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Twitter FIles Suit Against Spam Software Authors

Posted: April 6th, 2012, 8:30pm CEST by Unknown Lamer

Tags: spam

An anonymous reader writes, quoting Network World: "As with any platform that sees a meteoric rise in popularity, it's only a matter of time before spammers throw their hats in the ring and try and exploit the masses for financial gain and other sinister purposes. As the relatively new kid on the block, Twitter is still busying itself trying to tackle and ultimately prevent spammers from destroying the user experience. While Twitter's previous efforts centered exclusively on engineering-based solutions, the company today announced that they are also pursuing legal avenues to fend off spammers." From the Twitter blog: "With this suit, we’re going straight to the source. By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Good News: A Sustained Drop In Spam Levels

Posted: April 5th, 2012, 9:20pm CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

Orome1 writes "Industry and government efforts have dealt a significant blow to spam, according to a Commtouch report that is compiled based on an analysis of more than 10 billion transactions handled on a daily basis. The sustained decrease in spam over the last year can be attributed to many factors, including: Botnet takedowns, increased prosecution of spammers and the source industries such as fake pharmaceuticals and replicas. However, spam is still four times the level of legitimate email and cybercriminals are increasing their revenues from other avenues, such as banking fraud malware."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Blocking Pirate Bay Links In Messenger

Posted: March 27th, 2012, 11:34am CEST by Unknown Lamer

Tags: spam

RemyBR writes with an excerpt from an article at El Reg: "Microsoft has confirmed that users of its instant messaging app will not be able to send each other links to popular torrent site The Pirate Bay, citing malware fears. 'We block instant messages if they contain malicious or spam URLs based on intelligence algorithms, third-party sources, and/or user complaints. Pirate Bay URLs were flagged by one or more of these and were consequently blocked,' Redmond told The Register in an emailed statement."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Internet Water Army On the March

Posted: November 23rd, 2011, 4:20am CET by Soulskill

Tags: spam

New submitter kermidge sends in an article at the Physics arXiv blog about what's called the "Internet Water Army," large groups of people in China who are paid to "flood" internet sites with comments and reviews about various products. Researchers at the University of Victoria went undercover to figure out exactly how these informational (or disinformational) floods operate, and what they learned (PDF) could lead to better spam-detection software. Quoting: "They discovered that paid posters tend to post more new comments than replies to other comments. They also post more often with 50 per cent of them posting every 2.5 minutes on average. They also move on from a discussion more quickly than legitimate users, discarding their IDs and never using them again. What's more, the content they post is measurably different. These workers are paid by the volume and so often take shortcuts, cutting and pasting the same content many times. This would normally invalidate their posts but only if it is spotted by the quality control team. So Cheng and co built some software to look for repetitions and similarities in messages as well as the other behaviors they'd identified. They then tested it on the dataset they'd downloaded from Sina and Sohu and found it to be remarkably good, with an accuracy of 88 per cent in spotting paid posters."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dutch ISP Files Police Complaint Against Spamhaus

Posted: October 13th, 2011, 7:35pm CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

judgecorp writes "Dutch ISP A2B has filed police complaints against anti-spam project Spamhaus, calling its CEO 'nuts' and accusing him of blackmail. Spamhaus added all A2B's addresses to a spam blacklist, when A2B did not obey the letter of its demands in blocking a spammer."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ask Slashdot: Is Reverse DNS a Worthy Standard For Fighting Spam?

Posted: October 13th, 2011, 7:11pm CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

drmartin66 makes it to the front page with this question: "Last weekend I installed a new spam filter server for a client, and enabled connection rejection if the sending server did not have a Reverse DNS record. Since then, I have had a number of emails rejected from regulator bodies that do not have a Reverse DNS record, and are refusing to have one created for their email server. What is your opinion of Reverse DNS records? Are they (or should they be) a standard, and required? Or are they useless for spam fighting?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Does Signing Up Becoming 'Opting In?'

Posted: September 20th, 2011, 4:02am CEST by Soulskill

Tags: spam

AmyVernon writes "This piece from RWW got me thinking about whether, when you sign up for access to a site, you're actually signing up to get a slew of email spam from them. The single opt-in is still really popular, which I've noticed because I often check the box indicating I don't want further emails from a company or publisher. I always assume that giving my actual email address means I'm going to get spam-type emails from whomever. It still surprises me that most people don't. But it does raise a good question: Shouldn't you be able to sign up for something without automatically being signed up for a never-ending stream of 'updates?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Does Signing Up Become 'Opting In?'

Posted: September 20th, 2011, 4:02am CEST by Soulskill

Tags: spam

AmyVernon writes "This piece from RWW got me thinking about whether, when you sign up for access to a site, you're actually signing up to get a slew of email spam from them. The single opt-in is still really popular, which I've noticed because I often check the box indicating I don't want further emails from a company or publisher. I always assume that giving my actual email address means I'm going to get spam-type emails from whomever. It still surprises me that most people don't. But it does raise a good question: Shouldn't you be able to sign up for something without automatically being signed up for a never-ending stream of 'updates?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spammers Bribe Russian Officials

Posted: August 30th, 2011, 7:45pm CEST by Unknown Lamer

Tags: spam

hellkyng writes with a transcript of interesting chat logs in Krebs on Security. From the article: "Leaked online chats between the co-owners of the world's largest pharmacy spam operation reveal the extent to which illicit organizations in Russia purchase political protection, and bribe public officials into initiating or stalling law enforcement investigations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Malicious Spam Spikes To 'Epic' Level

Posted: August 17th, 2011, 7:52pm CEST by samzenpus

Tags: spam

Trailrunner7 writes "There has been a huge spike in spam volume in the last few days, including a massive amount of malicious spam with infected attachments, and researchers say that levels of junk mail are now far higher than they were before the takedown of the notorious Spamit affiliate program last fall. The huge spike comes at a time when spam should, in fact, be dropping because of the takedown of the Rustock botnet, the Spamit network and other botnets. 'From the beginning of August, we have observed a huge surge of malicious spam which far exceeds anything we have seen over the past two years, including prior to the SpamIt takedown last October. The majority of the malicious spam comes from the Cutwail botnet, although Festi and Asprox are among the other contributors,' M86 researcher Rodel Mendrez said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Graphing Internet Interaction To Spot Spammers

Posted: June 22nd, 2011, 8:35pm CEST by samzenpus

Tags: spam

Gunkerty Jeb writes "Spammers, it turns out, aren't like everyone else: they have fewer friends. 'Social Graphs for Online Service Security,' a study done by researchers Yinglian Xie and Fang Yu, uses studies of legitimate and malicious social network usage to spot bogus email accounts that are used to push spam, malware, and otherwise malicious links. The researchers are analyzing natural social connections between users on the Web that are difficult for attackers or botnets to replicate. Spotting a spammer isn't hard, they say, when you look at his or her patterns of communication."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Judges Berate Spammer For 'Incompetent' Litigation

Posted: June 18th, 2011, 4:49pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: spam

An anonymous reader writes "Joseph Kish, attorney for alleged serial spamming firm e360, must have known he was in trouble when Judge Richard A. Posner interrupted him seconds into his opening statement to berate both Kish and his client. Kish was appearing before the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit to explain why his client was entitled to $27,000 from Spamhaus, a British anti-spam nonprofit. None of the judges on the appeals court panel seemed sympathetic to e360's argument, but Judge Posner did most of the talking. He spent fully two-thirds of Kish's 15-minute presentation demanding that Kish explain his client's methodology and lecturing him on its inadequacy. 'This is just totally irresponsible litigation,' he said. 'You can't just come into a court with a fly-by-night, nothing company and say "I've lost $130 million."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Explaining The Business of Spam

Posted: June 10th, 2011, 12:20pm CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

ATMAvatar writes "The IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy hosted in Oakland nearly three weeks ago featured a study on the economics of spam. It attempts to identify and analyze the chain of businesses behind spam and the products that are featured. The goal was to take a more comprehensive look at the mechanics behind the industry in an attempt to identify better, alternative means to combat spam."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spammers Establish Fake URL-Shortening Services

Posted: May 25th, 2011, 2:07pm CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

Orome1 writes "Spammers are establishing their own fake URL-shortening services to perform URL redirection, according to Symantec. This new spamming activity has contributed to this month's increase in spam by 2.9 percentage points, a rise that was also expected following the Rustock botnet takedown in March. Under this scheme, shortened links created on these fake URL-shortening sites are not included directly in spam messages. Instead, the spam emails contain shortened URLs created on legitimate URL-shortening sites. These shortened URLs lead to a shortened-URL on the spammer's fake URL-shortening Web site, which in turn redirects to the spammer's own Web site."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A New Approach To Reducing Spam: Go After Credit Processors

