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Picture This: A Sneaker Kind
of Spam (USA Today)
07/24/06 The spam contains images spouting everything from stock scams to Viagra, and its volume has more than doubled since April, according to analysis by anti-spam vendor IronPort Systems. Image-based spam accounts for 21% of all spam, compared with just 1% in late 2005, IronPort says. Marketers are deploying image-based spam because it is harder to detect than text-based spam, and consumers are more likely to read an e-mail with a picture or graphic, says Craig Sprosts of IronPort. [Click here for Full Story] The State Of Spam (Tech Web)
07/19/06 Unsolicited bulk e-mail, otherwise known as spam, accounted for about 80 percent of all the e-mail traffic on the Internet during the first three months of 2006. This was the conclusion reached by the international Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, whose members include AOL, Bell Canada, Cingular Wireless, EarthLink, France Telecom, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo. Together, these organizations account for about 390 million mailboxes. And they should know. Microsoft and AOL combined block nearly 5 billion pieces of spam every day. Nearly nine out of every ten e-mail messages at Microsoft's MSN Hotmail are spam. The company says 95 percent of them never reach their intended targets and thus, spam is contained. [Click here for Full Story] Spam Zombies Jump (Tech Web)
06/08/06 According to message security vendor CipherTrust Inc., the bump-up in spam is the first since November 2005. "It may be a cyclical thing, or it could just be a coincidence" that these jumps happen about every six months, said Dmitri Alperovitch, CipherTrust's chief research scientist. "We've seen a huge increase in 'image' spam, and that seems correlated to the increase in spam overall," he added. Image-based spam messages eschew text and instead use graphics to make their spiel, hoping that the tactic slips the message through anti-spam filters. [Click here for Full Story] MSN Phisher Pleads Guilty to
Crimes (Information Week)
01/04/06 "This was a phishing attack that targeted MSN customers with a fake MSN billing E-mail and advised them that they needed to update their information, their credit card number, in order to continue to enjoy their MSN experience and keep their account active," says Aaron Kornblum, Microsoft’s Internet Safety Enforcement Attorney. The phishing E-mail falsely claimed that MSN customers would receive a 50% credit toward their next bill. Kornblum says the scheme was fairly sophisticated and involved Web hosts in California and Austria, and an Internet-service provider in India. The investigation began in September 2003 when a woman forwarded one of Harris' phishing messages to her son-in-law, a Microsoft employee. A month later, Microsoft filed a civil suit against Harris. [Click here for Full Story] eBay, PayPal Year's Top
Phishing Targets (Security Pipeline)
01/03/06 Of the more than 41,000 phishing URLs that Netcraft confirmed in 2005, 62 percent targeted eBay and PayPal. Many were what Netcraft dubbed "insta-spoofs," bogus URLs hosted from free sites or compromised machines, the latter often courtesy of a botnet. "Many of these spoof sites bear identical structures and file titles, suggesting deployment via kits that can be rapidly unpacked on a new machine," Netcraft stated in an online brief. eBay and PayPal remain the top targets for a simple reason: it's where the people are. [Click here for Full Story] Phishers Stay One Step Ahead (Smallbiz
Pipeline)
12/30/05 Open redirects were one of favorite tactics of phishers in 2005, said Web tracking and anti-phishing company Netcraft, and a good example of fraudsters' increasing proficiency. Redirects, essentially scripts on the Web server, are used by legitimate domains to redirect users to other parts of a large site from, for instance, the home page. Phishers can sometimes exploit these scripts to send users to a fraudulent site when users click on a link in a real site. The user may not even notice that he's been redirected to a phishing site rather than, say, a legitimate log-in page. [Click here for Full Story] Microsoft Hunts for Zombie
Spammers (Systems Management Pipeline)
10/27/05 Microsoft's action, which was done in conjunction with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Consumer Action, a San Francisco-based advocacy group, was part of a call to arms against zombies, compromised computers that are used without their owners' permission to send spam, launch denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, and spread worms and viruses. "The widespread use of zombie computers to commit crimes over the Internet presents a very real danger to law-abiding computer users," said Tim Cranton, the director of Microsoft's Internet Safety division. Earlier this year, Cranton said, Microsoft set up a "clean" PC, then infected it with malicious code commonly used by attackers to turn a computer into a zombie. Researchers then monitored the PC's use of the Internet for 20 days, and tallied the number of messages sent through it. [Click here for Full Story] AOL and Yahoo! to Deploy
Goodmail's CertifiedEmail Service (Systems Management Pipeline)
10/27/05 With CertifiedEmail, messages are marked with a trust symbol in the inboxes of AOL and Yahoo! users, assuring the messages are safe and from an accredited sender. "Today's e-mail users view incoming e-mail from familiar commercial sources with uncertainty and doubt," said Goodmail chairman and CEO Richard Gingras, in a prepared statement. "Our objective is to restore safety and reliability to this critical communications medium. We are very pleased to work in partnership with AOL and Yahoo! as they become the first online services to offer this powerful capability, extending their leadership in providing the best possible e-mail experience for their customers." [Click here for Full Story] Bird Flu Trojan Poses Danger
