Researchers have claimed skepticism around the existence of a spam botnet on Android devices, despite reports from Sophos and Microsoft claiming the issue was real.
Speculation surrounding the threat began last week when Terry Zink, a program manager for Microsoft Forefront Online Security, claimed spam messages were being sent using the Yahoo Mail app on Android devices.
Challenge-response techniques called "CAPTCHAs" designed to keep spambots off Web sites can easily be broken by humans who are paid to type in the responses, according to a new report from security firm Imperva.
CAPTCHAs, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, are created by programs and are intended to be difficult for computers to fill out.
Many of the LinkedIn e-mails alerts instructing users on how to reset passwords accessed by hackers were dumped into spam boxes, according to e-mail security vendor Cloudmark.
In a blog post last week, Andrew Conway, a Cloudmark researcher, said a substantial increase in spam reports last weekend were traced to LinkedIn password reset e-mail alerts
Yahoo said it will roll out globally this week a new antispam specification intended to make it easier for service providers to confidently discard suspicious email messages.
The specification, called DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance), allows email senders to tell receiving services if they are using two other technologies to weed out spam.
According to security experts, social networking sites, rather than email, are now the most favored platform for spammers to peddle their unsolicited links, as reported by Bloomberg.
This is partially due to the fact that email spam filters have become so effective that tens of billions of spam messages are now being diverted to social media sites instead, according to Dan Olds of Gabriel Consulting Group.
Russia has climbed up the global spam rating and now ranks third internationally and first in Europe, according to Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report.
The country’s ever-increasing hacker activity also took Russia up to sixth place in the global Internet malware activity rating. Last year, the country was tenth. Among the top five are the US, China, India, Brazil, and Germany.
Kasperksy today discovered a new spam campaign on Twitter pushing fake antivirus software. Since it is still ongoing, the numbers for it are likely much higher than what the security firm first reported: 540 compromised Twitter accounts sent out 4148 tweets, linking to a total of 44 unique domains (most of them hosted on .tk and .tw1.su).
A quick search on Twitter shows that the scam is still rampant. Here are a handful of tweets I saw while writing this article, to give you an idea of what the spam looks like:
Pinterest, the new scrapbook style social networking site has been all the rage recently and spammers have been quick to hop on as well.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has accused Warner Brothers Entertainment of using a flawed computer program to send out takedown notices without proper oversight.
Visa has begun threatening banks that harbour spammer accounts in a move designed to crush the spam revenue model.
The initiative, described as a “major effort”, had been quietly underway since the start of the year and has already forced the closure of accounts held by major spam players.