Posted: May 21st, 2011, 1:31am CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

WrongSizeGlass writes "A team of computer scientists at two University of California campuses has been looking deeply into the nature of spam, and they think found a 'choke point' [PDF] that could greatly reduce the flow of spam. It turned out that 95 percent of the credit card transactions for the spam-advertised drugs and herbal remedies they bought were handled by just three financial companies — one based in Azerbaijan, one in Denmark and one in Nevis, in the West Indies. If a handful of companies like these refused to authorize online credit card payments to the merchants, 'you'd cut off the money that supports the entire spam enterprise,' said one of the scientists." Frequent Slashdot contributor (and author of a book on Digital Cash) Peter Wayner wonders if "the way to get a business shut down is to send out a couple billion spam messages in its name."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Spamming Attorney Gets Sentenced To 40 Months

Posted: March 6th, 2011, 7:01pm CET by timothy

Tags: spam

www.sorehands.com writes "While one spammer, Robert Soloway, gets released on probation, the Feds send another, Robert Smoley, to the slammer for 40 months. I know about Smoley because I tracked him down, and beat him in court. Not only was he an attorney, he still has not lost his license, yet. The IRS contacted me as a result of seeing my web site, and I gladly assisted the IRS in tracking his business. He not only bounced a check on me, but stiffed his local counsel and one of his ISPs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China Cleans Up Spam Problem

Posted: February 28th, 2011, 2:49pm CET by CmdrTaco

Tags: spam

angry tapir writes "It's been a few years coming, but it looks like China may finally be getting a handle on its spam problem. Once the largest source of the world's spam, China has been gradually fading off the list of the world's top spam-producers. Right now Cisco Systems' IronPort group ranks it at number 18 in terms of spam-producing countries. That's a big drop from two years ago, when it consistently ranked in the top five."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spam Text Prematurely Blows Up Suicide Bomber

Posted: January 28th, 2011, 4:55pm CET by samzenpus

Tags: spam

Hugh Pickens writes "A suicide bomber's plan to detonate explosives in Central Moscow on New Year's Eve was foiled when she received an unexpected spam text message that caused her deadly payload to blow up too early. A message wishing her a happy new year came hours before the unnamed woman was to set off her suicide belt near Red Square, an act of terrorism that could have killed hundreds of people. Islamist terrorists in Russia often use mobile phones as detonators. The bomber's handler, who is usually watching his charge, sends the bomber a text message to set off the explosive belt at the moment when it is thought they can inflict maximum casualties."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon Bulk-Email Service Could Lure Spammers

Posted: January 26th, 2011, 1:52am CET by timothy

Tags: spam

snydeq writes "Amazon Simple Email Service and Amazon Web Services look to be a potent combination for businesses and developers, no matter which side of the law they're on, InfoWorld reports. The newly announced bulk email service, which will enable Amazon customers to send 100 emails for a penny, could prove enticing to those seeking a cheap way to bombard inboxes with spam, malware, and phishing lures. Amazon claims its in-house content filtering technology should assuage anyone thinking SES will be used by scammers. 'Those assurances aren't entirely heartening, though, unless Amazon is way ahead of the curve with content-filtering technology. Email services and software vendors have tried for years to keep spam and other unwanted messages from showing up in users' viewing pane, but the crud keeps slipping through.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

California Spam Law Upheld By Appeals Court

Posted: January 20th, 2011, 1:18am CET by samzenpus

Tags: spam

www.sorehands.com writes "In the first California appeals court ruling (pdf), in Hypertouch v. Valueclick, it is ruled that the I-CAN-SPAM Act does not preempt California Business & Professions Code Section 17529.5. California Business & Professions Code Section 17529.5 prohibits the use of falsified headers and subject lines that are likely to mislead recipients. Spammers have been claiming, and some courts have been ruling, that to survive preemption, a Plaintiff has to show all the elements of fraud (false representation, knowledge, reliance, and damage from the reliance.) The reliance and damage from the reliance is difficult as it would essentially require the recipient to buy the penis enlargement pills and show that they don't work, or to send the money to the Nigerian prince. An ISP could never show reliance and harm, as they are not the recipient and would not be responding to e-mails traversing their systems. The ruling also made it clear that the advertiser is responsible for the acts of their agents, even if their agents promise not to spam."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spammers Finally Under the Legal Gun?

Posted: December 27th, 2010, 2:11am CET by timothy

Tags: spam

MarkvW writes with this welcome bit of Schadenfreude: "People are finally starting to use the anti-spam laws in the malevolent manner in which they were intended — unlimited consumer lawsuits from unlimited plaintiffs!" The story's protagonist is my hero for the season.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over 40% of New Mechanical Turk Jobs Involve Spam

Posted: December 17th, 2010, 10:26pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: spam

An anonymous reader writes "An NYU study reveals that over 40% of the jobs posted by new employers on MTurk are some sort of spam request, such as fake account creation, fraudulent ad clicks, or fake comments, tweets, likes and votes. The study also shows that the bad jobs could be automatically filtered with 95% accuracy, but Amazon is not interested."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canadian Spammer Fined Over $1 Billion

Posted: October 6th, 2010, 5:11am CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

innocent_white_lamb writes "A man has been fined ONE BEELYUN DOLLARS (yes, really) for sending 4,366,386 spam messages that were posted on Facebook. He was fined $100 for each message, and including punitive damages he now owes $1,068,928,721.46. A ruling by a US District Court judge in San Jose, California has now been upheld by the Quebec Superior Court (the defendant lives in Montreal)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One Man's Fight Against Forum Spam

Posted: October 5th, 2010, 6:58pm CEST by CmdrTaco

Tags: spam

JWSmythe writes "Free Internet Press has an interview with 'Random Digilante,' an anonymous hacker who has been taking over forum spammers' email accounts, and notifying forum operators to delete those accounts. It looks like his reasoning is sound, and his methods are safe, where he won't hurt any real users."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spammers Attack Apple's Ping Social Network

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 3:29pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: spam

An anonymous reader writes "Scammers and spammers have deluged the new Ping musical social network, created by Apple and built into the new version of iTunes. Sophos researchers have found that Ping is being overrun by scams and spam messages. 'Apple seems to have anticipated a certain degree of malfeasance, as profile pictures that you upload will not appear until approved by Apple. They are likely filtering for other offensive content as well, so they probably have means in place they could use to stop the spam.' It's ironic that the most common scams on Ping right now revolve around Apple's own iPhone." The Sophos blog post adds that Apple is doing their best to clamp down on the spam, manually deleting many of the offending messages for now. Reader Tootech adds that Facebook integration was quickly disabled, possibly because of blocked API access.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rustock Botnet Responsible For 40% of Spam

Posted: August 25th, 2010, 4:49am CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

angry tapir writes "More than 40 percent of the world's spam is coming from a single network of computers that computer security experts continue to battle, according to new statistics from Symantec's MessageLabs' division. The Rustock botnet has shrunk since April, when about 2.5 million computers were infected with its malicious software that sent about 43 billion spam e-mails per day. Much of it is pharmaceutical spam."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spammers Moving To Disposable Domains

Posted: July 14th, 2010, 7:43pm CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

Trailrunner7 writes "Spammers and the botnet operators they're allied with are continuing to adapt their techniques to evade security technologies, and now are using what amount to disposable domains for their activities. A new report shows that the spammers are buying dozens of domains at a time and moving from one to another as often as several times a day to prevent shutdowns. New research shows that the amount of time that a spammer uses a given domain is basically a day or less. The company looked at 60 days worth of data from their customers and found that more than 70 percent of the domains used by spammers are active for a day or less."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FTC Bombs Massive Robocall Operation

Posted: June 10th, 2010, 6:15pm CEST by CmdrTaco

Tags: spam

coondoggie writes "The Federal Trade Commission today had a federal court in Chicago halt a major telemarketing operation that made at least 370 million illegal phone calls pitching worthless extended auto warranties and credit card interest rate-reduction programs. According to the FTC, one telephone service provider told the FTC that during a single day in April 2009 the defendants — SBN Peripherals — sent 2.4 million calls to consumers — more than 27 calls per second."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russian Anti-Spam Advisor Accused of Spamming