to Word Users (Systems Management Pipeline)
10/27/05 A new Trojan horse, dubbed "Navia.a" by Panda Software, uses subject heads of "Outbreak in North America" and "What is avian influenza (bird flu)?" to dupe recipients into opening an attached Microsoft Word document. That's when Navia.a goes old school: the Word document is infected with malicious macros. One of the macros makes several Windows kernel calls to allow the Trojan to create, change, or delete files, while the second installs "Ranky.fy," another Trojan that opens a back door to the PC. “Unfortunately, we were expecting something like this," said Luis Corrons, director of Panda's research, in a statement. "This is not the first time, and won't be the last, that writers of malicious code have taken advantage of people's misfortune and anxieties to spread their Trojans and worms." [Click here for Full Story] California Enacts Tough
Anti-Phishing Law (TechWeb)
10/03/05 The Anti-Phishing Act of 2005, sponsored by state Sen. Kevin Murray, a Democrat from Los Angeles, "makes it unlawful for any person, through the Internet or other electronic means, to solicit, request, or take any action to induce another person to provide identifying information by representing itself to be a business without the approval or authority of the business." Murray's bill defines "identifying information" as everything from a Social Security or credit card number to an account password or PIN, and levies fines of up to $2,500 per violation against those convicted phishers. Victims, meanwhile, may seek actual damages, or $500,000 per violation, whichever is greater. [Click here for Full Story] Slam that Spam 2005: We
Compare 5 AntiSpam apps (cNet)
Added 08/08/05 In fact, both McAfee and Norton kept Dan busy with technical-support calls, which can be expensive for you and me. We also heard a lot about Cloudmark's product, Cloudmark Desktop, but we were surprised to find it didn't perform as well as expected. That's why it's easy to declare a new Editors' Choice winner for best antispam app. Not only did MailFrontier Desktop 4.2 keep away the spam, it was also a cinch to set up and use. But hold on, Qurb 3.0 is a tight second. If anything, MailFrontier and Qurb both put Norton and McAfee to shame. [Click here for Full Story] ZombieAlert Scours Corporate
Networks For Spam-spewing PCs (TechWeb)
07/13/05 Sophos on Wednesday launched the alert service, dubbed ZombieAlert, that warns business, educational, and government administrators when some of the machines on their networks turn into the walking dead. So-called "zombies" account for more than half the world's spam, said Sophos. Tracking down zombies, however, isn't easy. Rather than monitoring systems internally for evidence of spam zombies, Sophos analyzes the millions of messages passing through its spam traps -- sometimes called "honeypots" -- traces such spam to its originating domain and IP address, then notifies customers when one of their machines is found sending spam. [Click here for Full Story] Spam Prompts 11 Percent of
Computer Users to Buy (TechWeb)
07/12/05 The poll, jointly conducted by Mirapoint, a message security vendor, and the Radicati Group, a research firm that specializes in e-mail messaging issues, found a surprising fraction of computer users actually open spam, buy its products, and get suckered into its bogus schemes. Even if they're not purchasing spammed products, nearly 4 in 10 users (39 percent) admitted to clicking on the embedded URLs within spam. More distressing is that 57 percent of those polled who said they clicked on links also said they received more spam after they did. Relating cause and effect, it seems, is a dying art. [Click here for Full Story] Phishers Jump On MasterCard
Breach (smallbiz pipeline)
06/20/05 The crude e-mail -- which was spotted by Seattle-based Secure Computing -- sports several clues that it's a phish, including the from: address, which is "Master Bank" rather than MasterCard International. The message reads in part: "During our regular update and verification of the accounts, we couldn't verify your current information." [Click here for Full Story] Who's the Most Likely User of
Anti-Spam Technology? Of Course, It's Spammers (desktop pipeline)
06/11/05 Spammers are adopting the Sender ID and Sender Policy Framework (SPF)e-mail authentication schemes to slip their junk mail past filters. On the eve of an industry summit to discuss how e-mail authentication can stem the flood of spam, one security firm says that spammers are already using the protocols -- to slip their junk mail past filters. According to Denver-based message security vendor MX Logic, spammers are continuing to adopt Sender ID and Sender Policy Framework (SPF), two of the prominent e-mail authentication schemes that are actually intended to stop spam. MX Logic tracked a sampling of 17.7 million messages that passed through its servers from June 19 through June 25, and found that of the 9 percent from domains with published SPF records, 84 percent was spam. Of the even smaller number of messages from domains with published Sender ID records (just 0.14 percent), 83 percent were spam. [Click here for Full Story] Help Avoid Computer Viruses
that Spread Through E-Mail (Microsoft)
Added
06/09/05 Expert Analysis: Why
Anti-Spam Software is so Important (smallbiz
pipeline)
