VB Migration

Tag: spam

  • Catch rates bounce back in latest spam filter test

    Products defy prediction of tougher circumstances. When spam levels were recently reported to have dropped below 50% for the first time in 12 years, I wrote that it was ‘not necessarily good news for spam filters’: as spam filtering is almost entirely reactive, spam campaigns of smaller size are more likely to stay under the…

  • Spam levels fall below 50% for the first time in 12 years

    Decline not necessarily good news for spam filters. For the first time in 12 years, less than half of email traffic is spam, Symantec reports in the latest issue of its monthly Intelligence Report ( pdf ). Spam is notoriously hard to measure, and different methodologies, definitions and spam sources can give significantly different numbers.…

  • Latest spam filter test sees significant drop in catch rates

    Despite a drop in catch rates, 15 products earn a VBSpam award, with four earning a VBSpam+ award. Spam is notoriously volatile and thus, while we like to make the news headlines with our tests as much as anyone, we would warn against reading too much into the fact that the percentage of spam missed…

  • Will DIME eventually replace email?

    Protocol has all the advantages of email, yet is orders of magnitude more secure. In the current Internet era sometimes referred to as ‘post-Snowden’, it is often said that email is broken. After all, a lot of email is still flowing over the Internet unencrypted, and even if encryption is used for email delivery, that…

  • Canadian firm fined $1.1m for breaching anti-spam law

    First success story for long-awaited CASL. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the agency responsible for enforcing Canada’s anti-spam law (CASL) has issued a $1.1m dollar fine to Compu-Finder , a Morin-Heights, Quebec-based firm, for violating the law. Anti-spam legislation plays an important if usually fairly invisible role in the fight against spam. It…

  • TorrentLocker spam has DMARC enabled

    Use of email authentication technique unlikely to bring any advantage. Last week, Trend Micro researcher Jon Oliver (who presented a paper on Twitter abuse at VB2014) wrote an interesting blog post about a spam campaign that was spreading the ‘TorrentLocker’ ransomware and which, unusually, was using DMARC. TorrentLocker is one of the most prominent families…

  • Praise for the unsung heroes of email

    Many decent performances in VB’s latest comparative spam filter test. A decade ago, there were optimists who thought that the spam problem would soon be eradicated. At the same time, pessimists thought that spam would quickly become such a big problem that we’d all stop using email. The bad news is that the optimists were…

  • WhatsApp spam on the rise

    End-to-end encryption makes spam filtering more difficult. Spam sent through the WhatsApp messaging service is on the rise, mobile security firm AdaptiveMobile reports . This news should come as little surprise: any means by which messages can be spread quickly and cheaply has always been attractive to spammers, be that email, website comments or Twitter…

  • VB2014 paper: Labelling spam through the analysis of protocol patterns

    What do your IP packet sizes say about whether you’re a spammer? Over the next few months, we will be sharing VB2014 conference papers as well as video recordings of the presentations. Today, we have added ‘Labelling spam through the analysis of protocol patterns’ by Bitdefender researchers Andrei Husanu and Alexandru Trifan. Machines sending spam…

  • VB2014 paper: DMARC – how to use it to improve your email reputation

    Terry Zink presents case study in which he describes setting a DMARC policy for Microsoft. Over the next few months, we will be sharing VB2014 conference papers as well as video recordings of the presentations. Today, we have added ‘DMARC – how to use it to improve your email reputation’, by Microsoft’s Terry Zink. Email…