Posted: May 18th, 2010, 5:41pm CEST by CmdrTaco

Tags: spam

Keith noted that Krebs has an interesting story on a Russian businessman being accused of running a spam ring while serving as an anti-spam adviser to the Russian government. It's a strange tale including an investigation in 2007 that was abandoned when the chief investigator was actually hired to work for the spammer. Not suspicious at all, no way.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Escalating Gmail/Spamming Attacks

Posted: April 21st, 2010, 12:44am CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

We've been getting submissions about an uptick in compromised Gmail accounts in the last few days, but nothing that could be substantiated. Robert McMillan did a bit of digging and now reports in PC World that "Google is investigating a growing number of reports that hackers are breaking into legitimate Gmail accounts and then using them to send spam messages. The problem started about a week ago but seems to have escalated over the past few days. ... [I]n forum posts, Gmail users note that the hackers appear to be sending spam via Gmail's mobile interface — which gives mobile-phone users a way to check their Gmail accounts — and wonder if there may be a bug in the mobile interface that is allowing criminals to send the spam. ... Google says there's no Gmail bug. ... 'Spammers may sometimes use a mobile interface to access accounts they have already compromised because it's simpler for bots to use this method at large scale.'" Here's how to tell if your Gmail account has been accessed by bad guys, and what to do about it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spamming a Judge Is Contempt of Court

Posted: April 9th, 2010, 7:51pm CEST by samzenpus

Tags: spam

eldavojohn writes "TV pitchman Kevin Trudeau was sentenced to 30 days in jail because he urged his fans and followers to spam a judge. Apparently the judge (who was deluged with emails) decided that this was an act of contempt of court on the court's 'virtual presence' since nothing happened while the court was in session in regards to Trudeau's courtroom behavior. US Marshals are now trudging through those emails to decide if any are threatening."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

1st Trial Under California Spam Law Slams Spammer

Posted: March 18th, 2010, 11:42pm CET by timothy

Tags: spam

www.sorehands.com writes "In the first case brought by a spam recipient to actually go to trial in California, the Superior Court of California held that people who receive false and deceptive spam emails are entitled to liquidated damages of $1,000 per email under California Business & Professions Code Section 17529.5. In the California Superior Court ruling (PDF), Judge Marie S. Weiner made many references to the fact that Defendants used anonymous domain name registration and used unregistered business names in her ruling. This is different from the Gordon case, where one only had to perform a simple whois lookup to identify the sender; here, Defendants used 'from' lines of 'Paid Survey' and 'Your Promotion' with anonymously registered domain names. Judge Weiner's decision makes it clear that the California law is not preempted by the I CAN-SPAM Act. This has been determined in a few prior cases, including my own. (See http://www.barbieslapp.com/spam for some of those cases.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Detecting Anonymously Registered Domains

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 7:51pm CET by kdawson

Tags: spam

Spamresource.com has up a piece describing a new service that could be useful in evaluating the reputation of sites you deal with — anonwhois.org returns information on domains registered anonymously. It provides a DNSBL-style service that "is not a blacklist and wasn't meant to be used for outright rejection of mail." Only 619,000 domains are listed so far, but more are added as they are queried, so the database will grow more complete. Anonwhois.org seems to be a sister site to Spam Eating Monkey.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers Claim "Effectively Perfect" Spam Blocking Discovery

Posted: January 25th, 2010, 9:43pm CET by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: spam

A team of computer scientists from the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, CA are claiming to have found an "effectively perfect" method for blocking spam. The new system deciphers the templates a botnet is using to create spam and then teaches filters what to look for. "The system ... works by exploiting a trick that spammers use to defeat email filters. As spam is churned out, subtle changes are typically incorporated into the messages to confound spam filters. Each message is generated from a template that specifies the message content and how it should be varied. The team reasoned that analyzing such messages could reveal the template that created them. And since the spam template describes the entire range of the emails a bot will send, possessing it might provide a watertight method of blocking spam from that bot."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By Latest Count, 95% of Email Is Spam

Posted: January 23rd, 2010, 1:52pm CET by timothy

Tags: spam

An anonymous reader writes "The European Network and Information Security Agency released its new spam report, which looks at spam budgets, the impact of spam and spam management. Less than 5% of all email traffic is delivered to mailboxes. This means the main bulk of mails, 95%, is spam. This is a very minor change, from 6%, in earlier ENISA reports. Over 25% of respondents had spam accounting for more than 10% of help desk calls. The survey targeted email service providers of different types and sizes, and received replies from 100 respondents from 30 different countries."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Court Rules WHOIS Privacy Illegal For Spammers

Posted: January 22nd, 2010, 6:39pm CET by kdawson

Tags: spam

Unequivocal writes "Spammers hiding behind a WHOIS privacy service have been found in violation of CAN-SPAM. It probably won't stop other spammers from hiding (what can?), but at least it adds another arrow in the legal quiver for skewering the bottom feeders. Quoting from the article: 'A recent decision by the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has determined that using WHOIS privacy on domains may be considered "material falsification" under federal law... Although the ruling does not make use of WHOIS privacy illegal, it does serve as a clear message from the court that coupling the use of privacy services with intentional spamming will likely result in a violation of the CAN-SPAM act. This is an important decision that members of the domain community should refer to prior to utilizing a privacy shield.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hotmailers Hawking Hoax Hunan Half-Offs

Posted: January 7th, 2010, 10:05pm CET by kdawson

Tags: spam

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "An estimated 200,000 Hotmail users currently have their auto-reply set to a message spamming an advertisement for Chinese scam websites, which sell "discounted" electronics. Presumably the spammers compromised a large number of Hotmail accounts to pull this off, but wouldn't it be pretty easy for Hotmail to query for which users have that set as their auto-reply, and turn the auto-reply off for them?" Read below for Bennett's thoughts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Project Honey Pot Traps Billionth Spam

Posted: December 15th, 2009, 6:33pm CET by timothy

Tags: spam

EastDakota writes "Project Honey Pot today announced that it had trapped its 1 billionth spammer. To celebrate, the team behind the largest community sourced project tracking online fraud and abuse released a full rundown of statistics on the last five years of spam. Findings include: spam drops 21% on Christmas Day and 32% of New Year's Day; the most spam is sent on Mondays, the least on Saturdays; spammers found at least 956 different ways to spell VIAGRA (e.g., VIAGRA, V1AGRA, V1@GR@, V!AGRA, VIA6RA, etc.) in mail received by the Project; and much more."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US No Longer Leading the World In Spam

Posted: December 8th, 2009, 11:20pm CET by kdawson

Tags: spam

darthcamaro writes "America is no longer the spam king. According to Cisco, US-originated spam dropped by over two trillion messages — American-based IP addresses sent about 6.2 trillion spam messages. The new world leader is Brazil at 7.7 trillion messages. 'I'm not completely surprised to see US falling to number two in the spam stats, but I didn't expect it to happen yet,' said Cisco Fellow Patrick Peterson. 'I was really gratified to see the actual spam volume decrease, not just ranking, but we [also] decreased the amount of spam that is pouring out of the United States.'" The drop in US spam might have had something to do with the temporary shutdown of the McColo spam ISP.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spammer Lance Atkinson Fined $16 Million

Posted: December 1st, 2009, 5:57pm CET by timothy

Tags: spam

Nashville Guy writes "According to Australia's The Age, 'A New Zealand man living in Queensland and believed to be behind the world's largest spam operation, has been ordered to pay more than $16 million for running the illegal enterprise. Lance Atkinson, 26, originally from Christchurch, was living in Pelican Waters on the Sunshine Coast when the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had his assets frozen last year. ... The FTC found Atkinson and American Jody Smith were at the centre of the world's largest internet spam operation, dubbed 'AffKing,' having recruited spammers from around the world.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers Take Down a Spam Botnet

Posted: November 11th, 2009, 12:26am CET by kdawson

Tags: spam

The Register is reporting on the takedown of a botnet once responsible for 1/3 of the world's spam. The deed was done by researchers from the security firm FireEye, who detailed the action in a series of blog posts. PC World's coverage estimates that lately the botnet has accounted for 4% of spam. From the Register: "After carefully analyzing the machinations of the massive botnet, alternately known as Mega-D and Ozdok, the FireEye employees last week launched a coordinated blitz on dozens of its command and control channels. ... Almost immediately, the spam stopped, according to M86 Security blog. ... The body blow is good news to ISPs that are forced to choke on the torrent of spam sent out by the pesky botnet. But because many email servers already deployed blacklists that filtered emails sent from IP addresses known to be used by Ozdok, end users may not notice much of a change. ... With [the] head chopped off of Ozdok, more than 264,000 IP addresses were found reporting to sinkholes under FireEye's control..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SORBS Blocklist Reportedly Sold For $451K

