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Spam Techniques

Spam increased in Q2, despite 3FN takedown

Angela Moscaritolo July 02, 2009

During the second quarter of 2009, the amount of spam was up 53 percent from the first quarter, according to Google.

Guilty plea for Detroit "spam king"

Greg Masters June 23, 2009

Five individuals pleaded guilty Monday in federal court in Detroit for their roles in an international spam operation that sent billions of emails to tout Chinese "penny" stocks and used a botnet capable of evading spam detection

Google responds to call for more security

Chuck Miller June 17, 2009

In reaction to a letter from 37 respected names in the computer security field, Google is considering tighter security of its web applications.

Spam king Wallace could be jailed

Chuck Miller June 15, 2009

Sanford Wallace, the so-called spam king who has been sued on multiple occasions, may finally face prison time.

Air France crash prompts spam, malware outbreak

Dan Kaplan June 12, 2009

As expected, spammers and malware writers are trying to cash in on the Air France disaster.

Pricewert shutdown brought only short-lived drop in spam

Angela Moscaritolo June 10, 2009

Any spam drop that resulted after the takedown of a rogue internet service provider last week was short-lived, researchers said Tuesday.

The many morphs of a phishing/malware scam

Angela Moscaritolo June 03, 2009

A new attack targeting Outlook users has morphed from trying to retrieve login credentials to attempting to infect users with fake anti-virus products.

Twitter hit with rogue anti-virus scams

Greg Masters June 02, 2009

Users of popular blogging platform Twitter fell victim this past week to a scareware scam.

Spam accounted for 90 percent of all email in May

Dan Kaplan May 26, 2009

Spam levels rose again in May -- and there is no sign of a slowdown, according to a new report.

Phishers continue to wage war on Facebook, Twitter

Dan Kaplan May 22, 2009

Social networking sites are all the rage within phishing circles these days.

Computer bot profusion swells dramatically

Chuck Miller May 06, 2009

In the past three months, twelve million new computers have joined botnets worldwide.

Image spam spikes

Chuck Miller May 05, 2009

Image spam is making a comeback, making up almost 22 percent of all unsolicited mail, according to IBM's X-Force research team. Much of the spam involves messages pushing pharmaceutical products, researchers Ralf Iffert and Holly Stewart said Monday. Two years ago, most image spam, in which the payload is carried in an embedded image, focused on stock trading, but that is no longer as lucrative. The focus on drugs is likely a way to prey on people who seek help in dismal economic times, the researchers said. — CAM

Researchers hijack control of Torpig botnet

Chuck Miller May 05, 2009

A group of researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have infiltrated the Torpig botnet, which was found to be in control of hundreds of thousands of computers that were volunteering gigabytes of sensitive information.

Prolific spammers busted in the Midwest

Chuck Miller May 04, 2009

A federal grand jury in Kansas City has indicted four people, including two Missouri brothers, in a nationwide email spamming case.

Swine flu spam leveling off, but attacks continue

Dan Kaplan May 01, 2009

As reports of swine flu infections grow across the world, spammers and malware purveyors continue to try to cash in.

Facebook neutralizes phishing attack

Dan Kaplan April 30, 2009

Fraudsters, using hijacked Facebook accounts, tried to lure users of the social networking site into divulging their login credentials.

Federal Reserve malware ruse

Dan Kaplan April 29, 2009

IT administrators should be on the lookout for a new round of spam claiming to come from the Federal Reserve Bank. It tries to redirect users to a malware-serving website, the Shadowserver Foundation warned Wednesday. The volunteer watchdog said the emails contain a link to a website that attempts to load a number of exploits, including some for PDF and Flash, in the background with hopes of infecting machines with a trojan. Shadowserver listed a number of offending domains being used in the ploy. — DK

Swine flu cases cause outbreak of fraud on internet

Dan Kaplan April 27, 2009

Reports of swine flu in Mexico and the United States has caused an outbreak of its own on the internet, with reports of a precipitous rise in spam and rogue internet sites being created to reference the hot news item.

RSA: Cybercriminals keeping up with banking safeguards

Dan Kaplan April 22, 2009

Customer education and a holistic security strategy are the best approaches to fight fraud within the financial services community, a panel of experts said Wednesday at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.

Microsoft Forefront now in the clouds

Angela Moscaritolo April 16, 2009

Microsoft has extended its Forefront brand and is now putting messaging security into the cloud.

Phishing increased 40 percent in 2008

Angela Moscaritolo April 15, 2009

The percentage of people losing money to phishing attacks is higher than ever -- five million consumers in the United States fell victim during 2008, an increase of 40 percent over 2007, according to a new report from Gartner.

Spam: Environmental disaster

Dan Kaplan April 15, 2009

Apparently spam is more than a nuisance on your eyes and index finger: It's also killing the environment. A report from McAfee released Wednesday finds that the amount of computing power required to send, process and filter junk mail is 33 billion kilowatt hours per year, or roughly the amount of electricity used in 2.4 million homes. To put the findings in perspective, McAfee said the energy saved when spambot hosting provider McColo was taken offline last year equated to the fuel savings of taking 2.2 million cars off the road for one day. — DK

Marshal8e6 acquires Avinti

Angela Moscaritolo April 13, 2009

Web and email security vendor Marshal8e6 announced on Tuesday its acquisition of behavioral malware detection vendor Avinti for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition will better equip Marshal8e6 to stop blended email threats -- email that contains active malware content or links to websites where malware is downloaded, according to a statement from Marshal8e6. The acquisition follows the merger of Marshal and 8e6 Technologies last November. — AM

Spammers capitalize on Italy earthquake

Chuck Miller April 09, 2009

As the death toll from the earthquake in central Italy grows, spammers have moved to capitalize on the catastrophe.

Tax scam season has arrived

Angela Moscaritolo April 09, 2009

With the U.S. tax filing deadline looming, cybercriminals are putting fraud efforts into high gear with tax-related phishing emails and websites designed to lure users into handing over their personal information, security firms are warning.

Microsoft and Facebook battle Koobface together

Angela Moscaritolo April 06, 2009

With Microsoft's assistance, Facebook has made great strides in fighting Koobface, a worm that has been wreaking havoc on social networking sites since last May.

Waledac might be out for revenge in latest spam run

Dan Kaplan April 02, 2009

The Waledac trojan, which has made its living off tricking people into visiting malware-serving or pharmaceutical-hawking websites, now just may be trying to get even.

Supreme Court: Spammer conviction null

Chuck Miller March 31, 2009

Because the Supreme Court refused on Monday to consider an appeal from the state of Virginia to overturn a ruling that the state's anti-spam law was unconstitutional, Jeremy Jaynes' conviction will not be reinstated. Jaynes had been sentenced to nine years for spamming AOL users in 2004. He is still in prison for an unrelated crime. According to the Associated Press, Virginia's attorney general will ask the state's General Assembly to rewrite the law. — CAM

On the eve of Conficker, anticlimactic predictions abound

Dan Kaplan March 31, 2009

It's already April 1 in some parts of the world and there have yet to be any reports of internet meltdowns due to the activation date of the Conficker worm.

Spam back up to pre-McColo levels

Angela Moscaritolo March 31, 2009

Following the highly publicized takedown of the McColo web-hosting company last November, worldwide spam levels dropped by around 70 percent. But four months later, spam is now back up to pre-McColo levels, according to the latest figures from Google's Postini.