Experts at SophosLabs?, Sophos's global network of virus, spyware and spam analysis centers, have warned German computer users to be on their guard against a malicious email which claims to come from home furniture giant Ikea.
The emails, which have been widely spammed out, pose as a communication from Ikea Deutschland, but opening the attached file launches the Troj/Clagger-AZ Trojan horse.
The tech quandary for many small businesses isn't about building a better website or when to buy Microsoft's new Vista operating system. It's an old problem managers thought they'd already licked: spam.
Unwanted commercial e-mail has surged in recent months as online fraudsters, bogus pharmaceutical suppliers and others send billions of pieces of spam engineered to pierce defenses at companies of all sizes. The share of e-mail deemed junk rose as high as 80% last month from as low as 47% in September, says software security firm Symantec.
E-mail. Who needs it? Fewer and fewer of you, going by Computer Weekly's recent Big Question poll, when 88% of IT workers said it was more of a hindrance than a help.
And to this hammer blow Downtime can now add the findings of a survey from network monitoring specialist Ipswitch, which show that just under 85% of all e-mail being received is spam.
A former treasurer of Alcona County in Michigan has been arrested after allegedly investing more than $1.2m of county funds in Nigerian fraud scams.
Security firm Sophos said that Thomas Katona, who was treasurer of Alcona County for 13 years, has been charged with forgery and multiple counts of embezzlement. Both charges carry a jail sentence of 10 years or more.
The US has been named and shamed as the nation that hosted more malicious code and relayed more spam than any other during 2006.
According to the security vendor Sophos Security Threat Report 2007, the US internet industry remains plagued by criminal activity despite continued efforts to clamp down on cyber-crime.
"Too many US-hosted websites still have lax security measures in place," said Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos.
Hackers have begun using newsletters to launch spam, joining legitimate newsletter creators in the hope to defy spam filters.
Researchers at Symantec say they've uncovered email messages that appear to be genuine newsletters - only to find the emails have been hijacked by spammers.
According to the US based anti-virus firm, Spammers embed their messages within a single file, which pops up after an affected user reads what he or she thinks is a normal newsletter message for a few minutes.
The biggest thing I've wondered about spam is: Why do the spammers even bother? They spend an enormous amount of effort, time, and (I expect) money to deliver huge quantities of mail to my inbox, which I then spend an enormous amount of effort, time, and (for some people) money to delete unseen and unread. How is this profitable for the spammers?
Spam email pretending to be from a hired killer is being sent out in an effort to blackmail recipients for up to $80,000.
The emails usually start with a cheery greeting of 'Good day' or have a subject line saying 'Read this to be safe and a new life in this new year' before going on to threaten the reader.
"Do not contact the police or FBI or try to send a copy of this to them, because if you do I will know and might be pushed to do what I have being paid to do, beside, this is the first time I turned out to be a betrayer in my job," the main text reads.
The amount of e-mail spam continues to grow at an unprecedented rate, setting a record level in December of nearly 94 percent of all electronic mail on the Internet, according to Postini. Postini blocked more than 25 billion spam messages in December, representing a 144 percent increase from December 2005 to December 2006.
Spam levels suddenly dropped 30 per cent last week, according to managed security firm SoftScan, which attributes the let-up to a "broken" botnet.
SoftScan is still investigating the possible cause of the significant drop in junk mail volumes it's recording but reckons the most likely explanation is that hackers have temporarily lost control of a significant network of compromised machines. It seems unlikely that new computers at Christmas had much to do with affecting the number of compromised machines out there.
