislation to a UK company, Media Logistics.
It is believed to be the first time the legislation has been used in the UK, and could open the doors for thousands of other cases.
Back in August, Roberts received several m......
[more] Sophos appoints new CEO UK security firm Sophos has appointed a new chief exec. Steve Munford is stepping up from chief operating officer to head the firm as a replacement to Sophos's co-founders and former joint CEOs, Dr. Jan Hruska and Dr. Peter Lammer. Both Hruska and Lammer will remain on the company's board.
Munford first joined Sophos in 2003 after its acquisition of the anti-spam specialist ActiveState, where he was president. He moved on to serve as president of Sophos for North Americ......
[more] Dodgy domains spam message boards Bogus poker sites and their anonymous owners... Spammers appear to have found a new target of choice for 2006 - bombarding internet message boards with unprecedented ferocity.
The amount of message board spam has been escalating dramatically since mid-2005, according to experts and a search of Google shows a number of frequently recurring domains are appearing in bogus comments on message boards all over the internet.
Among the most common domains appearing on......
[more] Can 'scam sweeps' clean up the internet? Law enforcement's planning on it.. "I am looking for a trusted person to help transfer £100m in gold out of a secret account. In return you will keep £10m but you must tell nobody..."
Most people with email addresses have probably received an email like the one above - and the vast majority delete them straight off. But scams like this, which lure unwary internet users into parting with financial details or cash, are still finding victims.
The UK public......
[more] Sophos Makes First Foray into Email Appliances Anti-virus software vendor Sophos Plc is to take a first step into the appliance market with an email security device that guards against virus, spam and policy abuse. The new general-purpose ES4000 unit is said to be the first in a planned series of appliance launches, with separate versions targeted at the needs of small businesses and big business slated to follow. A combined web security and instant messaging appliance is also on the cards.
"Th......
[more] China plans spam crackdown... ... which will achieve absolutely nothing," claims Spamhaus China is launching an offensive on the problem of spam email - a problem with which it has become synonymous in recent years.But critics suggest it is going to achieve very little by way of limiting the amount of spam circulating within and leaving the country.New anti-spam regulation will be introduced by the Ministry of Information and the country has also established a centre for handling reports of spam......
[more] AOL to see phishers in court AOL is using the long net of the law to snag three “phishing gangs” from the wild. The internet service provider (ISP) filed three civil suits against unnamed phishers in Alexandria, Va., federal court for the state's Eastern District.The lawsuits are the first time a major ISP has cited the state's anti-phishing statute, which was adopted last July. The suits also cite numerous federal laws and seek damage awards of $18 million, AOL said in a Tuesday statement.Curt......
[more] United Nations calls for ISPs to police spammers Legislation should be put in place to force service providers to combat spam, according to the UN's telecommunications body The UN on Wednesday recommended enforceable codes of conduct for ISPs as a way to cut down on spam. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN organisation responsible for global telecoms standards, recommended that ISPs be required to enforce codes of conduct regarding their customers, and block spammers' email......
[more] F-Secure launches e-mail security appliance F-Secure has launched an e-mail filtering gateway offering spam and virus protection and a single management console for network administrators.The F-Secure Messaging Security Gateway P-Series is intended for use by universities, governments and large enterprises, the company said. Based on Linux, it uses anti-spam technology from Proofpoint Systems Inc. that analyses the structural content and attributes of messages to separate valid and suspicious o......
[more] SurfControl Global Threat Experts Tracking New Phishing Attack Attacks Becoming More Sophisticated With Increased Use of Phishing Kits SurfControl, the world leader in Internet content protection, is tracking a new phishing kit that has been distributed to phish for Chase account numbers by offering a $20 reward for participating in a survey.Spam probes employed by SurfControl Global Threat Experts have received several different variants of the message, each utilizing a different server; howev......
[more] Australia nails first spammer An Australian spammer has become the first person to be successfully prosecuted under that country's anti-spam laws. The Western Australia-based spammer, Wayne Mansfield, and his company Clarity1, were found to have illegally sent more than 56 million spam messages to email addresses around the world during the 12 months since the act was introduced in April 2004. In April 2005, authorities in Australia raided offices in Perth, during which the contents of computer......
[more] Phishers move in on VoIP Two separate phishing attacks this week have used a new technique in which VoIP systems are used to imitate a bank's call centre. The phishing emails are fairly standard, warning of a problem with the user's account and asking them to get in touch.But the emails give a phone number leading to a VoIP account, with an operator on the end pretending to be from the bank in question or an automated system asking for account details."We have seen two separate VoIP attack......
[more] Spammers turn on anti-spam vigilantes An effort to force spammers to stop soliciting certain e-mail addresses went bad on Monday, after at least one spammer began sending large volumes of unsolicited e-mail to members of a "Do Not Spam" list run by Israeli firm Blue Security. In recent days, e-mail users who had registered for Blue Security's "Do Not Intrude" list have instead been the target of a spam campaign and received extortion e-mail messages threatening to continue t......
[more] Taiwan fingered as spam hub In research conducted in May, the e-mail security company found that 64 percent of machines sending out junk mail were in that country. Next was the US with 23 percent and third China, with three percent. CipherTrust also determined that unwanted e-mail traffic went up as much as 20 percent worldwide in May. The data was gathered using CipherTrust's network of fake "zombie" computers, among other sources, the company said. Spammers typically use networks of......
[more] Aussie taxes to fund 'free' porn blocks The federal government in Australia is to spend AU$116.6m (£46.7m) to provide all Australian families with free internet pornography blocking software.The minister for communications, IT and the arts, Helen Coonan, announced the initiative today. A spokesperson for the minister told silicon.com sister site ZDNet Australia the first free filters should be available for download from a government portal within six months.Coonan said in a statement: &q......
[more] Spammers pump and dump cosmetic firm's shares A "widespread spam campaign" has been uncovered that attempts to make money by encouraging users to buy stock in a company called Southern Cosmetics and illegally inflating its stock price.The emails, which consist of an embedded graphic in an attempt to avoid detection by anti-spam filters, tell recipients that savvy investors should buy stock in the company because of business deals it is making with cosmetics firm Naomi LLC.Since t......
[more] Secrets of stock spam scams revealed Junk emails promoting false stock information have been proven to be surprisingly effective Spam that contains fraudulent stock information has been proven to influence the financial markets, German researchers have found. So-called "pump-and-dump" scams, where spammers send out false stock information to encourage people to buy shares, were found to both increase the traded volume and artificially boost the share price, said researchers from the Te......
