The cybercrime underground is expanding each day, yet the longer I study it the more convinced I am that much of it is run by a fairly small and loose-knit group of hackers. That suspicion was reinforced this week when I discovered that the author of the infamous ZeuS Trojan was a core member of Spamdot, until recently the most exclusive online forum for spammers and the shady businessmen who support the big spam botnets.
Facebook and the state of Washington have filed separate lawsuits against West Virginia-based Adscend Media LLC, alleging the company was responsible for spreading malware through Facebook and for stealing personal information from users of the social networking site.
The Russian man who Microsoft has accused of being the mastermind behind the Kelihos botnet has taken to his blog to deny the allegations.
"I did not commit this crime, [have] never participated in the management of botnets and any other similar programs and especially not extracted from it any benefit," Andrey Sabelnikov wrote Friday in a translated post on LiveJournal. The entry was directed to Microsoft and Kaspersky Labs, which also reportedly was involved in the takedown of Kelihos.
Nokia has been fined by Australian regulators for spamming its customers with text messages, Reuters reports. The company will have to pay AUS$55,000 for sending SMS marketing messages for its products and services alongside "tips" on how customers can best use their phones, but without offering a way to unsubscribe to the messages.
Several months ago there was a massive spam operation by the name of Kelihos botnet that both Microsoft and partners took offline, this menace having already sent 3.8 billion spam emails a day for some time. What you should know, and perhaps much more importantly, is the following fact: the controller and creator of that spam factory was no less than a former employee of several Antivirus firms. What does this mean for you? It means you should think twice before firing Johnny No-Virus from your Antivirus group, folks, because he’ll probably be spamming you soon.
Researchers have revealed a new type of spam campaign that appears to be a test run to find out how mobile users will respond to social engineering attempts on their smartphones and tablets.
According to a Tuesday blog post from security firm Websense, the emails look like typical spam trying to hawk male enhancement drugs. However, in this case, they contain a link to a legitimate site -- 2tag.nl -- that generates quick response (QR) codes for URLs.
India has emerged as the world's top source of junk mail as spammers make use of lax laws and absent enforcement to turn the country into a centre of unsolicited email.
A recent report by Kaspersky Lab, a Moscow-based global Internet security firm, says more spam was sent from the south Asian giant than anywhere else in the world in the third quarter of the year.
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) claims to have made significant progress in finding those responsible for bothering UK citizens with mobile spam.
The data protection watchdog today said it was almost certain it knew who was behind spam messages, but it needed more evidence to punish them.
The ICO has learned messages are being sent from unregistered pay-as-you-go SIM cards and has raided an office in the north of England as part of its investigations. It said it was planning to execute more search warrants in the future.
Facebook said it has identified many of those responsible for a wave of pornographic content that showed up on users' news feeds this week.
In Q3 2011, the percentage of fraudulent emails in spam traffic increased twenty times, rising from 0.1 per cent last quarter to 2 per cent of all spam traffic in Q3. The quantity of fraudulent messages is striking, but so is the variety of social engineering techniques deployed.
On one level, attackers used tried-and-trusted tricks, sending email offers on behalf of online games to steal usernames and passwords, or fake notifications from major organisations which then link to a phishing resource. Multi-stage attacks on a new level are now becoming more common.
