Spam / Phishing Breaking News

Parasitic botnet spams 60 billion a day
The Srizbi botnet has stormed over its competition to become the Internet's biggest spammer. More..

McAfee, Yahoo team on Web security
McAfee and Yahoo today announced a partnership on Web security in which Yahoo's search engine is making freely available to users the warnings about unwanted or malicious code on Web sites as determined through McAfee's security technology. More..

Malware vs. anti-malware, 20 years into the fray
As I recall, Nov. 2, 1988, started as an ordinary day at Goddard Space Flight Center where I was working in the data communications branch. By the end of the day ... well, actually, that day never ended. We just kept fighting to bring our servers and networks back to life. Our SunOS and VAX/BSD systems, which were connected to the Internet, had slowed to a stop. More..

Mail and its hidden headers
Like many people, reader S. B. is concerned about spam. He writes: More..

U.S. court halts adult site's e-mail operation
A U.S. judge has ordered the halt to an e-mail campaign by the operators of adult Web sites after complaints by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice that the e-mail messages violated an antispam law. More..

Resist the latest business phishes
The latest spam can take the form of a subpoena purporting to be from a United States District Court, a calendar invite, or an IRS refund, in 'net cast wide' blasts or more targeted 'spear phishing' usually aimed at businesses. More..

Botnet attacks military systems
Security researchers have discovered a complex spamming scheme that hijacks users' PCs in order to attempt to send junk mail via university and military systems. More..

Researchers infiltrate Kraken botnet, could clean it out
A group of security researchers Wednesday said they have infiltrated one of the world's biggest botnets and can snatch control of compromised machines from the hackers. More..

Hosted solution cures spam's effect on VPN, bandwidth
Atlas Specialty Metals has saved more than A$4000 a month in excess bandwidth consumption by subscribing to a hosted spam prevention service. More..

Spammers ramp up siege on Google's Blogger via bots
Spammers are using an automated method to create bogus pages on Google's Blogger service, again highlighting the diminishing effectiveness of a security system intended to stop mass account registrations, according to security vendor Websense. More..

Why the Open Relay Data Base lost its relevance
The Open Relay Data Base (ORDB) was started in 2001 as a means of combating spam. The database did what its name implies - it listed open relays on the Internet that could be used by spammers to send their stuff. However, the ORDB became increasingly less relevant over time as spammers migrated to using other techniques, most notably botnets, and as work on maintaining the ORDB waned. The ORDB was taken offline in December 2006. More..

Bot breaks Hotmail's CAPTCHA in 6 seconds
A new bot can crack defenses erected by Microsoft to keep spammers from creating large numbers of accounts on its Live Hotmail service within seconds, a security researcher said Friday. More..

Botnet economy runs wild
Cybercriminals have created a global business with a supply chain that's every bit as organized and sophisticated as that of any legitimate business. More..

Test Center guide: Mail security appliances
E-mail security continues to be a hot-button issue for IT administrators, who now find more moving parts in mail security solutions than they did just a couple of short years ago. Fighting viruses and spam were the original spurs for creating e-mail security appliances, and anti-spam is still the most important component of mail security. But the solutions have evolved to meet a host of additional requirements. These include securing connections between users, both internal and external; preventing loss of corporate data; stopping new types of threats such as phishing, spyware, and other types of malware; and blocking DoS and other network attacks as well as some application-layer attacks on mail servers. More..

Collaborative security initiatives spark interest at RSA
SAN FRANCISCO— IT executives who flocked to the RSA Conference this week heard more evidence that enterprise networks are increasingly vulnerable, while cybercriminals are becoming better organized and more dangerous. An estimated 250,000 computers are compromised every day by botherders, according to Robert Holleyman, president and CEO of the Business Software Alliance (BSA). The number of exploits is seven times higher than it was a year ago, and the cyberthreat is "growing exponentially,'' he said. More..

Swedes hope to keep spam out of blog search results
Swedish startup Twingly has launched a blog search engine designed to deliver spam-free search results. More..

An interesting approach to solving the spam problem
Among the more innovative techniques currently available to defeat spam is one offered by Abaca. Instead of relying on the reputation of the sender or scanning the content of incoming e-mail as many antispam solutions do, the Abaca system determines the reputation of e-mail recipients based on the proportion of spam that they receive. More..

CAN-SPAM still gets mixed reviews
When the U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced a US$2.9 million settlement with online marketing firm ValueClick this month, it was a record monetary settlement under the 4-year-old CAN-SPAM Act. More..

11-year-old takes school network by the horns
Preteen steps in to install security gateway, grudgingly agrees to MySpace blocking. More..

Microsoft offers way to share data with social networks
Microsoft is opening up its Windows Live platform to allow users to share their contact lists with five social-networking sites, some of which until now have been accessing such data through the back door. More..

ValueClick to pay $2.9 million to settle spam complaint
Online advertiser ValueClick has agreed to pay a record US$2.9 million to settle a U.S. Federal Trade Commission complaint that it sent deceptive advertising claims in spam e-mail and failed to secure consumers' sensitive financial information. More..

Juniper beefs-up branch office router security
Juniper is upgrading its J-Series routers to support a firewall and IPSec VPN, putting it in closer competition with Cisco's ISR branch office routers. More..

Eliot Spitzer: High-tech felt his impact
Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced New York governor making headlines this week for being linked to a prostitution ring, is perhaps best known for his aggressive takedown of unethical Wall Street firms during his days as attorney general. But the former prosecutor also played a big role in cleaning up the high-tech and network industries. More..

Rise in Gmail spam indicates more solved CAPTCHAs
Spam originating from Google's Gmail domain doubled last month, indicating that spammers are still defeating the CAPTCHA, the distorted text used as a security test to thwart mass registration of e-mail accounts and other Web site abuse. More..

Luxury car retailer eliminates spam burn out
After experiencing its fair share of virus attacks as well as dealing with the ongoing problem of spam overwhelming the corporate network, luxury car retailer Brisbane BMW, made the decision to upgrade its e-mail management system. More..