VB Migration

Tag: spam

  • Malicious spam campaigns leave experts puzzled

    Increase in malware in spam has not led to increase in malicious activity. Security researchers have noticed a significant increase in the quantity of spam sent with malicious attachments since the beginning of August; however, they are unclear about the goal of these campaigns. The campaigns, which we wrote about last month, started to appear…

  • Confirmed newsletter subscriptions half as likely to be blocked

    Good practice means good performance. Newsletters that do not confirm their subscriptions are twice as likely to be blocked by spam filters as those that do, Virus Bulletin has found. The research, in which over 500 newsletters were sent to 21 anti-spam solutions, was part of the most recent VBSpam comparative test . Unbeknownst to…

  • Explosive growth of malicious spam

    Spam filters less likely to block current malware campaigns. While several reports show that the global levels of spam have seen a steady decline over the past year, this month has seen a spike in the number of spam messages with malicious attachments, security firm M86 reports. Using well-known tricks to deceive users, including subject…

  • Spam sent via fake out-of-office messages

    ‘Sick leave’ message followed by weight loss spam. In an apparently new way of spreading their messages, spammers are advertising their products via fake out-of-office replies. The example VB has seen involved a legitimate email which was sent with an (unintentional) typo in the domain name of the intended recipient. What came back was an…

  • Rogue Twitter application steals passwords

    ‘See who stalks my Twitter’ used to lure users. A malicious Twitter application is currently spreading on the microblogging network, luring users to hand over their passwords, supposedly so they can see who is ‘stalking’ them on the site. At first glance, the page where the application (dubbed ‘StalkTrak’) asks to be authorized may look…

  • Hotmail beefs up security with stricter password policy

    ‘My friend has been spammed’ button also welcomed by experts. Microsoft ‘s free webmail service Hotmail has introduced some new features which should make it less likely for its users’ accounts to be hacked, and which also enable users to tell the company when a friend’s account has been hacked. One of the new features…

  • Google delists all .co.cc domains from its index

    Large fraction of sites deemed ‘spammy or low-quality’. Google has removed all sites running on subdomains of .co.cc from its search engine index as the company believes too large a fraction of them are used for spam or are otherwise of low quality. co.cc uses the top-level domain of the Australian territory of the Cocos…

  • Spammers using social network templates

    Templates from social networking sites used to make messages appear legitimate. According to Symantec , spammers are increasingly using templates from social networking sites to make their messages appear legitimate. The company also reports that the volume of Chinese language spam has increased in recent months. With most Internet users active on one or more…

  • Outlook spam phishes for SMTP credentials

    Login details would give spammers access to legitimate mail servers. A phishing scam has been identified that targets users of Microsoft Outlook and tries to obtain SMTP login credentials. Many internet users send email using their ISP’s mail server which means that, upon setting up their email client, they need to enter the latter’s SMTP…

  • 95% of spam monetized through three banks

    Financial infrastructure possible bottleneck for spammers. In a recently published paper, researchers from the University of California found that 95 per cent of spamvertised products are monetized through just three banks, thus showing a potential bottleneck that may help in the fight against spam. The researchers looked at almost one billion spamvertised URLs, or 93…