VB Migration

Tag: spam

  • ARF published as IETF standard

    Abuse report format helps auto-handling of email complaints ARF (Abuse Reporting Format) has been approved by the IETF as an Internet standard. ARF is a format used to send complaints about email – for instance the report generated when a user clicks a ‘this is spam’ button in their email agent. A draft version of…

  • 41% of spam sent via Rustock botnet

    Botnet spam back after short summer break. In its latest intelligence report, security firm MessageLabs reports that 41% of all spam is being sent through the Rustock botnet, an increase of 9% since April. The botnet sends an estimated 32 million spam emails per minute. Interestingly, the number of bots controlled by Rustock’s botherders has…

  • Microsoft sues alleged spammer for gaming Hotmail’s spam filter

    Messages marked as ‘not spam’ from phony web mail accounts. Connecticut spammer Boris Mizhen and several companies controlled by him have been sued by Microsoft for sending unwanted email to its customers and for gaming spam filters. Mizhen has a long history as a spammer. For years he was listed in Spamhaus ‘s ROKSO list…

  • Contract spam serving malware

    Recipients made to believe they have been sent emails accidentally. In a new campaign, spammers are sending out emails that have appear to have contracts attached to them, but which actually serve malware, Sophos ‘s Graham Cluley reports. The emails, which are still being sent at the time of writing, have subject lines suggesting that…

  • Spammers move from China to Russia

    Stricter rules on registering .cn domains leads to increase in malicious .ru domains. A change in the rules of the organization responsible for registering .cn domains has resulted in a drop in the number of spam messages referencing Chinese top-level domains, with Russian domains moving in to fill the gap. Until recently, a large proportion…

  • EU report suggests 95% of email is spam

    Less than five per cent of all SMTP connections result in an email being delivered into a user’s inbox. A survey carried out by the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) among 92 internet and telecom providers suggests that less than five per cent of all SMTP connections result in an email being delivered…

  • Botnets becoming more robust

    Zeus botnet used Amazon’s in-the-cloud service to control bots. New reports by MessageLabs and McAfee show that botherders have learned a lesson following the take-down of McColo in November last year . McColo was a rogue ISP that was taken down after security researchers gathered evidence of suspicious activities on the provider’s network, with the…

  • Project Honey Pot ‘celebrates’ billionth spam message

    Facebook about to become most phished organization. Few people would celebrate receiving a billion spam messages, but those at Project Honey Pot must have been a little proud when their billionth message arrived last week. After all, the purpose of the project is to collect as many spam messages as possible and use these to…

  • Legal success against notorious spammers

    Atkinson to pay huge fine; Ralsky to spend years in prison. US judges have sentenced two notorious spammers to a huge fine and years of imprisonment, respectively. Yesterday, a US Federal judge sentenced Lance Atkinson, a New Zealand citizen residing in Australia, to a fine of more than 15 million US dollars. Atkinson was the…

  • VB calls for collaboration amongst anti-spam vendors

    VB finds that, when it comes to spam filtering, a combined effort outperforms individual products. Virus Bulletin has discovered that running several spam filters in combination could be key to getting the best performance out of them. Following the last VBSpam comparative review of anti-spam products, the VB test team established that if the efforts…