[more] Volume of email viruses falls in June The percentage of emails containing viruses remained at just 0.36 per cent during June, despite an attack launched by the Bagle virus.The percentage of spam, however, was marginally higher month on month at 85.11 per cent, according to figures from anti-spam and antivirus firm SoftScan. SoftScan considers this change to be the result of less business related email as the holiday season begins, rather than an overall increase in spam. The company reported th......
[more] Hong Kong drafts first anti-spam law Hong Kong is readying its first anti-spam laws, promising fines and long prison terms for serious offenders.The Chinese territory currently has no laws specifically outlawing junk email, and recent surveys looking at the sources of spam have included Hong Kong and China among the worst in the world. The proposed new law appears to threaten companies which knowingly use spammers to market their products if they are based in, or do business in, Hong Kong.......
[more] Sophos to reduce IT security overheads by 25% at DaimlerChrysler DaimlerChrysler UK, which is responsible for the distribution, sales and marketing for Mercedes-Benz, Chrysler, smart, Mitsubishi Canter, Jeep and Dodge in the UK, has successfully protected the email traffic at its nationwide dealerships, using Sophos's new email security appliance and industry-leading anti-virus and anti-spam software. This move is set to substantially reduce administrator and network overheads - saving th......
[more] UK government looks at revising flawed anti-spam law The UK government has admitted that it may be forced to strengthen the much-maligned anti-spam legislation introduced in 2003.The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations came into force on 11 December 2003 but the legislation has been criticised by anti-spam campaigners and data protection watchdog the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).The problem with the law is that while it bans the sending of spam to individuals, it does n......
[more] GTA Expands Firewall Family with Gigabit Firewall Global Technology Associates, Inc., (GTA), today announced a high-powered firewall appliance, the GB-3000 Gigabit Firewall Appliance. The cost effective GB-3000 is designed for SME businesses with gigabit networks. The GB-3000 provides support for up to twelve network interfaces, ten of which can operate at speeds up to 1 gigabit per second. "Many SME businesses are moving to gigabit networks at their offices and the......
[more] US heads global spam league of shame The US remained at the top of the chart of spam-relaying nations during the second quarter of 2006, accounting for 23.2 per cent of the world's unsolicited email.The closest rivals to the US are China and South Korea, according to figures from IT security firm Sophos, although both of these nations have managed to reduce their statistics since the first quarter of 2006.But the US has failed to reduce its spam problem for the first time in more than two years......
[more] Spammers dust off their botnet passports Criminals who remotely infect PCs for the purpose of using them to relay spam messages are targeting new countries and regions in order to increase the number of machines they can enlist.UK and US internet service providers have seen their networks riddled with infected PCs in the last few years and those PCs have been used to relay vast spam campaigns. But as these networks - called botnets - get cleaned up, so they must be replaced.Now it seems the bot......
[more] Email managers face up to spam problems A recent survey asking IT staff to rank issues relating to email suggests that spam and management are still causing difficulties.The annual research by email security specialist IronPort questioned 300 IT managers and found that availability of email systems was the top concern for third year running. Spam, viruses and management took the next three places. Legal compliance fell to seventh place from second last year.IronPort technical consultant Jason S......
[more] Spammer's kin to allow initial search The grandparents of a notorious Internet spammer say they will allow AOL to do an initial search of their property to see if their grandson buried gold there. Robert Davis, the 90-year-old grandfather of Davis Wolfgang Hawke, said that after initially opposing AOL's request to survey his land and possibly dig there, he and his wife decided to compromise to avoid an expensive legal battle with the company.They will allow the company to use radar and sonar eq......
[more] Vicky's sex partner graphic email points to malicious Trojan horse Experts at SophosLabsTM have warned that hackers are stealing the tricks used by image spammers to infect computer users with malicious code. Experts based in Sydney, one of Sophos's global network of virus, spyware and spam analysis centers, have discovered email messages are being sent to Australian computer users claiming to come from a young woman visiting the country. Unusually, the malicious emails contain no text, but an......
[more] Spam laws fail to measure up Microsoft has bypassed criminal anti-spam laws and reached an out-of-court settlement with a UK spammer after bringing a civil case against the man for breach of Hotmail terms and conditions.Spam laws introduced in 2003 have yet to produce a single criminal prosecution, and critics say this case highlights the alternative routes businesses are having to take to combat the problem.Figures from campaign group Spamhaus show almost 75 per cent of all email is now spam.M......
[more] Australian link to two billion spam emails probed Australian authorities are investigating a man accused of sending out more than two billion spam emails -- most of them touting Viagra. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) said it had searched a home after a tip-off from Dutch authorities."Preliminary analysis of the email messages contained in the spam campaign has identified that over two billion emails were sent," acting authority chair Lyn Maddock said."An......
[more] Microsoft sues British spammer for Hotmail breach Microsoft has won what it described as the largest reported civil award against a spammer in Europe. The software giant says it won a court order requiring spammer Paul Fox to pay £45,000.Rather than pursue a case under Britain's limited anti-spam laws, Microsoft filed a complaint that Fox had breached the terms and conditions of its Hotmail service. It conditions state: "You may not use any [Microsoft] Services to send Spam. You also......
[more] Spammers cycling more quickly through domains Usually spam messages contain links to Web sites where recipients can purchase advertised wares. Because anti-spam companies filter for these URLs, spammers are constantly buying new domains and abandoning old ones to get through spam defenses. According to a report released by McAfee on spam trends during August, major spam campaigns are going through 72 percent more domains per hour than one month ago. Additionally, McAfee Avert Labs found recentl......
[more] Spamhaus repels DDoS attack Spamhaus, the leading anti-spam organisation, has restored its site and services to normal after a distributed denial of service attack rendered its site temporarily inaccessible for several hours on Monday.The attack, launched from a botnet of compromised Windows PCs, witnessed a huge surge in spurious traffic to Spamhaus's web servers from 0900 BST until around 1400 BST.Steve Linford, director of Spamhaus Project, explained that the site was restored to normal oper......
[more] Spam trail uncovers junk empire An investigation into a seemingly routine series of spam messages has revealed how sophisticated the business of online crime has become. The story begins with the junk mail messages themselves that were sent during April and May of 2006. Outwardly, said Patrick Peterson, chief technology officer of security firm Ironport who led the investigation, the messages hawking pharmaceuticals looked like the billions of other junk mail messages swilling around the net. T......
[more] Scammers adding layers to image spam Email users should be on the lookout for an advanced type of image spam featuring a new technical wrinkle, researchers said today. Spammers are now using multiple frames within animated .gif files to hide messages. The technique bypasses most anti-spam gates now in use, according to Internet Security Systems (ISS). Hackers often use multiple, layered frames to disguise their message in this new form of image spam, experts said. Gunter Ollman, director of ISS'......