Posted: November 4th, 2009, 5:26pm CET by CmdrTaco

Tags: spam

palegray.net writes "SORBS, a well-known email blocklist provider, has reportedly been sold for $451k. Early reports indicate an acquisition by GFI, a company specializing in various communications services. In recent years, SORBS has been the target of frequent accusations of mismanagement and poor conduct, leading many to wonder if this turn in events might signal a chance for improved behavior. Citing lack of ISP support, the blocklist released statements earlier this year that they would be shuttering their operation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook Awarded $711 Million In Anti-Spam Case

Posted: October 30th, 2009, 6:46pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: spam

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook is on a never-before-seen legal rampage against high profile internet spammers. Today Facebook was awarded yet another nine-figure settlement, this time for over $700 million. Facebook also has a criminal contempt case on Wallace, which means a high likelihood of prison, a big win for the internet and a milestone in cyber law. 'The record demonstrates that Wallace willfully violated the statutes in question with blatant disregard for the rights of Facebook and the thousands of Facebook users whose accounts were compromised by his conduct,' Jeremy Fogel wrote in his judgment order, which permanently prohibits Wallace from accessing the Facebook Web site or creating a Facebook account, among other restrictions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jQuery Dev Bemoans Overwhelming Spam On Google Groups

Posted: October 28th, 2009, 3:55pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: spam

angryrice tips a blog post by John Resig, lead developer for jQuery, about the failure of Google Groups to manage spam, declaring attempts to use it as a public discussion system "completely futile." Quoting: "The final straw was placed upon my patience with the Google Groups system a few weeks ago. Spammers are now spoofing the email addresses of existing group participants to sneak their messages through. Previously you would've seen a delightful 'FREE MOVIE DOWNLOADS' spam from 'freemovies123@gmail.com' — but now you'll see it coming from existing group users — or even the group moderators themselves. This cheat completely bypasses the moderation system since the spammers are pretending to be pre-moderated users. The Google Groups system is completely fooled. The spam message comes in claiming to be from an existing group participant — and according to the Google Groups interface there is no difference. If you click the user's name you'll be taken to a full listing of that user's posts (with the spam messages delightfully interspersed)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fighting "Snowshoe" Spam

Posted: October 3rd, 2009, 4:13am CEST by Soulskill

Tags: spam

Today Spamhaus announced they are releasing a new list of IP addresses from which they've been receiving "snowshoe" spam — unsolicited email distributed across many IPs and domains in order to avoid triggering volume-based filters. "This spam is sent from many small IP ranges on many Internet Service Providers (ISPs), using many different domains, and the IPs and domains change rapidly, making it difficult for people and places to detect and block this spam. Most importantly, while each host/IP usually sends a modest volume of bulk email, collectively these anonymous IP ranges send a great deal of spam, and the quantities of this type of spam have been increasing rapidly over the past few months." A post at the Enemies List anti-spam blog wonders at the impact this will have on email service providers and their customers. The author references a conversation he had with an employee from one of these providers: "... I replied that I expected it to mean the more legitimate clients of the sneakier gray- and black-hat spammers would migrate to more legitimate ESPs — suggesting that it was, in the long run, a good thing, because ESPs with transparency and a reputation to protect will educate their new clients. His reply was essentially that this would be a problem for them in the short run, because it would swamp their new customer vetting processes and so on."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anti-Spam Lawyer Loses Appeal, and His Possessions

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 12:22am CEST by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: spam

Techdirt is reporting that one particularly rabid anti-spam fighter has not only lost his case, but most of his worldly possessions as well. James Gordon tried to set himself up as an ISP to get around the conventions of the CAN SPAM act in order to set up a litigation house designed to sue companies that spam. Unfortunately a judge did not take kindly to this trick and ordered him to pay $110,000 to the firm he was suing, a decision that was not only upheld on appeal but accompanied by some very unkind words trying to shut down litigation mills like his. "But, perhaps even more fascinating is that the guy, James Gordon, didn't just lose the lawsuit, it appears he lost most of his possessions as well. Remember that ruling telling him to pay the $110k to Virtumundo? He refused. The company sent the debt to a collections agency, but told Gordon they'd call off the collections agency if he dropped the appeal. Gordon didn't."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yahoo Revives Pay-per-email, With Charitable Twist

Posted: August 13th, 2009, 8:12pm CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

holy_calamity writes "Yahoo research have started a private beta of a scheme that resurrects the idea of charging people to send email to cut spam. Centmail users pay $0.01 for each message they send, with the money going to a charity of their choice. The hope is that the feel good effect of donating to charity will reduce the perceived cost of paying for mail and encourage mass adoption, making it possible for mail filters to build in recognition of Centmail stamps."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yahoo Revives Pay-Per-Email, With Charitable Twist

Posted: August 13th, 2009, 8:12pm CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

holy_calamity writes "Yahoo research have started a private beta of a scheme that resurrects the idea of charging people to send email to cut spam. Centmail users pay $0.01 for each message they send, with the money going to a charity of their choice. The hope is that the feel good effect of donating to charity will reduce the perceived cost of paying for mail and encourage mass adoption, making it possible for mail filters to build in recognition of Centmail stamps."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Times Are Tough For Nigerian Scammers

Posted: August 9th, 2009, 4:13am CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

The Narrative Fallacy writes "The Washington Post reports that online swindling takes dedication even in the best of times but succeeding in the midst of a worldwide economic meltdown takes patience, resolve, and hard work. 'We are working harder. The financial crisis is not making it easy for them over there,' said Banjo, 24, speaking about Americans, whose trust he has won and whose money he has fleeced, via his Dell laptop. 'They don't have money. And the money they don't have, we want.' US authorities say Americans — the easiest prey, according to Nigerian scammers — still lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year to cybercrimes, including a scheme known as the Nigerian 419 fraud, named for a section of the Nigerian criminal code. 419 is cemented in Nigerian popular culture. and the scammers, known as 'yahoo-yahoo boys,' are glorified in pop songs such as 'Yahoozee,' which gained even more fame after former secretary of state Colin L. Powell danced to it at a London festival last year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

12% of E-mail Users Have Responded To Spam

Posted: July 15th, 2009, 9:30pm CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

Meshach writes "An article in Ars Technica claims that 12% of internet users have actually responded to spam messages and tried to buy items. Although I find this hard to believe, it does explain why my spam folder is always full." Also in spam news, wjousts links to a Technology Review article about how spammers get your e-mail address, writing "E-mail addresses in comments posted to a website had a high probability of getting spammed, while of the 70 e-mail addresses submitted during registration at various websites, only 4 got spammed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fake Tamiflu "Out-Spams Viagra On Web"

Posted: July 4th, 2009, 1:11am CEST by Soulskill

Tags: spam

cin62 writes "The number of Internet scammers offering fake versions of the anti-swine flu drug Tamiflu has surpassed those selling counterfeit Viagra, reports CNN. Since the H1N1 virus, also known as swine flu, was declared a global pandemic last month, there has been an increase in the number of Web sites and junk emails offering Tamiflu for sale. 'Every Web site that used to sell Viagra is now selling Tamiflu. We are pretty sure that the same people are making the Tamiflu as are making the Viagra,' said Director of Policy for the UK's Royal Pharmaceutical Society." This news fits in nicely with a report Wired ran a couple weeks ago about the hysteria behind H1N1.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Imminent Demise of SORBS

Posted: June 24th, 2009, 2:47am CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

An anonymous reader lets us know about the dire straits the SORBS anti-spam blacklist finds itself in. According to a notice posted on the top page, long-time host the University of Queensland has "decided not to honor their agreement with... SORBS and terminate the hosting contract." The post, signed "Michelle Sullivan (Previously known as Matthew Sullivan)," says that the project needs either to "find alternative hosting for a 42RU rack in the Brisbane area of Queensland Australia" or to find a buyer. Offers are solicited for the assets of SORBS as an ongoing anti-spam service — it's now handling over 30 billion DNS queries per day. An update to the post says "A number of offers have already been made, we are evaluating each on their own merits." Failing a successful resolution, SORBS will cease operations on July 20, 2009 at 12 noon Brisbane time. Such a shutdown could slow or disrupt anti-spam efforts for large numbers of mail hosts worldwide.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Has Google Broken JavaScript Spam Munging?

