Tag: spam
-
MAAWG unveils spam and botnet battling policies
Working group of ISPs and net operators issue traffic calming guidelines. Global collaboration body the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) has ratified a set of guidelines developed by groups of members from around the world, and approved at a recent group meeting, aimed at combating botnets and spam at an ISP level. The guidelines focus…
-
Spammers turn to DoubleClick for open redirect
Loophole in Google’s AdSense solved, but new flaw quickly uncovered. The good name of web giant Google continues to be a popular source of legitimacy among spammers, despite their efforts to shut down loopholes open to abuse. Last month, Google fixed an open redirect in its AdSense ad serving program. The open redirect had become…
-
Spam and ID theft attacked from all sides
EU body issues warning, ICANN, Japan and Yahoo! take on spammers and phishers. Last week a series of major institutions took action highlighting the threat of spam and phishing, with a serious warning released by European Union web security body ENISA and more concrete actions taken by web management body ICANN, the Japanese government and…
-
MySpace wins record payout in case against spammers
‘Spam Kings’ Wallace and Rines fined maximum amount under federal law. Social networking site MySpace has been awarded a record $230 million in a lawsuit it filed against well-known spammer Sanford Wallace and his partner Walter Rines after the defendants failed to appear in court. MySpace brought the case against the spammers when it discovered…
-
Cracked CAPTCHAs used to create malicious blogs
Blogs on Google’s blogging system redirect to spam sites. Spammers are using botnets to mass-create phony blogs on Google ‘s free Blogger system, with the phony entries redirecting to spam sites. According to research by security company Websense , a large botnet is used to surpass the CAPTCHAs used by Google in an attempt to…
-
More than 50% of users regularly double-check for false positive spam filtering
Only 12% of users trust their spam filter sufficiently not to bother sifting through spam folder. In a poll of more than 1,000 visitors to the VB website, 52% of users say they regularly check their spam folder for false positives, while only 12% of users said they never bother to check for legitimate messages…
-
Average spam message size at record low
No decrease of bandwidth usage as number of spam messages keeps increasing. The average size of spam messages has decreased to a record low of just over 2KB, security company Marshal reports . The average size of spam messages was almost 11KB early in 2007, when spammers hid the content of their messages in images…
-
April Storm
April Fools’ Day emails contain new variant of infamous worm. Security researchers report a new wave of spam emails being sent out. The emails, which use subject lines such as ‘Gotcha! April Fool!’ or ‘Surprise! The joke’s on you.’, contain a small piece of text, an image as well as a link to an IP-based…
-
Hoax email warns about ‘nasty virus’
Phony advice causes removal of site from search engines. Over the last few days an email, written in German, has been seen circulating warning users about a ‘nasty virus’ that is infecting millions of websites. The email indicates that making a simple change to the robots.txt file in the website’s main directory will prevent the…
-
Spammer’s free speech defence fails
Appeal against conviction turned down. US spammer Jeremy Jaynes, the first spammer convicted in a felony case, has had his last appeal against the conviction, brought on freedom of speech grounds, turned down by a Virginia supreme court. After a 2003 spamming spree accounting for several million messages in a two-month period, Jaynes was convicted…