[more] UK punters still falling for phishers UK punters are still failing to take basic precautions when banking online despite a wealth of available advice, according to a recent survey by banking association APACS. Although net users are aware of scams such as "phishing" and Trojan attacks, they remain complacent. APACS advises the estimated 15.7m people who regularly use the internet to access their current, savings and credit card accounts to do their homework, unless they want to leave......
[more] Time travelling spam tops e-mail inboxes In a simple twist of tactics, spammers are sending large amounts of unsolicited e-mail that has been date stamped one month in the future -- in order to guarantee their messages remain at the top of the recipients' inbox. This twist is another advancement in the ongoing battle between spammers and the anti-spam filtering firms.Joel Camissar, country manager at Internet security firm Websense, said the change in tactics may be a simple one, but it has prov......
[more] Microsoft enters the anti-virus bear-pit Microsoft is setting the cat among the pigeons at this year's Virus Bulletin conference, the big chinwag for the security software industry. Ordinarily, blame for the lamentable state of awareness of internet security has fallen on Redmond, alongside clueless end-users and over-sensationalist journalists. Lately, though, Microsoft has tried to shake off the fall-guy role, and reinvent itself as security industry participant. In May it launched its own se......
[more] Spam used to boost stock prices Spam is no longer simply a tool for mass-mailing unsolicited advertising, it is now being used in some cases to drive up certain prices on the stock market. According to PandaLabs, there has been a series of mass-mailings containing stock market information, advising users to buy stocks in certain companies.PandaLabs has analyzed one of these cases and found that stock prices in one of the companies mentioned increased significantly over a period of a few days -e......
[more] Security still a top priority for organizations The threat picture is much more complicated today compared to a few years ago," says Partik Runald, Senior Security Specialist, F-Secure Corporation Aiming to be 'Mr Reliable' in the security services arena, F-Secure Corporation provides solutions for workstations, gateways, servers and mobile phones that include anti-virus and desktop firewall with intrusion prevention, anti-spam and anti-spyware solutions, as well as network control solutions for......
[more] Spam Trojan Installs Own Anti-Virus Scanner Veteran malware researcher Joe Stewart was fairly sure he'd seen it all until he started poking at the SpamThru Trojan-a piece of malware designed to send spam from an infected computer.The Trojan, which uses peer-to-peer technology to send commands to hijacked computers, has been fitted with its own anti-virus scanner-a level of complexity and sophistication that rivals some commercial software."This the first time I've seen this done. [It] gets......
[more] Microsoft re-pitches anti-spam standard Microsoft pitched its Sender ID email logging system to developers and service providers, by handing over the framework for free. The company advocates labelling emails with the sender's IP attached to make it more easily traced. Sender ID checks whether an email's sender matches the corresponding IP address. While it's easy to spoof an email address, it is harder to spoof an IP address. Software developers and service providers can now use the techn......
[more] Hackers use Wikipedia to spread malware Hackers are using online encyclopaedia Wikipedia to spread malware, according to a security firm. Sophos discovered that hackers had created an article on the German edition of Wikipedia containing false information about a new version of the Blaster worm, along with a link to a fix. However, the fix is actually a piece of malicious code designed to infect visitors' PCs.Wikipedia is built from user contributions, allowing anyone to create or edi......
[more] Australian Defence Force Academy Selects PatchLink to Protect Student Learning Environment The Australian Defence Force Academy, a unique institution which provides office cadets and midshipmen with military training and undergraduate education, has selected PatchLink’s industry leading solution, PatchLink Update, to secure its student learning environment. Contracted by Defence to provide undergraduate education, the University of New South Wales' Canberra campus, UNSW@ADFA, provides academic r......
[more] Webwasher 6.0 Delivers Industry's Most Advanced, Proactive IT Security Web Gateway Security Solution Integrates TrustedSource Global Reputation System; Introduces Proactive Anti-Malware Protection Secure Computing Corporation, a leading enterprise gateway security company, today announced Webwasher 6.0, a new and enhanced version of its award-winning Web Security Gateway, protecting enterprises from inbound and outbound security threats. Webwasher 6.0 marks the initial integration of CipherTrus......
[more] Windows Vista used as bait in aggressive image spam campaign Experts at SophosLabs, Sophos's global network of virus, spyware and spam analysis centers, have reminded computer users of the threat posed by image spam following a new campaign which purports to offer a cut-price edition of Microsoft Windows Vista. Image spam, which uses a graphic embedded in an email rather than regular text, has grown in popularity amongst spammers attempting to communicate their marketing messages to internet us......
[more] Spamty Claus is coming to town Although statistics for spam e-mail landing in Irish inboxes won't be released until January, experts are predicting we could see a surge in the proportion of junk e-mail that businesses need to filter out of their inboxes. Ken O'Driscoll of monitoring firm IE Internet says holiday seasons are prime time for spammers who take advantage of the fact that most network administrators have a break over Christmas. "Spammers know it's a holiday for most of the weste......
[more] 2006 Declared Year Of The Zombies Broadband-connected computers commandeered by spammers drove a 30% increase in the amount of spam headed to consumer e-mail boxes and corporate networks, an e-mail security firm says.Remotely controlled armies of computers, called zombies, spread to all regions of the world in 2006, with as many as 8 million computers spewing billions of junk e-mails on any given day, Commtouch said Wednesday in its 2006 Spam Trends Report.New sophisticated spamming techniques......
[more] Nearly seven in ten junk emails are images Spammers use graphics to fool text scanners - and they are eating up your bandwidth Spam using images rather than text now accounts for most junk email, according to McAfee.The change began in late 2005 to counter aggressive spam filtering which blocks emails containing certain words or phrases. By last October 40 percent of spam was image-based, and by the end of the year the proportion had risen to 65 percent.As an image spam......
[more] Malware hosting surprise for Dutch A recent report on sources of malware from Sophos puts the usual suspects at the top of the list; between them, the top three, the US, China and the Russian Federation, are home to over 70% of viruses, trojans and other nasties hosted online. Fourth place however goes to an unlikely candidate - the Netherlands, recently singled out for praise in a report on spam reduction by the European Commission. The Dutch anti-spam agency OPTA has had considerable success......
[more] F-Secure launches new version of client security tool Anti-malware specialist F-Secure has launched a new version of its Client Security product, featuring new technology designed to detect and stop zero day attacks, and updated anti-spam capabilities as standard.Version 7 of the internet security solution features DeepGuard, an application that incorporates behaviour-analysis, sandboxing and real-time heuristics technology with more traditional signature based methods, according to the firm.It......