Posted: June 23rd, 2009, 8:31pm CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

Baxil writes "For years now, Javascript munging has been a useful tool to share email addresses on the Web without exposing them to spammers. However, Google is now apparently evaluating Javascript when assembling summary text for web pages' listings, and publishing the un-munged email addresses to the world; and spammers have started to take advantage of this kind service." Anyone else seen this affecting their carefully protected email addresses?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spammer Alan Ralsky Pleads Guilty

Posted: June 23rd, 2009, 2:06pm CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

Czmyt sends the excellent news that one of the US's most notorious spammers has pleaded guilty and could serve 6 years in jail. "Five individuals pleaded guilty today in federal court in Detroit for their roles in a wide-ranging international stock fraud scheme involving the illegal use of bulk commercial e-mails, or 'spamming'... Alan M. Ralsky, 64, of West Bloomfield, Mich., and Scott K. Bradley, 38, also of West Bloomfield, both pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, mail fraud and to violate the CAN-SPAM Act. ... Ralsky and Bradley also pleaded guilty to wire fraud, money laundering, and violating the CAN-SPAM Act. Under the terms of his plea agreement, Ralsky acknowledges he is facing up to 87 months in prison and a $1 million fine..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FTC Targets Massive Car Warranty Robocall Scheme

Posted: May 16th, 2009, 4:02am CEST by Soulskill

Tags: spam

coondoggie writes "Robocalls are a scourge, and the Federal Trade Commission today took action against one outfit by asking a federal court to shut down companies that have been bombarding consumers with hundreds of millions of allegedly deceptive robocalls in an effort to sell vehicle service contracts. According to the FTC, the robocalls have prompted tens of thousands of complaints from consumers who are either on the Do Not Call Registry or asked not to be called. Five telephone numbers associated with the defendants have generated a total of 30,000 Do Not Call complaints. Consumers received the robocalls at home, work, and on their cell phones, sometimes several times in one day. Businesses, government offices and even 911 dispatchers also have been subjected to the calls, the FTC said." Reader powerlord points out that another such company, not named in the FTC filing, raised the ire of thousands of internet-goers, who struck back by rickrolling the company's voice mail and digging up personal information on the company's president.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Opting Out Increases Spam?

Posted: April 24th, 2009, 12:35am CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

J. L. Tympanum writes "I used to ignore spam but recently I have been using the opt-out feature. Now I get more spam than ever, especially of the Nigerian scam (and related) types. The latter has gone from almost none to several a day. Was I a fool for opting out? Is my email address being harvested when I opt out? Has anybody had similar experience?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Ecological Impact of Spam

Posted: April 15th, 2009, 5:43pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: spam

krou writes "A new study entitled 'The Carbon Footprint of Spam' (PDF) published by ICF International and commissioned by McAfee claims that spam uses around 33 billion kilowatt hours of energy annually, which is approximately enough to power 2.4 million US homes (or roughly 3.1 million cars) for a year. They calculated that the average CO2 emission for a spam email is around 0.3 grams. Interestingly, the majority of energy usage (around 80%) comes from users viewing and deleting spam, and searching for legitimate emails within spam filters. They also claim that 'An individual company can find that one fifth of the energy budget of its email system is wasted on spam.' One of the report's authors, Richi Jennings, writes on his blog that 'spam filtering actually saves an incredible amount of energy.' He continues, 'Imagine if every inbox were protected by a state-of-the-art spam filter. We could save about 75% of the spam energy used today — 25 TWh per year; that's like taking 2.3 million cars off the road.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spam Replacing Postal Junk Mail?

Posted: April 11th, 2009, 8:30pm CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

TheOtherChimeraTwin writes "I've been getting spam from mainstream companies that I do business with, which is odd because I didn't give those companies my email address. It is doubly strange because the address they are using is a special-purpose one that I wouldn't give out to any business. Apparently knotice.com ('Direct Digital Marketing Solutions') and postalconnect.net aka emsnetwork.net (an Equifax Marketing Service Product with the ironic name 'Permission!') are somehow collecting email addresses and connecting them with postal addresses, allowing companies to send email instead of postal mail. Has anyone else encountered this slimy practice or know how they are harvesting email addresses?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why the CAPTCHA Approach Is Doomed

Posted: April 8th, 2009, 9:33pm CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

TechnoBabble Pro writes "The CAPTCHA idea sounds simple: prevent bots from massively abusing a website (e.g. to get many email or social network accounts, and send spam), by giving users a test which is easy for humans, but impossible for computers. Is there really such a thing as a well-balanced CAPTCHA, easy on human eyes, but tough on bots? TechnoBabble Pro has a piece on 3 CAPTCHA gotchas which show why any puzzle which isn't a nuisance to legitimate users, won't be much hindrance to abusers, either. It looks like we need a different approach to stop the bots."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spam Back Up To 94% of All Email

Posted: March 31st, 2009, 11:19pm CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

Thelasko writes "A NYTimes blog reports that the volume of spam has returned to its previous levels, as seen before the McColo was shut down. Here is the report on Google's enterprise blog. Adam Swidler, of Postini Services, says: 'It's unlikely we are going to see another event like McColo where taking out an ISP has that kind of dramatic impact on global spam volumes,' because the spammers' control systems are evolving. This is sad news for us all."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Supreme Court Lets Virginia Anti-Spam Law Die

Posted: March 31st, 2009, 11:20am CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

SpuriousLogic sends in a CNN report that begins "The Supreme Court has passed up a chance to examine how far states can go to restrict unsolicited e-mails in efforts to block spammers from bombarding computer users. The high court without comment Monday rejected Virginia's appeal to keep its Computer Crimes Act in place. It was one of the toughest laws of its kind in the nation, the only one to ban noncommercial — as well as commercial — spam e-mail to consumers in that state. The justices' refusal to intervene also means the conviction of prolific commercial spammer Jeremy Jaynes will not be reinstated." Jaynes remains behind bars because of a federal securities fraud conviction unrelated to the matter of spamming.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

3D-Based CAPTCHAs Become a Reality

Posted: March 28th, 2009, 2:16am CET by Soulskill

Tags: spam

mateuscb writes "A new way of creating a CAPTCHA using 3D objects has become a reality. The idea was thought up independently by blogger Taylor Hayward and by the folks at YUNiTi.com. 'Similar to Hayward's idea, this new technology relies on our ability to identify objects in 3D instead of using alphanumeric characters. YUNiti's 3D Captcha, however, has three objects in the challenge and extends the list of images to any object, not limiting it to animals as in Hayward's idea. This increases the challenge's level of complication to prevent computers from successfully making the correct guesses.' I, for one, welcome the thought of not having to read more and more complex CAPTCHA. Lately, I've been having a hard time getting CAPTCHA to work the first time."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Giving Your Greytrapping a Helping Hand

Posted: March 22nd, 2009, 9:36pm CET by timothy

Tags: spam

Peter N. M. Hansteen writes "Some spam houses have invested in real mail servers now, meaning that they are able to get past greylisting and even content filtering. Recently Peter Hansteen found himself resorting to active greytrapping to put some spammers in their place. The article also contains a list of spam houses' snail mail addresses in case you want to tour their sites."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook Vs. Spammers, Round Two

Posted: February 28th, 2009, 4:15pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: spam

An anonymous reader writes "Three months after being awarded $873 million in a lawsuit against Atlantis Blue Capital for violating the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, Facebook earlier this week filed a federal complaint against 'Spam King' Sanford Wallace in San Jose District Court. Las Vegas night club manager Adam Arzoomanian and Scott Shaw are also named as defendants in the suit." These filings do not mark the first time Wallace has faced legal action; last May, MySpace won a $230 million judgment against him.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Verizon.net Finally Moving Email To Port 587

Posted: February 17th, 2009, 10:06pm CET by kdawson

Tags: spam

The Washington Post's Security Fix blog is reporting that Verizon, long identified as the largest ISP source of spam, is moving to require use of the submission port, 587, in outbound mail — and thus to require authentication. While spammers may still be able to relay spam through zombies in Verizon's network, if the victims let their mail clients remember their authentication credentials, at least the zombies will be easily identifiable. Verizon pledges to clean up their zombie problem quickly. We'll see.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Name and Shame Spam Senders With OpenBSD

Posted: February 8th, 2009, 12:40am CET by timothy

Tags: spam

Peter N. M. Hansteen writes "Once you've identified spam senders, OpenBSD provides all the tools you need to take one step further: exporting their addresses and publishing the evidence. You can even trap them yourself using known bad addresses. It's easy, fun and good netizenship."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