06/06/05 In that story, Jimmy Kuo, the research fellow at McAfee who was the first to predict the impact of the Word macro virus called Melissa, allowed as how mass-mailed worms had reached their peak: "The good news now," he said, "is that what Melissa ushered in is finally waning. Mass-mailed worms and viruses reached their peak last year." Two months later, the Radicati Group has reported that e-mail viruses are currently circulating at the rate of 900 million messages a day -- and that number will increase to 4.2 billion by 2009, an increase of a staggering 466 percent. The report bases its projections on an anticipated growth of e-mail clients from about 1.57 billion worldwide this year to 2.73 billion in 2009. [Click here for Full Story] Hackers, Spammers Partner Up
To Wreck Havoc (smallbiz
pipeline)
06/02/05 The attack, which involves a new combination of malicious code, shows evidence of "tactical coordination that is unprecedented," said Sam Curry, vice president of Computer Associates' eTrust security group. Unlike blended threats, which were first popular two years ago -- and in which one piece of malicious code uses multiple tricks or tactics to spread -- this recent attack is a convergence of malware itself and its creators, Curry went on. "They're collaborating, and making quite an effective parcel," said Curry. [Click here for Full Story] Yahoo, Cisco Combine
Anti-Spam Efforts (systems management pipeline)
06/02/05 The move, announced Wednesday, combines two techniques that rely on cryptography to help determine whether the sender of an E-mail message is legitimate. Sending messages using a false address is a common tactic of spammers. "This is the first time that we've had something fundamental to the mail system that the vendors could get together and agree on," said Sendmail Chief Technology Officer Eric Allman, an E-mail pioneer who helped merge the technologies. "That's an amazing thing right there." [Click here for Full Story] Government's Anti-Spam
Campaign Faces Obstacles (security pipeline)
05/27/05 Working with government agencies in 20 countries, the FTC plans to send notices to ISPs when "zombie" PCs are found on their networks. Zombies are virus-infected computers hijacked by spammers, without the knowledge of their owners, to send out millions of junk e-mails. The agency, which calls the effort launched May 24 "Operation Spam Zombies," has signed a six-month contract with ICG Inc., a Princeton, N.J., threat-management investigation company, to identify PCs infected with zombie software. [Click here for Full Story] Web Site Flaws Let Spammers,
PHishers Build User Profiles (smallbiz pipeline)
05/23/05 Blue Security, which has offices in Menlo Park, Calif., and Israel, laid out details of what it's calling "registration attacks" and "password reminder attacks" in a report released Monday. Together, these attacks are used, said Blue Security's chief executive Eran Reshef, to conduct hostile profiling of Internet users. In a registration attack, a spammer tries to register large numbers of e-mail addresses -- using automated scripts somewhat similar to those used in directory harvest attacks -- with a variety of Web sites. Because sites typically return errors on addresses already in use -- Reshef said his research showed a majority of sites do this -- spammers and phishers can determine not only which addresses are valid, but match an address with a Web site. [Click here for Full Story] The War on Spam Takes a Turn (systems
management pipeline)
05/17/05 "We're really trying to give you back what is a property right in your own attention," he says. "Since interruptions are costly, what you're basically doing is asking the sender to make these interruptions worth your time." Technology companies impose a cost on spammers by blocking spam. The government imposes a cost on spammers by locking them up. But to date, the potential profit for spamming continues to exceed the likely cost. Spam continues because it pays. Leave it to an economist to price spammers out of the market. Van Alstyne describes his anti-spam scheme in "An Economic Response to Unsolicited Communication," a research paper co-authored by graduate students Thede Loder and Rick Wash that should be accepted by a prominent economics journal in a month or so. He is proposing an "Attention Bond Mechanism," money put up by E-mail senders as a form of spam insurance. In the paper, he argues that an attention bond designed to promote valuable communication can outperform technical solutions designed to block low-value content. Economics, in this theory at least, trumps technology. [Click here for Full Story] Should Spammers Pay? One
Economist Thinks So (smallbiz pipeline)
05/17/05 "We're really trying to give you back what is a property right in your own attention," he says. "Since interruptions are costly, what you're basically doing is asking the sender to make these interruptions worth your time." Technology companies impose a cost on spammers by blocking spam. The government imposes a cost on spammers by locking them up. But to date, the potential profit for spamming continues to exceed the likely cost. Spam continues because it pays. Leave it to an economist to price spammers out of the market. Van Alstyne describes his anti-spam scheme in "An Economic Response to Unsolicited Communication," a research paper co-authored by graduate students Thede Loder and Rick Wash that should be accepted by a prominent economics journal in a month or so. He is proposing an "Attention Bond Mechanism," money put up by E-mail senders as a form of spam insurance. In the paper, he argues that an attention bond designed to promote valuable communication can outperform technical solutions designed to block low-value content. Economics, in this theory at least, trumps technology. [Click here for Full Story] |
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