[more] Firm 'ordered to pay spam costs' A British company has been ordered to pay damages for sending spam. Gordon Dick took Transcom to Edinburgh's Sheriff Court for sending an unwanted advertising email, which he claimed was a breach of anti-spam laws. He was awarded £750 in damages plus legal costs of £616.66 through a "decree in absence" after Transcom did not appear in court. But a spokesman for Transcom denied any intentional wrong-doing, and stated: "We are not spamme......
[more] Aladdin eSafe the First Content Security Product to Receive UK Government Quality Award Aladdin Knowledge Systems, the leader in Software DRM, strong authentication and content security solutions, today announced that its eSafe solution is the first gateway content security product to be awarded the UK Government's Central Sponsor for Information Assurance (CSIA) Claims Tested (CCT) Mark. Under the CCT Mark Scheme, Aladdin eSafe was tested and certified for anti- virus, anti-Trojan, anti-spywar......
[more] Scotsman wins £1,300 settlement against spammer An Edinburgh man has obtained damages of more than £1,300 from British-based spammer.Gordon Dick was granted the order against Transcom Internet Services Ltd of Henley-on-Thames at a January hearing in Edinburgh's Sheriff Court. Although he hasn't received any money yet, even after sending a debt collector around to Transcom's premises, the lawsuit is a landmark in the fight by consumers against UK spammers. This is the first action of its k......
[more] Microsoft releases two Vista fixes Microsoft has released several "high priority," patches including two for Windows Vista. Among the four updates Microsoft pegged as "non-security, high-priority" today were the usual monthly revamp of the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool and new signatures for the Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 anti-spam filters. One Vista-specific update was also on the list, as was another that affected both XP and Vista. The first, dubbed March 2......
[more] MySpace sues 'Spam King' for phishing Social networking site MySpace announced today that it has filed a lawsuit against "Spam King" Sanford Wallace for spearheading a phishing scheme to steal login credentials. Wallace, who claimed in 1998 that he was quitting the spam business, allegedly used that information to create profiles, groups and forums to spam users into visiting deceptive websites, according to a statement. MySpace - one of the world's most heavily trafficked websites with more tha......
[more] Spammers Are Due For A Surprise Some of the worst spammers in the United States could be in for a rude surprise shortly, as Unspam Technologies has taken the first steps in tracking them down, with help from the ISPs. The company filed a lawsuit yesterday in the Eastern District of Virginia seeking the identities of spammers under the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act and the state of Virginia's own anti-spam statue. The suit seeks damages that could potentially reach $1 billion, but Unspam said it would be ha......
[more] Image spam lures recipients by hook-er by crook, warns Sophos IT security and control firm Sophos is warning internet users of a new image spam campaign offering the services of an online prostitute finder. The emails, which contain the subject line 'How about finding a girl in your town who is ready to help you take the pressure off?' include an image containing a weblink, which must be typed in manually by the recipient, as well as several sentences of seemingly random text. Sophos experts no......
[more] Image spam: In the picture Spammers are finding new ways to bypass filters, but that doesn't mean you have to let them bombard your inbox. Rob Buckley reports Need pain releif (sic)? Some Cialis, perhaps? Or maybe you'd like to invest in China YouTV Corp (CYTV)? You've probably received at least a few emails offering some of these things because they managed to sneak past your spam filters. Rather than using a simple text-based email, these spammers have embedded their kind offers into images, m......
[more] New spam-fighting system for France A group of public bodies and private companies have joined forces to implement a new system allowing French email users to report spam email to a centralised system for evaluation and blacklisting. The project, Signal Spam, also provides data to ISPs hosting spamming systems and opt-out information for users receiveing unwanted but legitimate bulk emails. The Signal Spam project is backed by several French public and governmental institutions, including the p......
[more] Is this the end of spam and spoof email? Yahoo!, Cisco: 'We have the DomainKeys... ' Spammers, phishers and other internet fraudsters, be warned.A key internet standards body has given preliminary approval to a powerful technology designed to detect and block fake email messages.It's called DomainKeys Identified Mail, and it promises to give internet users the best chance so far of staunching the seemingly endless flow of fraudulent junk email.Cisco Systems, PGP Corporation, Sendmail and Yahoo!......
[more] DomainKeys approved as anti-spam standard The Internet Engineering Task Force has granted preliminary approval to DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). The industry standard promises to curb spam by preventing spoofing, the forging of the sender's email address to make it appear as if the message originated from a reputable company instead of a spammer.DomainKeys attaches an encrypted digital signature unique to the sender to each email when it is sent. If the sender's address does not match......
[more] Google Buys Antivirus, Anti-Spam Company Is the security software that protects against malware and spyware by quarantining Internet sessions from the rest of the system destined for Google's toolbar? Google is adding an antivirus and anti-spam solution to its arsenal with the acquisition of GreenBorder Technologies Inc. Google did not return press inquiries by deadline but GreenBorder, a Mountain View, Calif.-based security company, posted a statement on its Web site, telling users that it has......
[more] UK sets the pace when it comes to cyber crime Identity theft, phishing and Trojan attacks are on the rise, and virtual worlds are being targeted by fraudsters, said a global online security firm. UK is a popular target because it was the pioneer for fast online payments, and consumers are used to easy and instant payment transfers, said Uriel Maimon, senior research scientist, RSA consumer solutions. Financial firms continue to face new and emerging threats, and are challenges to increase confi......
[more] Hackers launch PDF spam campaign Hackers have launched a widespread "pump-and-dump" stock spam campaign using PDF files, anti-virus researchers have warned. In a change of tactics, the attackers have hidden the spam content within a PDF file instead of attaching an image file to plug the stock, according to a security advisory on the McAfee website.The spammers are sending the PDF files with randomly generated subject lines, sender names and a blank message body. The stock spam is believed to ha......
[more] Email security vendors see PDF spam spike Email security vendors reported a spike in PDF spam this week that, because of the size of the messages, increased global spam traffic by as much as a third. Researchers at Commtouch first reported on Wednesday that PDF spam spiked over a 24-hour period, accounting then for 10 to 15 percent of all spam messages. Because PDF spam messages are as much as four times the size or traditional spam, the spike increased global spam traffic by 30 to 40 percent, a......
[more] Spammers dump images, switch to PDF files Foiled by increasingly accurate corporate spam filters, spammers have dumped pictures for PDFs in their bulk e-mailings, according to the latest data from security firms. Image spam, which at the beginning of the year accounted for nearly 60 percent of all junk e-mail, has plummeted and now accounts for only about 15 percent of spam. Taking its place, the number of junk e-mail messages using an attachment in the Portable Document Format (PDF) has steadi......
[more] Businesses fail to cope with image-spam Half of all medium to large organisations in the UK are failing to cope with the growing problem of image-based spam, new figures show. While 97 per cent of respondents have anti-spam solutions in place, 50 per cent are not managing to deal with image-based junk messages, according to the latest research by email security firm PineApp.The survey also found that 48 per cent of those businesses surveyed said the burden on bandwidth caused by image spam is a......