KnujOn Updates Top 10 Spam-Friendly Registrars List

Posted: February 6th, 2009, 6:33pm CET by kdawson

Tags: spam

alphadogg writes "Some companies are more popular than others for spammers wanting to register their domain names. Spam-fighting organization KnujOn has updated its report on the top 10 registrars whose customers are linked to spam and other illicit activity. (We discussed the original report last year.) These 10 companies registered 83% of the domains spammed in KnujOn's sample of spam between June and January. KnujOn found that some companies have cleaned up their act in recent months and that others — most surprisingly, Network Solutions and GoDaddy sister company Wild West domains — have popped up on the list. At the top of KnujOn's list, for the second time in a row, is Xinnet.com, a Chinese registrar linked to more than 3 million spam messages. KnujOn recommends that ICANN threaten to pull Xinnet's accreditation, as it did for some of the offenders on the previous list."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why Your Pop-Up Blocker Doesn't Work Anymore

Posted: February 5th, 2009, 3:59pm CET by CmdrTaco

Tags: spam

An anonymous reader writes "If you've noticed that pop-up ad windows seem to have made an unwelcome return into your life, it's because they're not using the same easily blockable technology as before. The Adimpact system uses DHTML to annoy you, and there's no immediate prospect of a solution."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite Gates' Prediction, Spam Far From a Thing of the Past

Posted: January 23rd, 2009, 12:00am CET by timothy

Tags: spam

Slatterz writes "Bill Gates declared in 2004 at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland that spam would be 'a thing of the past' within five years. However, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, has written in a blog post that 'with the prophecy's five-year anniversary approaching, spam continues to cause a headache for companies and home users.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Aussie Regulator Comes Down On SMS Spam

Posted: January 13th, 2009, 4:31pm CET by timothy

Tags: spam

An anonymous reader writes "The Australian Communications and Media Authority has commenced legal proceedings in the Federal Court against several local and international companies over allegedly unsolicited SMS spam. It's the first time the regulator has used its powers under the Spam Act to pursue an alleged SMS spammer through the Courts. Other companies have been fined or committed to an 'enforceable undertaking' to avoid this type of action (although these are not without issue). Another firm accused of SMS spam accused the regulator of being overzealous after it received a formal warning. The regulator appears to have instituted a crackdown on the premium mobile content industry in recent months, culminating in this latest action."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lexus To Start Spamming Car Buyers In Their Cars

Posted: January 8th, 2009, 10:14pm CET by timothy

Tags: spam

techmuse writes "Lexus has announced plans to send targeted messages to buyers of its cars based on the buyer's zip code and vehicle type. Unlike regular spam, these messages will be delivered directly to the buyer's vehicle, and will play to the vehicle's occupants as audio. Lexus has promised to make the messages relevant to the car buyers." Imagine the fun that some targeted malware could do — not that such a thing could happen to a Lexus.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thai Premier Spams Nation, Prompts Consumer Outcry

Posted: December 26th, 2008, 7:40am CET by timothy

Tags: spam

patiwat writes "Newly installed Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's first act was to send a spam SMS to tens of millions of Thai cell phone subscribers. The message, signed 'Your PM,' urged people to help him solve the Thai political crisis and respond with their postal code at a charge of 3 baht (10 US cents). The new premier was criticized for violating privacy regulations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Personalized Spam Rising Sharply, Study Finds

Posted: December 18th, 2008, 4:16pm CET by CmdrTaco

Tags: spam

designperfection9 writes "A new study by Cisco Systems Inc. found an alarming increase in the amount of personalized spam, which online identity thieves create using stolen lists of e-mail addresses or other poached data about their victims, such as where they went to school or which bank they use."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Permalink for 'Slashdot__IT/2008/12/17/CAN_SPAM_Act_Turns_5_Today__mdash__What_Went_Wrong_'

CAN-SPAM Act Turns 5 Today — What Went Wrong?

Posted: December 17th, 2008, 12:52am CET by kdawson

Tags: spam

alphadogg writes "Five years ago, the US tech industry, politicians, and Internet users were wringing their hands over the escalating problem of spam. This prompted Congress to pass a landmark anti-spam bill known as the CAN-SPAM Act in December 2003. Fast forward five years. The number of spam messages sent over the Internet every day has grown more than 10-fold, topping 164 billion worldwide in August 2008. Almost 97% of all e-mails are spam, costing US ISPs and corporations an estimated $42 billion a year. What went wrong here?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Massive Botnet Returns From the Dead To Spam On

Posted: November 26th, 2008, 9:07pm CET by timothy

Tags: spam

CWmike writes "Gregg Keizer reports that the big spam-spewing Srizbi botnet, shut down two weeks ago when McColo was shuttered, has been resurrected and is again under the control of criminals, security researchers said today. As of late Tuesday, infected PCs were able to successfully reconnect with new command-and-control servers, which are now based in Estonia, said Fengmin Gong, chief security content officer at FireEye. The comeback confirms what researchers noted last week, that Srizbi had a fallback strategy. So, in the end, that strategy paid off for the criminals who control the botnet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook Wins $873 Million Lawsuit Against Spammer

Posted: November 25th, 2008, 12:19am CET by CmdrTaco

Tags: spam

damn_registrars writes "A US District judge has awarded $873 million dollars to Facebook in a default judgment against a spammer who sent messages to Facebook users about drugs and sex. This is the highest award so far in a civil suit under the CAN-SPAM Act."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Washington Post Blog Shuts Down 75% of Online Spam

Posted: November 12th, 2008, 3:10pm CET by CmdrTaco

Tags: spam

ESCquire writes "Apparently, the Washington Post Blog 'Security Fix' managed to shut down McColo, a US-based hosting provider facilitating more than 75 percent of global spam. " Now how long before the void is filled by another ISP?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spam Flood Unabated After Bust

Posted: October 21st, 2008, 1:30am CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

AcidAUS writes "Last week's bust of the largest spam operation in the world has had no measurable impact on global spam volumes. The spam gang, known by authorities and security experts as HerbalKing, was responsible for one-third of all spam, the non-profit antispam research group Spamhaus said." The article speculates that the operators of HerbalKing simply passed on to associates the keys to the automated, 35,000-strong botnet, and the spam flow didn't miss a beat.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

International Spam Ring Shut Down

Posted: October 15th, 2008, 12:19am CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

smooth wombat writes "An international spam ring with ties to Australia, New Zealand, China, India, and the US is in the process of being shut down. Finances of members in the US are being frozen using the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 while the FBI is pursuing criminal charges. The group sent spam advertising male enhancement herbs and other items using a botnet estimated at 35,000 computers, and able to send 10 billion emails per day. The Federal Trade Commission monitored the group's finances and found that they had cleared $400,000 in Visa charges in one month alone."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Now Even Photo CAPTCHAs Have Been Cracked

Posted: October 14th, 2008, 5:14pm CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

MoonUnit writes "Technology Review has an interesting article about the way CAPTCHAS are fueling AI research. Following recent news about various textual CAPTCHAs being cracked, the article notes that a researcher at Palo Alto Research Center has now found a way crack photo-based CAPTCHAs too. Most approaches are based on statistical learning, however, so Luis von Ahn (one of the inventors of the CAPTCHA) says it is usually possible to make a CAPTCHA more difficult to break by making a few simple changes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spammer Perjury is Worth Prosecuting

Posted: October 8th, 2008, 6:01pm CEST by CmdrTaco

Tags: spam

Slashdot regular Bennett Haselton summarizes his essay by saying "Spammers really do lie more often under oath than other parties in court (surprise). Judges and prosecutors could promote respect for the law by cracking down on it, and maybe make a dent in spam in the process." Read on to learn of his experiences with (shocking!) spammers who lie in court.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Postfix's Creator Outlines Spam Solution

Posted: September 22nd, 2008, 4:46pm CEST by CmdrTaco

Tags: spam

SATAN writes "Wietse Venema started out as a physicist, but became interested in the security of the programs he wrote to control his physics experiments. He went on to create several well-known network and security tools, including the Security Administrator's Tool for Analyzing Networks (SATAN) and The Coroner's Toolkit with Dan Farmer. He is also the creator of the popular MTA Postfix and TCP Wrapper. SecurityFocus chatted up Venema to talk about software security, how to improve the code quality, what solutions we might have to fight spam successfully, the principle of least privilege, and the philosophy behind the design of Postfix. Venema is currently a researcher at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Virginia Supreme Court Strikes Down Anti-Spam Law

