Over 10,000 soldiers, civilians, and military family members with .mil email extensions were duped by a bizarre, security exercise conducted by the Army on Sunday. The exercise set out to test susceptibility to phishing - attempts to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic medium.
Although plenty of criminals have embraced spam, and corrupted thousands of machines to send out billions of messages, there was a time when spamming was unthinkable.
Long before Tim Berners-Lee and Mosaic and AOL, and other points in Internet history, the humble email came into existence during the summer of 1971. Ray Tomlinson sent a message from one machine to another in the same room.
He recently told the Times Online the idea of spam would have been unthinkable in the early days, when no more than a thousand people had email.
The US, China and Russia may be responsible for a large proportion of the world's spam email but other, smaller nations are also playing their role.
Statistics from security firm Sophos suggest that it is the Pitcairn Islands that actually produces the highest ratio of unsolicited email compared to its overall population.
On a per-person basis, the former British colony in the South Pacific pumps out more spam than much larger nations.
Back in early February, we covered the rapid rise of the Mega-D botnet and its various social-engineering-based attack methods. At the time, there was some question as to what malware was behind the creation of Mega-D (it has since been identified as Ozok), and no definite time frame as to when the botnet might be shut down. Now, according to security firm Marshal, Mega-D's profile is shrinking, thanks to a 10-day control server failure, but another botnet, Srizbi, is quickly moving into the gap.
CHINA'S INTERNET regulators plan to block spammers and punish parties who commission spamming, according to Huang Chengqing, secretary general of the Internet Society of China (ISC).
At a press conference, Huang explained that those who broadcast spam emails are often hired by others, so the Society will target those who cause spam to be sent and seek to benefit from it monetarily.
Having prospered by passing the costs of their operations onto others, spammers have a new way to vex computer users: printer hijacking.
Building on the concept of cross-site scripting, whereby an attacker can inject malicious code in Web pages viewed by others, security researcher Aaron Weaver has demonstrated how an attacker can inject spam messages into a Web site visitor's printer.
Internet users in Britain get 20billion spam e-mails every day – double the amount of junk mail sent a year ago.
Up to 120billion spam messages are sent daily worldwide – that's 20 for each person on the planet – and 49 out of 50 e-mails are junk.
Next year, social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace will become prime sources of personal data for spam gangs, a report claims today.
'2007 marked a turning point for threats,' said Jason Steer of IronPort Systems, which did the research.
A group of spammers, with a fondness for using celebrity names in its spam, is now controlling a network of compromised computers large enough to rival the massive 'Storm Worm' botnet.
A botnet is a network of computers that are under the control of hackers, usually with the rightful owner blissfully unaware that their machines have been hijacked.
Botnets, with their massive computing power, are used to distribute vast amounts of spam by email that usually contains malware that will allow the cyber crooks to steal personal information like passwords.
MX Logic Inc., a provider of managed email and Web security services, has predicted that spam levels will spike an additional 50% over current levels by the end of 2007 due to the holiday retail rush. This will represent a 200% increase since January of 2007.
Spammers are using bogus MP3 files to lure people to partake in pump-and-dump stock scams, according to security companies. Otherwise empty email messages carry MP3 files named after recording artists, such as Fergie, Carrie Underwood, even Elvis.