[more] Vendors disagree on PDF spam volumes PDF spam, the most prevalent spam method currently used by hackers globally has decreased in numbers over the last two weeks, claims data security vendor BitDefender, but fellow security experts are disagreeing. BitDefender researchers have revealed that its detection rates for PDF spam are reducing and attributed the change to the relative ineffectiveness of the method, stating it requires more user interaction than usual e-mail spam. According to Vlad Valc......
[more] Researchers spot ZIP spam spike Spammers have turned to ZIP files to push pump-and-dump scam emails past filters, researchers have warned. Commtouch's lab disclosed on Tuesday that spammers are distributing email runs with ZIP files containing a text file with a stock promotion. The attachments are sometimes password-protected, according to Commtouch.The files, however, cannot be opened by common ZIP file utilities built into Windows operating systems, and require compression tools like winrar.......
[more] Kitten photos deployed in anti-spam battle Microsoft is working on ways to use photos of kittens, among other solutions, to help solve the spam problem. Kevin Larson, a researcher at Microsoft's advanced reading technologies group, has found that asking a user to identify the subject of a photo, like a kitten, could help block spam programs. Currently, services like Hotmail require new users to read and type in a string of distorted letters as proof that they're human rather than a computer. Ca......
[more] Spammers outwitting computer security Purveyors are hiding faux greetings, ads in unwanted e-mail Just when it appeared tech companies had gained the upper hand, spammers have unleashed new forms of the meddlesome e-mail to trick filters. Spam in the form of popular PDF e-mail attachments and electronic greeting cards is confounding e-mail security systems and annoying consumers. The recent Storm e-mail virus and several pump-and-dump stock scams are clogging inboxes and snookering consumers int......
[more] Pfizer PCs used to relay Viagra spam Spammers have hijacked computers at drug manufacturer Pfizer, causing them to send junk emails advertising the company's product Viagra. At least 138 of Pfizer's IP addresses are being used to send the spam after being loaded with Trojan software, it emerged this week. Aside from Viagra, the spam advertises penis-enlargement drugs, fake Rolexes and shares, according to botnet-tracking company Support Intelligence, which said that those IP addresses have now b......
[more] Malware becoming more sophisticated, warns IBM IBM has reported an increase in malware volume and sophistication as part of its security statistics report for the first half of the year. So far this year, its X-Force research and development team has identified and analysed more than 210,000 new malware samples, which is more than the total number of malware samples observed over the entirety of last year. According to IBM, the "exploits as a service" industry continues to thriv, with......
[more] UK IT managers waste 5.85 million hours a year sifting through spam UK IT managers could be spending more than five million working hours, worth more than £140m a year, searching for valid e-mails caught in spam filters, according to a survey commissioned by web-based email management service provider, Mimecast. Research firm e-Media surveyed more than 100 IT managers and found that 26% checked their e-mail quarantine every day and 12% checked it twice a day. Using E-Skills figures of 270,000 IT......
[more] Storm builds the world's biggest botnet Storm may not be the most creative or malicious piece of malware ever written, but it's on track to become the most productive; threat researchers' recent estimates put the number of PCs it has infected at more than 1 million. First showing up on researchers' radars about a year ago, Storm is defined by some as a worm, others as a Trojan Horse. Though it has gone by many names, Storm - referring to the spam blasts it has been behind that mention storms -......
[more] US phishermen trawl UK waters The biggest source of attempts to steal personal bank details via email originates in the US, according to stats from UK anti-spam firm ClearMyMail.ClearMyMail has compiled a rogues gallery of the top 10 countries guilty of trying to steal domestic bank account information. According to ClearMyMail, more than half of all phishing attacks originate in the US.US (54%) Spain (3.8%) Germany (2.9%) Korea (2.8%) France (2.7%) China (2.7%) Russia (2.5%) Japan (2.2%0 Urugu......
[more] Pump-and-dump MP3 email spam warning An outbreak of pump-and-dump email spam this week is using bandwidth-sapping MP3 voice file attachments to promote certain stocks.The MP3 attachments, which range from around 85KB to 147KB in size, feature a poor sound quality audio blast with a barely audible synthetic female voice promoting a specific stock. The voice is heavily distorted to avoid detection by signature-based anti-spam security.Email security company Email Systems said it detected a global......
[more] Spammers turn to web redirection to avoid detection Spammers are ramping up their use of redirection techniques to try to get around many anti-spam filters, a security firm warned today.The latest flurry started about 10am Tuesday morning and by 11am represented an estimated 4.3 per cent of the spam on the internet, according to anti-spam firm Mail-Filters.com.The technique, most commonly found with pharmaceutical spam, sends a user to a web page and the user is then automatically redirected to......
[more] PC stripper helps spam to spread A virtual stripper is helping to defeat anti-spam security checks. Spammers have created a Windows game which shows a woman in a state of undress when people correctly type in text shown in an accompanying image. The scrambled text images come from sites which use them to stop computers automatically signing up for accounts that can be put to illegal use. By getting people to type in the text the spammers can take over the accounts and use them to send junk mail......
[more] McAfee goes shopping for ScanAlert McAfee has agreed to acquire e-commerce firm ScanAlert in a transaction that is valued at up to $75m.ScanAlert runs the Hacker Safe security service. The service provides a certification program for online retailers that meet certain security standards. Qualifying sites are awarded a "Hacker Safe" logo.The company claims that having a Hacker Safe certification increases consumer confidence that results in a 14 per cent sales jump.Under the terms of t......
[more] Googlewhack trick used to slip junk mail past spam filters Advanced features in Google's search engine are being used by spammers to disguise the URLs of spamvertised sites. Hackers have been using Google search functions to hunt for vulnerabilities. Now their peers in the junk mail business are getting into the act, Symantec reports.Google supports a variety of advanced query words that are capable of narrowing the scope of a search. Spammers have latched onto this functionality as a means to......
[more] Russian hackers go offline but not out of business The Russian Business Network (RBN), a notorious hacker and malware hosting organisation that operates out of St. Petersburg, has gone off the air, security researchers said Wednesday. According to a pair of Trend Micro researchers, RBN went dark around 10 p.m. on Tuesday. "The routing information for their IP addresses has been withdrawn," said Paul Ferguson, a network architect at Trend Micro. "That's significant because while R......
[more] Despite filters, tidal wave of spam bears down on e-mailers Why, in 2007, is spam worse than ever? Let exasperated consumers count the ways: PDF spam. MP3 spam. Pump-and-dump spam. E-card spam. "Two years from now, spam will be solved." - Microsoft's Bill Gates, 2004, World Economic Forum in Switzerland. It may sound like a broken record, but spam continues to do just that - break records. This year marks the first time the total number of spam e-mail messages sent worldwide, 10.8 tril......