Posted: September 12th, 2008, 9:30pm CEST by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: spam

Skater writes "The Washington Post is reporting that the Virginia Supreme Court has struck down the anti-spam law that was used to convict spammer Jeremy James, on the grounds that the ability to be anonymous was more important than the problem of spam. Strangely, the same court only a few months ago upheld the law. 'The court noted that "were the 'Federalist Papers' just being published today via e-mail, that transmission by Publius would violate the [current Virginia] statute." The court suggested that the law does not limit its restrictions on spam to commercial or fraudulent e-mail, or to unprotected speech such as pornography or defamation. And when the state suggested that the court merely tailor a restriction to the law within its opinion, the court declined.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zebras Get Less Spam Than Aardvarks

Posted: August 31st, 2008, 9:18pm CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

MojoKid writes "A recent study (PDF) by Richard Clayton at Cambridge University determined that the first letter of a someone's email address directly affects how much spam they receive. As shown in the graph at either link above, email addresses with numbers as their first characters receive even fewer spam emails. The corpus used in the study was 8 weeks' worth of email from the UK ISP Demon Internet, just over half a billion messages, of which 56% was deemed to be spam."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zebras Get Less Spam Than Aardvarks

Posted: August 31st, 2008, 9:18pm CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

MojoKid writes "A recent study (PDF) by Richard Clayton at Cambridge University determined that the first letter of a someone's email address directly affects how much spam they receive. As shown in the graph at either link above, email addresses with numbers as their first characters receive even fewer spam emails. The corpus used in the study was 8 weeks' worth of email from the UK ISP Demon Internet, just over half a billion messages, of which 56% was deemed to be spam."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Permalink for 'Slashdot__IT/2008/08/24/Facebook__amp__Myspace_Taking_Some_Spammers_To_Court'

Facebook & Myspace Taking Some Spammers To Court

Posted: August 24th, 2008, 3:12am CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

kevinqtipreedy writes "Social networks like Facebook and Myspace are now bringing spammers into the court systems in new attempts to put a stop to it. Although spammers rarely show up in court and the suits do not always lead to monetary reward, companies are hoping the 'chilling effect' will help in the effort to curb spam."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Where Has All My Spam Gone?

Posted: August 15th, 2008, 4:10pm CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

An anonymous reader writes "I have my own domain, which has its own email server, where I receive all my personal email. I've been getting about 800 emails a day, of which perhaps 20 are real. Suddenly, Sunday or Monday evening, the spam pretty much stopped. My volume of mail has plummeted to less than 100 a day, and as far as I can tell, I'm not missing any real mail — I'm still getting the email list subscriptions I'm expecting, and every time I ask someone to send me a test message, it gets through. My domain host insists that it doesn't do any spam filtering before mail gets to my inbox, and that they've changed nothing about their configuration. I run SpamAssassin on my server to mark, but not delete, spam, and download the whole mess to my home client, and I'm still seeing the occasional message tagged by SpamAssassin. But it's virtually all gone. And I haven't changed anything about my own mail configuration, or the harvestability of my site (my personal email has been harvestable for almost a decade). So what's going on? I can't believe that several major botnets would have vanished overnight. Any ideas?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spam King and Family Dead In Murder-Suicide

Posted: July 25th, 2008, 3:05pm CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

Lt.Hawkins was one of many readers sending in word that the escaped spam king discussed yesterday was found dead in Colorado, after apparently killing his wife and 3-year-old daughter. A teenager was injured, and an infant was found alive in the car.

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Spam King Escapes From Federal Prison

Posted: July 24th, 2008, 4:06pm CEST by CmdrTaco

Tags: spam

Bobfrankly1 writes "The FBI, IRS, and the Rocky Mountain Safe Streets Task Force are helping the US Marshals search for escaped 'Spam King' Edward 'Eddie' Davidson. He apparently jumped in a car with his wife, changed clothes at home, and hasn't been seen since." Update: 07/24 22:20 GMT by T : It seems that Davidson has been found, victim of a murder-suicide which also left two others dead.

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Spammers Choose GMail

Posted: July 17th, 2008, 2:47pm CEST by CmdrTaco

Tags: spam

EdwardLAN writes "A study by Roaring Penguin has discovered that during the past three weeks, the amount of spam originating from Gmail has risen sharply." My spam has been pretty ridiculously high for the last few weeks, although I have no idea if this is part of it. It really does seem like gmail's spam filters are declining these days.

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Spammers Announce World War III

Posted: July 10th, 2008, 11:56pm CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

schliz writes with the stub of a disheartening article at IT News: "Hackers are deluging web users with malware-laden spam claiming that World War III has started following a US invasion of Iran. Security experts warned [yesterday] that spam emails with subject lines including 'Third World War has begun,' '20000 US Soldiers in Iran,' and 'US Army crossed Iran's borders' have been intercepted. The emails contain links to a malicious webpage that displays what appears to be a video player showing the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon's EC2 Having Problems With Spam and Malware

Posted: July 2nd, 2008, 9:14pm CEST by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: spam

jamie pointed out a story about the recent problems Amazon's EC2 service has been having with malware and spam. "EC2 space is now actively blocked by Outblaze, and has been listed by Spamhaus in their PBL list [...] However as Seth Breidbart noted in the comments, 'note that Amazon will terminate the instance. That means that the spammer just creates another instance, which gets a new IP address, and continues spamming.' True enough -- as described, instance termination simply isn't good enough."

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What Happens When You Reply To ALL of Your Spam

Posted: July 1st, 2008, 11:54pm CEST by CmdrTaco

Tags: spam

bednarz writes "For Tracy Mooney, a married mother of three in Naperville, Ill., the decision to abandon cyber-sense and invite e-mail spam into her life for a month by participating in a McAfee experiment was a bit of a lark. The idea of the Spammed Persistently All Month (S.P.A.M.) experiment — which fittingly started on April Fool's Day — was to have 50 volunteers from around the world answer every spam message and pop-up ad they got. Mooney was game, especially since McAfee was giving a free PC to all participants. She told her story to Network World."

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ICANN Asked To Shut Down "Worst" Chinese Registrar

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 5:25am CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

Ian Lamont writes "Anti-spam service Knujon has released reports highlighting how certain registrars in the US and abroad have consistently failed to live up to certain WHOIS-related obligations under ICANN's Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) — specifically, the requirement that people or company registering domains provide valid contact information. Now the firm is requesting that ICANN shut down the worst alleged offender, Xinnet Bei Gong Da Software. According to Knujon, none of the WHOIS records in a sample of 11,000 alleged spam sites registered through Xinnet and reported by Knujon to ICANN's Whois Data Problem Report System were corrected in a six-month period ending in May 2008 — and the Chinese registrar continues to register about 100 spam sites per day. In many cases, says the Knujon document (PDF), Xinnet does not have 'any Whois record data for review while the sites are still active' and the spam sites further promote 'seal abuse' by posting bogus BBB, Verisign, and other trusted industry seals. ICANN says it is investigating. ICANN has just posted a draft revised RAA that is open for public comment until August 4. However, the wording of Section 3.7.8, governing registrars' obligations to check and correct domain owners' contact information, hasn't changed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How To Convince My Boss Not To Spam?

Posted: June 17th, 2008, 9:37am CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

An anonymous reader writes "The small travel agent that I work for recently received an email from one of our competitors with several thousand of their potential customers in the 'To:' and 'Cc:' fields. My boss now wants to use these addresses to send unsolicited advertisements. I would like to convince him not to do this, as I believe that this practice is morally wrong and legally dubious. However, morals don't go very far in the business world, so I'm asking Slashdot: what business-oriented arguments can I use to dissuade my boss from spamming?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MySpace Wins $230 Million vs Sanford Wallace

Posted: May 14th, 2008, 5:00pm CEST by CmdrTaco

Tags: spam

smooth wombat writes "Apparently some people just don't take the hint. The latest story in the Sanford Wallace spamming saga is a $230 million verdict against Wallace and his partner, Walter Rines, when they failed to show up in court. Wallace and Rines were accused by MySpace of creating their own accounts and taking over other accounts through phishing scams, and then using those accounts to send out bogus emails to other members. The emails sent would indicate a video or web site but when people would go to the link, the two would make money through the number of hits generated or they would try to sell something such as ring tones. According to MySpace, the pair sent over 730,000 emails to members which resulted in bandwidth and delivery-related costs as well as complaints from hundreds of members. The 2003 CAN-SPAM Act allows MySpace to collect $100 per violation or triple that amount when the spam is sent "willfully and knowingly"."

