About a year ago, Scott Madlener, a marketing executive, e-mailed a client several times but his messages were not getting through.
"It raised a red flag immediately," said Madlener, executive vice president for interactive strategies at the Performance Communications Group of Chicago. "We asked our system administrator to look at what was happening, and he came back to me with some bad news: We had been blacklisted."
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has granted preliminary approval to the DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).
The industry standard promises to curb spam email by preventing spammers spoofing, the practice of forging the sender's email address to make it appear like the message originated from a reputable company instead of some shady offshore spammer.
DomainKeys attaches an encrypted digital signature unique to the sender to each e-mail message when it is sent. A message where the sender's address doesn't match the signature can be discarded as spam.
Customers of UK net provider Plusnet have been told to change the password for their account following a break-in by malicious hackers.
In the attack, the hackers gained control of a Plusnet's mail server and stole a list of e-mail addresses.
Spammers used the list to deluge Plusnet customers with junk mail. Some customers may also have been exposed to a computer virus.
Plusnet shut down its webmail system while it tried to remedy the problem.
THE amount of spam originating from China dropped dramatically in the first three months of the year, an IT security firm says.
In the period from January to March, China accounted for 7.5 per cent of all worldwide spam, Sophos said in a statement. This compared with 21.9 per cent in the year-earlier period.
"China, who until recently was an intimate rival to the US, dropped dramatically during the last quarter," said Carole Theriault, a senior security consultant at Sophos.
Spammers are having a field day with a string of recently discovered security vulnerabilities in MailEnable, an e-mail server program offered by many large, dedicated Web hosting companies.
Over the past few months, MailEnable has released updates at least a half dozen times to fix quite serious vulnerabilities in its various products that attackers can use to completely hijack vulnerable systems. Unfortunately, it looks like many customers either are not registered (and thus not receiving e-mail notices from MailEnable about the flaws), or they are simply ignoring the alerts.
The average size of a spam message has increased by 77 per cent since September last year and continues to grow, according to SoftScan.
The security firm attributes the increase to the dramatic rise in image-based spam in recent months.
SoftScan warned that this will add to the cost managing email for organisations that have to scale-up bandwidth and storage requirements to meet demand. Since September last year individual spam emails have increased from an average of 6.62Kb to 11.76Kb.
New Zealand is well known for producing huge quantities of milk, wool and lamb. But spam?
A new report shows New Zealand is outproducing Australia two to one in the production of spam - of the email kind - a new report from security software producer Symantec has found.
The just-released report found New Zealand generated about four per cent of all the spam from the Asia-Pacific/Japan region, compared with two per cent coming out of Australia.
Blog owners and website administrators have been alerted to the growing risk of 'trackback' spam, following reports that Filipino online news service Newsbreak found over 27,000 links to adult web pages posted on its website.
Trackbacks allow blog authors to observe who has seen and linked to their postings, and enables readers to easily locate web postings related to the subject matter.
However, it is also open to abuse from spammers who can connect automatically via trackbacks to postings on legitimate blogs.
Pornography, long the flagship of the spam industry, continued to lose some of its stature in February, with fewer spam messages than ever relating to porn.
Symantec's State of Spam report for last month shows that pornographic spam reached an all time low of 3% of all spam. The security company reported in February that pornographic spam accounted for 4% of all spam sent out in January.
By contrast, in the first half of last year, adult spam made up 22% of all spam messages.
Although it lacks the headline impact of the various forms of nakedly malicious cyber crime such as hacking, phishing, identity theft, worms, viruses and denial of service attacks, spam is fast changing its status from that of on-line nuisance to major global menace.