[more] BETT: Brunel tackles harrassment with anti-spam Violent, threatening emails are now quarantined and trackable at Brunel University, letting the IT team prevent online harrasment and track those guilty to help protect their students. In a six-figure investment, the West London university signed up for Secure Computing's IronMail system just over three years ago in order to help them manage the deluge of incoming email, but it was quickly put to a more specific use when one of their 13,000 studen......
[more] 40% of US SMBs do not believe their networks are secure Despite having anti-virus and anti-spam software as well as a firewall installed, four in 10 small and medium sized companies in the United States still do not believe their networks are completely secure, a new survey shows. In a poll of 455 IT executives in US SMBs, 42% said their networks were not secure even though 96% and 93% of respondents respectively said they had anti-virus and a firewall installed. 80% said they also used spam fi......
[more] Researcher 'cracks' Yahoo anti-scam feature A security researcher has claimed that Yahoo's system for blocking automated access to its systems - the CAPTCHA image-recognition system - has been effectively cracked. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) systems are used by Yahoo, as well as Google, Microsoft and others, to stop automated systems from registering web-based email accounts, filling blog comments sections with spam and guessing passwords......
[more] Spammers cloak scams by redirecting through Google services Spammers are using thousands of Google accounts to camouflage their scams from anti-spam filters, a security researcher said Friday. He dubbed the practice "Spam 2.0." Rather than inserting links to the actual pages touting their products, some junk mailers are sticking in links from domains registered with Google Page Creator - the search engine's free web page maker - or accounts with Google's Blogger.com service, said Dan Hubbard, v......
[more] Automated crack for Windows Live captcha goes wild Spammers are using a sophisticated piece of software that can create thousands of Windows Live email addresses by cracking the protections designed to prevent the large-scale creation of fraudulent accounts. According to security firm Websense, the bot is surreptitiously installed on the PCs of end users. It then establishes a connection to the registration page of the Microsoft-owned mail service. About a third of the time, the software is abl......
[more] Spammers crack Gmail Captcha Spammers, fresh from the success of cracking the Windows Live captcha used by Hotmail, have broken the equivalent system at Gmail. Internet security firm Websense reports that miscreants have created bots which are capable of signing up and creating random Gmail accounts for spamming purposes, defeating Captcha-based defences in the process. It reckons the same group of spammers are behind both attacks. Captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Comput......
[more] 'Out of office' messages turned into spam relays Spammers have found a new trick that gets around many current anti-spam filters: abusing the "out of the office" auto-respond feature found in legitimate webmail services. Security firm McAfee has come across several instances of the trick, the company said this week. The spammer first signs up for a legitimate webmail account, switching on its auto-respond feature, with the spam text in place of the "out of the office" message. The spa......
[more] Spam blights e-mail 15 years on Spam continues to blight e-mail exactly 15 years after the term was first coined and almost 30 years since the first spam message was sent. The term is thought to have been coined by Joel Furr, an administrator on the net discussion system Usenet, to refer to unsolicited bulk messages. More than 90% of all e-mail is spam, according to anti-spam body Spamhaus. "Spam is a real life arms race," said Mark Sunner, chief analyst at online security firm Messag......
[more] 30 years of Spam - and we ain't finished yet Spam celebrates its 30th birthday on Saturday (3 May). On that day in 1978, 393 Arpanet subscribers were sent what's reckoned to be the first ever spam email in history (the message itself was written on 1 May 1978). DEC marketing rep Gary Thuerk came up with the wheeze which produced a fierce backlash from Arpanet (military) administrators, as well as a small number of sales.After first appearing on Arpanet, unsolicited bulk commercial ads moved ove......
[more] Detroit Knocks Out Email Threats and Improves Citywide Communication With Websense Hosted Email Security The "Motor City" of America, known for its legacy of developing fast automobiles, recently saw its city government email system slow to a crawl, plagued with email servers overrun with spam and computers infected with viruses. That's when the City of Detroit Information Technology Services (ITS) decided to replace their server-based anti-spam solution with Websense® Hosted Email Security acro......
[more] Protecting your business from insider threats Business managers are aware of the dangers inherent within an organisation from disgruntled, or more likely just disorganised or unthinking employees. These insider threats can either open up the network to abuse from outside or can inadvertently cause mischief. There are some simple tips which if implemented will enable businesses to efficiently manage their enterprise security:1. Write and publish an IT use policy, then ensure your employees sign......
[more] BBC email list leak highlights dangers of mailing lists Security consultancy Global Secure Systems (GSS) says this week's revelations that a BBC mailing list had been hacked and the users on the list spammed with scams and/or computer viruses, highlights the dangers that spam poses modern companies. "Whilst it's likely that many of the people who signed up to this list were using their personal email addresses, it's a sure-fire bet that some were using their business addresses. And th......
[more] SPIT anti-SPAM For VoIP SPIT is the unfortunate acronym for Spam over Internet Telephony, a relatively new addition to the world of unwanted male enhancement creams and millionaire making schemes from Africa. Most spam arrives by email but increasingly spam is being generated in VoIP communications, and the more VoIP grows, the more attention it gets from “We need you Barclay’s password” cybercriminals intent on annoying users of the system. The problem with SPIT is the diffic......
[more] Fake Microsoft email contains "backdoor" virus A fake phishing email making the rounds seemingly comes from Microsoft, but actually contains a “backdoor” trojan. The email has a subject line that reads, “Security Update for OS Microsoft Windows” and supposedly came from the "Microsoft Official Update Center" at a domain named securityassurance[at]microsof[dot]com. The message urges users to run an attached file to install an update that the email said will protect ......
[more] The State of Spam: What to Expect in 2009 Spam, oh spam -- can we ever get rid of you? 2008 saw a promising blow to the endless sea of junk mail, but the relief didn't last for long. Now, spam experts say new forms of annoyances are on the way for the new year. "Some battles have been won in 2008, but the war is far from over," says Martin Thorborg, co-founder of SPAMfighter , a software development and spam research company.So far, junk mail has managed to infiltrate only about 22 p......
[more] Companies do not monitor their internet usage or security Almost two-thirds of UK businesses do not effectively control their internet security. According to new research by Network Box, around 65 per cent of companies spend ‘no time' managing their security systems with nearly 15 per cent spend less than 30 minutes per week managing their IT security. Just over half (54 per cent) of companies do not have a web usage monitoring policy in place to manage bandwidth, yet nearly 70 per cent of comp......