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Spam Filtering For Small/Medium Business?

Posted: May 11th, 2008, 1:58pm CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

or_is_it writes "The company I work for has been growing dramatically and I've been charged with the task of being the gatekeeper for our GFI Spam filters. This involves manually inspecting the subject line/to/from for all caught messages in each filter rule folder. For a company of about 50 people, in one day the number of spam messages can exceed 2,000. Neglect it for a day and you end up with quite a task on your hands. I've made the rules lax enough so important messages can go through, along with a few stray spams, for which I get bitched at. Tighten the rules up and then maybe an important time-sensitive email never gets to its intended recipient, and I get bitched at. Manually reading through all those subject lines is supposed to prevent that, but I'm only human and genuine messages can easily get overlooked. How do larger organizations deal with the spam issue? I can't imagine having one centralized person manually inspecting everyone's junk-mail header is the optimal solution. Purchasing a different commercial mail filter product is a possibility, but I'd like to hear some anecdotal evidence before jumping ship."

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Gmail As Open-Relay Spam Server

Posted: May 11th, 2008, 3:14am CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

sveard writes of a little problem Google is having that has Gmail acting like an open relay. Compounding the issue is the fact that services such as Hotmail and Yahoo trust Gmail as a source of mail. "A recently-discovered flaw in Gmail is capable of turning Google's e-mail service into a highly effective spam machine. According to the Information Security Research Team (INSERT), Gmail is susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack that allows a spammer to send thousands of bulk e-mails through Google's SMTP service without fear of detection. This attack bypasses both Google's identity fraud protection mechanisms and the current 500-address limit on bulk e-mail."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gmail As Open-Relay Spam Server

Posted: May 11th, 2008, 1:20am CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

sveard writes of a little problem Google is having that has Gmail acting like an open relay. Compounding the issue is the fact that services such as Hotmail and Yahoo trust Gmail as a source of mail. "A recently-discovered flaw in Gmail is capable of turning Google's e-mail service into a highly effective spam machine. According to the Information Security Research Team (INSERT), Gmail is susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack that allows a spammer to send thousands of bulk e-mails through Google's SMTP service without fear of detection. This attack bypasses both Google's identity fraud protection mechanisms and the current 500-address limit on bulk e-mail."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

100 Email Bouncebacks - Welcome to Backscattering

Posted: May 5th, 2008, 11:50am CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

distefano links to a story on Computerworld, excerpting: "E-mail users are receiving an increasing number of bounceback spam, known as backscatter, and security experts say this kind of spam is growing. The bounceback e-mail messages come in at a trickle, maybe one or two every hour. The subject lines are disquieting: 'Cyails, Vygara nad Levytar,' 'UNSOLICITED BULK EMAIL, apparently from you.' You eye your computer screen; you're nervous. What's going on ? Have you been hacked? Are you some kind of zombie botnet spammer? Nope, you're just getting a little backscatter — bounceback messages from legitimate e-mail servers that have been fooled by the spammers."

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Spammers Hijacking IP Space

Posted: April 30th, 2008, 2:54am CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

Ron Guilmette writes "As reported in the Washington Post's Security Fix blog, a substantial hunk of IP address space has apparently been taken over by notorious mass e-mailing company Media Breakaway, LLC, formerly known as OptInRealBig, via means that are at best questionable. The block in question is 134.17.0.0/16, which I documented in depth in an independent investigation. (Apparently, the President of Media Breakaway has now admitted to the Washington Post that his company has been occupying and using the 134.17.0.0/16 block and that front company JKS Media, which provides routing to the block, is actually owned by Media Breakaway.) Remarkably, the president of Media Breakaway, who happens to be an attorney, is trying to defend his company's apparent snatching of this block based upon his own rather novel legal theory that ARIN doesn't have jurisdiction over any IP address space that was handed out before ARIN was formed, in 1997."

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Spam Is 30 Years Old

Posted: April 25th, 2008, 6:32pm CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist commemorates spam's 30th anniversary, a week from today. The first spam message — archived here — was sent to 393 users of ARPANET on May 2 1978 by someone from computing pioneers DEC. They had to type in all the addresses by hand first."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Judge In e360 Vs. Comcast Rules e360 a Spammer

Posted: April 11th, 2008, 5:43pm CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

Brielle Bruns writes "Yesterday, Judge James B. Zagel dismissed claims against Comcast by e360. In the decision, the judge says: 'Plaintiff e360Insight, LLC is a marketer. It refers to itself as an Internet marketing company. Some, perhaps even a majority of people in this country, would call it a spammer.' This clears the path for Comcast's counter-suit." e360 is the spammer that got a default judgement against Spamhaus, as we have discussed on numerous occasions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-Dead ORDB Begins Returning False Positives

Posted: March 25th, 2008, 11:39pm CET by kdawson

Tags: spam

Chapter80 writes "At noon today (Eastern Standard Time), the long dead ORDB spam identification system began returning false positives as a way to get sleeping users to remove the ORDB query from their spam filters. The net effect: all mail is blocked on servers still configured to use the ORDB service, which was taken out of commission in December of 2006. So if you're not getting any mail, check your spam filter configuration!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Open Source News » Tags » spam

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104 items tagged "spam"

Posted: April 6th, 2012, 8:30pm CEST by Unknown Lamer

Tags: spam

Posted: April 5th, 2012, 9:20pm CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

Posted: March 27th, 2012, 11:34am CEST by Unknown Lamer

Tags: spam

Posted: November 23rd, 2011, 4:20am CET by Soulskill

Tags: spam

Posted: October 13th, 2011, 7:35pm CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

Posted: October 13th, 2011, 7:11pm CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

Posted: September 20th, 2011, 4:02am CEST by Soulskill

Tags: spam

Posted: September 20th, 2011, 4:02am CEST by Soulskill

Tags: spam

Posted: August 30th, 2011, 7:45pm CEST by Unknown Lamer

Tags: spam

Posted: August 17th, 2011, 7:52pm CEST by samzenpus

Tags: spam

Posted: June 22nd, 2011, 8:35pm CEST by samzenpus

Tags: spam

Posted: June 18th, 2011, 4:49pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: spam

Posted: June 10th, 2011, 12:20pm CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

Posted: May 25th, 2011, 2:07pm CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

Posted: May 21st, 2011, 1:31am CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

Posted: March 6th, 2011, 7:01pm CET by timothy

Tags: spam

Posted: February 28th, 2011, 2:49pm CET by CmdrTaco

Tags: spam

Posted: January 28th, 2011, 4:55pm CET by samzenpus

Tags: spam

Posted: January 26th, 2011, 1:52am CET by timothy

Tags: spam

Posted: January 20th, 2011, 1:18am CET by samzenpus

Tags: spam

Posted: December 27th, 2010, 2:11am CET by timothy

Tags: spam

Posted: December 17th, 2010, 10:26pm CET by Soulskill

Tags: spam

Posted: October 6th, 2010, 5:11am CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

Posted: October 5th, 2010, 6:58pm CEST by CmdrTaco

Tags: spam

Posted: September 4th, 2010, 3:29pm CEST by Soulskill

Tags: spam

Posted: August 25th, 2010, 4:49am CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

Posted: July 14th, 2010, 7:43pm CEST by timothy

Tags: spam

Posted: June 10th, 2010, 6:15pm CEST by CmdrTaco

Tags: spam

Posted: May 18th, 2010, 5:41pm CEST by CmdrTaco

Tags: spam

Posted: April 21st, 2010, 12:44am CEST by kdawson

Tags: spam

Posted: April 9th, 2010, 7:51pm CEST by samzenpus

Tags: spam

Posted: March 18th, 2010, 11:42pm CET by timothy

Tags: spam

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 7:51pm CET by kdawson

Tags: spam

Posted: January 25th, 2010, 9:43pm CET by ScuttleMonkey

Tags: spam

Posted: January 23rd, 2010, 1:52pm CET by timothy

Tags: spam

Posted: January 22nd, 2010, 6:39pm CET by kdawson

Tags: spam

Posted: January 7th, 2010, 10:05pm CET by kdawson

Tags: spam

Posted: December 15th, 2009, 6:33pm CET by timothy

Tags: spam

Posted: December 8th, 2009, 11:20pm CET by kdawson