An examination of spam originating from the major free e-mail providers shows that like consumers, spammers prefer Google.
In a three-week period from mid-June to this month, e-mail filtering firm Roaring Penguin said it saw an explosion of spam originating from Gmail, while Microsoft Hotmail and Yahoo Mail remained flat.
For Tracy Mooney, a married mother of three in Naperville, Ill., the decision to abandon cybersense and invite e-mail spam into her life for a month by participating in a McAfee Inc. experiment was a bit of a lark.
The idea of McAfee's Global SPAM (for Spammed Persistently All Month) Experiment — which fittingly started on April Fool's Day — was to have 50 volunteers from 10 different countries answer every spam message and click on every pop-up ad on their PCs.
Spam has never been cheaper. online-marketing firms are falling over themselves to offer spam campaigns of millions of addresses. These e-mail blasts are disturbingly inexpensive. Pro Software Pack, for example, charges just $125 to send 1 million mes sages. Despite spending billions of dollars fighting spam over the past decade, the security industry is in no danger of winning the war soon:
The rising popularity of smartphones such as the BlackBerry and the iPhone will make them targets for viruses and spam, security experts believe.
In the past few years the internet has experienced a huge rise in security problems, led by criminal gangs who have used spam and viruses for financial scams. Mobile phones have remained relatively unscathed, but that is set to change as sales of smartphones surge.
In the first three months of this year 32.2 million smartphones were sold - 11 per cent of all handset sales and a 29 per cent increase on the same period last year.
A major antispam organization is pushing a set of new best practices for ISPs (Internet service providers) to stop increasing volumes of spam from botnets.
The guidelines, from the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), were drawn up at a meeting in Germany last week and deal with forwarded e-mail and e-mail that is sent from dynamic IP (Internet Protocol) addresses.
The growing prevalence of Web sites that can download malicious software onto the computers of unsuspecting visitors has led some to compare the Internet to the lawless Wild West, but a new survey suggests that in law and order terms, the Web looks more like a city with a broad variety of neighborhoods -- some safe, and some less so.
Potentially good news for email users - spammers are now concentrating on a range of other communication channels, too. The bad news is that spammers are using other forms of interaction - such as email - to increase spam on social networks.
Research from messaging specialist Cloudmark and researcher Harris Interactive suggests spam is now clogging social networks and creating a potential barrier to further growth.
If you’re cash-strapped and waiting on a tax refund, clicking on an e-mail with directions from the Internal Revenue Service on how to get that check might seem like a no-brainer.
But hold off, says IRS spokesman Dan Boone, even if the e-mail has an official logo on it.
“The IRS does not ever send e-mails about your personal taxes, or your business taxes — your taxes period,” Mr. Boone said. “We know that’s not a secure form of communication. So if you get an e-mail, you can be virtually sure it’s a scam.”
One of the biggest spam block lists on the internet suffered an embarrassing technical cock-up today which blocked emails from some servers at web security monitoring firm MessageLabs and at some ISPs for about five hours.
The CBL (Composite Blocking List), a DNS blacklist that takes its source data from very large spamtraps and lists IP addresses of open proxies and worms/viruses, said on its website that a problem in a contributory feed spat out a number of invalid lists.
Spammers are employing human workers to sign up for thousands of free email accounts from which to distribute phishing emails, claims a new report.
The report, from TrendLabs, claims workers in India are being used to solve the CAPTCHA tests (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) during registration for free online email accounts. At least one large supplier of free accounts has been heavily targeted, claims the company.