[more] Websense acquires Defensio Websense has acquired Defensio, a technology company which focuses on the problem of spam on the Web. The acquisition enhances the Websense ThreatSeeker Network by highlighting spam posted as comments on social Web sites, including blogs, user forums and social networking sites. The company will also benefit from Defensio Web services so third-party Web 2.0 developers can embed Websense into their applications.“This acquisition puts Websense years ahead of the s......
[more] Spammers break Hotmail's CAPTCHA yet again The battle by Microsoft to secure its Live Hotmail system from spammers appears to have failed yet again with the news that the latest version of its CAPTCHA authentication system has been broken. According to a detailed analysis of the latest hack by security company Websense, spammers have come up with a new scheme to fool the CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) that takes possible attack scenarios to......
[more] Spam attacks focus on victims' economic gloom The economy remains the main topic spammers focus on to lure users into opening emails with malicious links, according to Symantec's March 2009 "State of Spam" report. “It's something the spammers are latching onto to get into a victim's inbox,” Dermot Harnett, principal analyst of anti-spam engineering at Symantec, told SCMagazineUS.com. One of the more egregious spam messages Symantec found looked like a rejection letter. It said: &ldq......
[more] Phishers hit Twitter again By Robert McMillan, IDG news serviceTwitter users who thought friends were directing them to a "funny blog" got caught up in a phishing scam. The microblogging service was hit by two different rounds of phishing, as criminals tried to take control of user accounts and then use them as a springboard to attack others.Both Twitter and Facebook have been hit with phishing attacks in recent days. "The social networking attacks are becoming increasingly commo......
[more] Spammers target corporates with new technique Spammers seem to be working a little bit harder these days, according to Symantec, which has reported that unsolicited email made up 90.4 percent of messages on corporate networks last month. That represents a 5.1 percent increase over last month's numbers, but it's nothing out of the ordinary. For years, spam has made up somewhere between 80 percent and 95 percent of all email on the Internet.Symantec reported that nearly 58 percent of spam is now......
[more] Spammers find new way to bust filters Spam is on the rise once more, thanks in part to a new technique. Unsolicited email accounted for 90.4 percent of all messages received on corporate networks during April, an increase of 5.1 percent from the previous month according to Symantec's MessageLabs Intelligence unit.Adam O'Donnell, a researcher at Cloudmark, a provider of anti-spam tools, noted that in addition to using botnets, spammers in recent months have been experimenting with a new wa......
[more] Spam drops after latest ISP closure The US Federal Trade Commission's recent takedown of an Internet service provider thought to be a safe haven for spammers has reduced spam volumes, but only by a little. According to email security vendor Marshal8e6, total spam volume dropped by about 15 percent last week, as the FTC got a court order to pull the plug on a notorious ISP named Pricewert. "We noticed quite a drop-off mid to late last week," said Phil Hay, a threat analyst with Marshal......
[more] PCs hit by Michael Jackson malware It didn't take long. Security researchers are reporting that hackers have begun to use the death of pop star Michael Jackson to infect people's PCs, just as they predicted. Starting late last week and continuing today, messages posing as breaking news alerts from the likes of CNN and the Los Angeles Times have been reaching users' mailboxes, said several security companies, including Sophos, Symantec and Trend Micro. Some of the messages, which have appeared o......
[more] Forget spam - tackle e-mail holistically When your mission is to be the pre-eminent empowerment stockbroker on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), but you need relocate your premises, move to a new Internet service provider, figure out how to provide business continuity while being plagued by the nuisances of spam and viruses, you need to look at innovative software as a service (SaaS) solutions to make it happen. Unified E-mail Management (UEM) to solve the company's spam and e-mail headach......
[more] Short URLs on spammers' hit-lists Email security provider MessageLabs said on Tuesday it saw a dramatic spike in the number of spam emails that include shortened URLs. Shortened URLs, which allow spammers to hide the real web address from web surfers and are commonly used on social media sites like Twitter where message character length is restricted, began a sharp rise last week and now appear in more than two per cent of all spam caught in the company's spam trap, according to MessageLabs. Ma......
[more] Anti-spam smackdown finds best junk filter McAfee has claimed the crown in a run-off of anti-spam products organised by Virus Bulletin, the independent security certification body. A total of 12 products took part in the anti-spam comparative review, which rated the effectiveness of the products against each other rather than against a fixed standard. The latest edition of the bi-monthly VBSpam tests compared the effective of each of the submitted products in filtering emails from Virus Bulletin......
[more] Spammers turn to fake non-delivery reports Online fraudsters are ramping up spam attacks through emails designed to look like automated responses to undelivered messages, according to recent figures from PandaLabs. The cloud security firm saw a 2,000 per cent increase in the number of malware laden non-delivery report (NDR) messages in August, compared to the average monthly number in the first six months of 2009.
Legitimate NDRs are automated messages sent to someone by a mail server when it c......
[more] Security firms battle world's biggest spam campaign Computer users in the US are finding there's someone to fear even more than the tax man. They're being spammed by criminal gangs, preying on users' fears of the tax authorities, leading them to install malicious software. Security researchers estimate that the campaign has already enriched criminals by millions of dollars. The spam campaign, entering its third week now, is showing no signs of slowing down, according to Gary Warner, director of......
[more] UK SMEs happy to rely on free security tools Small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) across the UK are the thriftiest when it comes to IT security, and spend less than any of their counterparts from other countries in Europe, according to research by cloud security firm Panda Security. The survey found that almost 98 per cent of UK SMBs spend less than £1,000 a year on security software, and around half spend less than £300 a year.
Some 57 per cent of UK businesses surveyed use fre......
[more] New Halloween-themed spam just the first fright With Halloween nearing, users should be on alert for spam and other attacks exploiting the holiday, and experts expect social network websites to serve as a major vector this year. So far, one Halloween-themed spam campaign offers readers the opportunity to earn money from home, according to anti-virus vendor Trend Micro.
"Happy Halloween!" the message reads. "Make it even sweeter with some EXTRA CASH in your candy bag!"
The message contains a lin......
[more] Switchers Guide: Understanding Mac security When it comes to security, using Windows can feel like living in the heart of a big city--the kind of place where you can install all the locks and alarms you want, but you still worry. The vast number of computer users who run Microsoft operating systems form the biggest, juiciest target cybercriminals could dream of. Which is why there are more than twenty-two million unique examples of Windows malware out there. Using the Mac, by contrast, is like......
[more] 3 Basic Steps to Avoid Joining a Botnet Banging the drum for security awareness never gets old. As much as CSOs try to get folks to bone up on safe practices (both online and in the office), there are always going to be some who need reminding. Online, the biggest battle these days is against botnets: networks of infected computers which hackers can use -- unbeknownst to the machine's owner -- for online crimes including sending out spam or launching a denial of service attack. Unfortunately, t......
