Anti-malware firm Kaspersky Lab has announced a new technology which it hopes will provide greater ammunition in the fight against spam.
The technology can detect text embedded in images without the need for machine recognition, which requires uniformity of size, style and arrangement of symbols in order to detect junk email. Spammers can avoid detection by distorting the images, explained Kaspersky Lab's senior technology consultant, David Emm.
IT security and control firm Sophos is advising Twitter users to be vigilant of suspicious accounts that have been using the service to build up databases of contacts in order to spread their spam messages. These spam accounts are recognisable as they tend to follow very large numbers of similarly named Twitter profiles.
Sophos was alerted by a Twitter account that was also following over a hundred other users, all with user-names containing "Graham" or "Honda".
How do you let people create user accounts or post comments on your Web site without letting spam bots in? Simple -- make your users prove they're human. Many Web sites use CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) technology to try to tell the bots from the people.
Yahoo is touting a new set of tools it is using to block spam for its webmail service.
Company anti-spam czar Mark Risher made a posting on Tuesday outlining some of the new protections that the company is putting into place. "At Yahoo, we take spam seriously," wrote Risher.
The Irish Government has introduced a law that will impose a fine of €250,000 or 10% of the turnover on business found to be involved in spamming practice.
The Communication Minister of Ireland has introduced the law that makes spamming practice an offensive act. As per the reports, earlier, hackers were charged in the District Court where the maximum limit of fine was €3,000.
A CISCO REPORT claims that more than 90 per cent of the email flowing around the net is spam created by armies of zombie botnets.
Cisco chief security researcher Patrick Peterson said that every year Cisco sees the hackers get more cunning as they come up with new ways to exploit people, networks and the Internet. The report said that there are more than 200 billion spam messages sent every day which is about 90 per cent of all email.
A Twitter account in the name of internet luminary Vint Cerf has been suspended after miscreants abused it to send link spam.
The @cerf account Cerf himself established with the micro blogging service last month was used to push auction search sites, according to a ZDNet security blog story. Really? Actually no - it's a fake profile, as Cerf himself confirms.
New Zealand lags way behind our neighbours in Australia, but according Sophos Asia Pacific head of technology, Paul Ducklin, when it comes to hosting malware Kiwis should be happy with their lowly 51st ranking.
In its Security Threat Report: 2009 released yesterday, Sophos points the finger at the US for being the host of more web-based malware than any other country in 2008, overtaking China, which, in 2007, hosted more than half the world's malware.
The outcome of a new poll by conducted Opinium Research for Moneysupermarket in October 2008 has disclosed that an average Brit receives 10 spam mails per day, 372 per month, either by text or mail.
Nearly 90% of 2,179 adults surveyed do not safeguard themselves from spam by filtering mails, making them accessible to harmful messages. 81% claim that the messages they receive are meaningless, with the most frequent types of spam are sales (35%), pornography (16%) and phishing (27%).
Spam is on the rise again, just in time for the holiday shopping season. Spam dropped two-thirds in November after Silicon Valley-based McColo, a major spam network, was shut down. At the time, Symantec correctly predicted little long-term effect on spam levels.
