VB Migration

Tag: spam

  • ‘Hotmail and Gmail have best spam filter’ says Cascade spam test

    Comparative test did not take false positives into account. Researchers from Cascade Insights performed a comparative spam filtering test on the three major webmail providers and concluded that Hotmail performed best, shortly followed by Gmail , with Yahoo! a distant third. The researchers registered accounts at all three providers and, for comparison, a fourth one…

  • Vulnerability turns McAfee’s anti-malware solution into open relay

    Flaw allows for spam to be sent through customers’ PCs. A vulnerability discovered in McAfee ‘s SaaS for Total Protection , the company’s hosted anti-malware solution, effectively turns a customer’s machine into an open relay, allowing others to send spam through it. Open relays allow anyone to send mail through a machine to any recipient…

  • Spammers link to site containing QR code

    Curious users may scan URL and end up on pharma websites. Researchers at Websense have discovered spam containing links to a site containing a QR code in which the spam’s target URL is encoded. A QR code is a two-dimensional variant of a barcode – which can thus contain more information than a barcode. QR…

  • Spammers using Google open redirect

    Vulnerability ‘not worthy of bug bounty program’. Researchers at Solera Labs have discovered spammers using an open redirect at Google to hide the final destination of their link from both users and filters. Open redirects on a domain allow for the creation of redirects to arbitrary third-party sites. They are usually enabled by a site’s…

  • IETF expedites publication of RFC describing feedback loop recommendations

    Document fast-tracked to be published shortly before the sad passing of its author J.D. Falk. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has published an RFC detailing current practices of running email feedback loops. Feedback loops are essential for entities that send emails, such as ISPs and ESPs. Not only do they help them to detect…

  • South Korea to ask ISPs to block port 25 traffic

    Experts sceptical about long-term effects on spam levels. South Korea intends to require ISPs to block all outbound traffic on port 25 from anything but the “official” mail servers, hoping to help the global fight against spam and to improve the country’s reputation as a spam-friendly country. The blocking of port 25 has long been…

  • ‘Meta-phish’ uses attached form to evade web filters

    Landing page contains clear warning. A phishing email targeting Austrian credit card users evades web filters by using an attached HTML form, but thankfully the landing page on the real website has a clear warning. The email, written in far from fluent German, claims to be sent from PayLife , Austria’s largest facilitator of financial…

  • Dutch ISP sues Spamhaus for ‘extortion’

    Blacklist entries ‘unfair and illegal’. Dutch ISP A2B Internet has sued The Spamhaus Project , claiming the project unfairly blacklisted its IP range. A2B provides the upstream connection for a number of data centres. Recently, Spamhaus , which runs a number of widely used IP- and URL-based blacklists, asked the provider to block traffic of…

  • E-marketing companies compromised to send spam

    Fake order confirmations contain malicious links. Spammers have gained access to the accounts of email service providers (ESPs) and used them to send out fake order confirmation spam with links leading to malware. The systems of ESPs are a popular target among spammers: they contain a large number of email addresses and other personal information…

  • New RFC grants DKIM improved status

    Email signing method now ‘Draft Standard’. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has published a new RFC describing the DKIM protocol which sees its status advance from ‘Proposed Standard’ to ‘Draft Standard’. DKIM (‘DomainKeys Identified Email’) allows mail transfer agents (MTAs) to sign email messages that pass through them and also to verify a signature…