[more] Call sounded for anti-spam collaboration Security testing firm Virus Bulletin (VB) is calling on anti-spam vendors to work with one another to beat spam. The company said on Monday that its latest round of spam tests suggested that vendors could provide better protection for all users if they were to collaborate when developing anti-spam tools. VB said that the results of the latest round of anti-spam tests showed that if vendors were to share data on blocked messages everyone would benefit.
Th......
[more] Extra spam and malware security for bit.ly Bit.ly has partnered with security firms to bolt improved anti-spam and malware protection onto the URL shortening service. VeriSign’s iDefense IP reputation service will be used to screen against links that point to blacklisted sites hosting exploits, malicious code, botnet command and control servers or other nefarious activity. Websense Threatseeker cloud service will be used to peer behind the web content behind bit.ly links in real time, using beh......
[more] McAfee warns there will be no repeat of McColo shutdown The anti-spam community is unlikely to have any future successes on the same scale of the McColo shutdown, as botnet herders have learned from their mistakes to make botnets harder to track and close, according to McAfee. In the security giant's monthly spam report released today, technology lead Adam Wosotowsky and director of product marketing Elan Winkler argued that "McColo has taught botnet owners a lesson".Advertisement
"As a result,......
[more] Honeynet research lifts the lid on spam trends Stats from the one billion spam messages blocked by Project Honey Pot over the last five years provide an insight into junk mail trends and spamming practices. The Honey Pot project was formed by a community of web administrators as an alliance against online fraud and abuse back in 2004. The group now numbers 40,000 members in 170 countries, making it the biggest effort of its kind on the web. Last week, the group trapped its one billionth spam em......
[more] SpamAssassin '2010' bug blocked email across world If you sent an email in the first few hours of 2010, there is a chance that it never reached its recipient thanks to an embarrassing ‘2010' bug buried in the open source SpamAssassin anti-spam engine used by many Internet Service Providers. According to a UK-based techie who first blogged on the issue, the fault lies with the ‘FH_DATE_PAST_20XX' rule used in conjunction with many others by the program to score the likelihood of an email......
[more] Spammers taking advantage of free online hosters Security giant McAfee warned today that spammers are increasingly exploiting online hosting companies that provide free domains and web hosting, in order to bypass anti-spam filters. In the vendor's December 2009 Spam Report, McAfee Labs anti-spam technology lead Adam Wosotowsky and director of product marketing Elan Winkler argued that the trend has turned into "an all-out gold rush".
"Using a free hosting service is a good tactic for spammers b......
[more] Valentine's Day spam starts to appear Valentine's Day still is nearly two weeks away, but the lover's holiday is already attracting the attention of the web's criminal element. Researchers at Trend Micro said they have spotted two spam campaigns - one promoting a fake gift card promotion, the other counterfeit watches - in the wild. Maria Alarcon, an anti-spam engineer, said in a blog post that as Valentine's Day nears, internet users should expect the scams to get more malevolent. "Every speci......
[more] Microsoft to target other botnets with legal weapon Microsoft has several other botnets in its crosshairs, and believes it can use the same legal tactic against them that it deployed last week to strike at the Waledac botnet's command-and-control centers. But the company also admitted that it had not yet severed all communications between the controllers of Waledac and the thousands of compromised Windows computers used by hackers to pitch bogus security software and send a small amount of spam......
[more] Gmail spam uses fake addresses to spread malware Gmail spam is on the rise. Spammers are using fake Gmail accounts to clog up inboxes, making "Gmail.com" the most abused domain name, according to Commtouch's quarterly Internet Threats Trend Report, released Wednesday. Only 1% of spam emails sent from Gmail addresses are actually from real Gmail accounts, and "this small percentage is likely to represent a mix of spammers and compromised Gmail accounts," Commtouch says.Overall, "b......
[more] Spammers still hot for Michael Jackson One year after his death, pop star Michael Jackson is still being used as a target for spammers. An anti-spam researcher at Symantec is reporting a series of new spam emails that push products related to the death of the man known as the 'King of Pop'. Symantec researcher Dermot Harnett said that the messages are titled "The Official Michael Jackson Commemorative Anniversary Coin In Loving Memory of Michael Jackson," and advertise a collectable c......
[more] LinkedIn users attacked by deadly Zeus spam Networking site LinkedIn is being used as the lure for a huge spam campaign designed to infect UK and US businesses with the data-stealing Zeus/Zbot Trojan, Cisco has reported. After appearing on 27 September, by 11am BST (6am eastern), spam featuring a bogus LinkedIn reminder accounted for up to a quarter of all spam detected by the company in a 15-minute period. Users are asked to review the contact request for a fictitious user by clicking on an emb......
[more] Legal sector moves indicate cloud acceptance Law firms are putting their e-mail systems in the cloud to cut costs and ensure they adhere to tough data protection regulations. Information sent and received by law firms is not only business critical, but often highly sensitive. As a result security, storage and reliability are necessities for any e-mail system. This has lead to IT departments buying separate systems to provide security, archiving and back-up.Cloud service provider Mimecast, which......
[more] WatchGuard boosts messaging security with appliance launch Security firm Watchguard Technologies has expanded its range of messaging and content security products with a new appliance designed to offer medium and large enterprises advanced inbound and outbound threat protection. The WatchGuard XCS 770R features dynamic on-demand clustering and queue replication across multiple systems and is fully redundant to ensure email security is always running, the firm said. The appliance has been designe......
[more] Sophos goes virtual with email security appliance Sophos has expanded its range of email security and data protection products with a virtual email security appliance, designed to offer enhanced inbound and outbound threat protection with simplified management at a low cost. Available immediately for VMware virtualised environments, the Sophos Virtual Email Appliance integrates data loss prevention with email encryption and proactive spam and malware protection. The appliance features the vendor......
[more] Major spam network silenced mid-campaign The sudden drop in activity of a major spam producer looks to be the result of the largest co-ordinated attack on spammers. At 15:30 GMT on 16 March, a network of spam-producing computers, known as Rustock, suddenly stopped. It also appears that the infrastructure needed to control the spam network has been disrupted. Security researchers said that would make it the largest ever take down of a cyber crime network.In 2010, the Rustock botnet - a coll......
[more] Epsilon attack - a turning point for the online marketing industry? Last week, consumers in the US were bombarded with email messages warning them of what may be the most widely felt data breach in US history. A company that most of them had never heard of, Epsilon Interactive, had been compromised and their names and email addresses had been stolen. For a few days, it seemed that almost everyone was getting a warning message. The notes all struck the same tone: "Email files have been acces......
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