VB Migration

Tag: spam

  • Webmail data leak hype deflated

    Rumoured phishing explosion grabs headlines, reality much more mundane. This week has seen some major news organisations picking up on the story of tens of thousands of sets of webmail access data appearing online, with rumours of a major and highly effective phishing campaign – possibly targeting children – rife across the web. As the…

  • Take-down of rogue ISP sees temporary drop in spam levels

    Spam levels back to normal within a few days. The take-down of the rogue ISP Real Host on 1 August saw spam levels temporarily drop by more than a third, Messagelabs claims in its monthly Intelligence Report. The provider, based in Riga, Latvia, was linked with various kinds of malicious activity. In particular, it is…

  • Unspam files lawsuit against unnamed cybercrooks

    Anti-spam firm hopes to force banks to share more information on attacks. Unspam Technologies , the company behind Project Honey Pot, has filed a lawsuit against unnamed ‘John Does’, who are thought to be responsible for stealing millions of dollars every month from US bank accounts through the use of malware. In 2007, Unspam filed…

  • Anti-Obama sentiments used in spam campaign

    ‘DDoS software’ turns out to be malware. In a new spam campaign users are being urged to participate in a DDoS attack on the website of American president Barack Obama in protest against his healthcare reforms. The email contains a link to a piece of software that users can download to participate in the attack.…

  • Yahoo! re-opens e-postage discussion

    ‘CentMail’ to benefit charities, harm spammers. Online giant Yahoo! has launched a website to give a charitable twist to the old idea of combating spam by making senders pay a small price for every email they send. The project, dubbed CentMail in a pun on the popular mail agent sendmail , lets senders voluntarily donate…

  • McColo shutdown not felt the same by all recipients

    Mailbox-level reduction may depend on spam detection methods. When the rogue provider McColo was taken offline in November 2008, depriving many botnets of their command and control systems, global spam levels were reported to have dropped by as much as 60%. However, new research shows that this drop was not experienced as such by all…

  • Five botnets responsible for 75% of spam sent

    Each infected machine sends spam at rate of almost two messages per second. Spam levels have increased 60% since the beginning of this year, according to security company Marshal8e6 in its latest Security Threats report. The increase means that spam levels are now back at where they were mid-2008, prior to the closure of the…

  • URL shorteners experience surge of popularity among spammers

    More than 2.2% of spam contains shortened URLs. URL shortening services have proven recently to be popular not just among microbloggers in need of shorter URLs, but also among spammers attempting to disguise the websites they are spamming. According to email filtering service MessageLabs , well over 2 per cent of current spam contains a…

  • VB announces latest VBSpam certification results

    Two products achieve top level VBSpam Platinum award. Virus Bulletin has announced the results of its second comparative review of anti-spam products, revealing two top-level awards. Of the nine products tested, two achieved VBSpam Platinum certification awards, while one VBSpam Gold award and two silver-level awards were handed out. VB’s Anti-spam Test Director Martijn Grooten…

  • DKIM usage shows significant growth

    US banks urged to use authentication method In a report on its website , Internet giant Cisco states it has been seeing almost 700,000 non-spam messages that contain valid DKIM signatures per week – a number that has almost tripled since a year ago. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is an authentication method where the sending…