Australia has dropped off the 2006 "dirty dozen" spam list completely. The dirty dozen spam list is a snapshot of countries found to be contributing to the worldwide level of spam in the third quarter of 2006 compiled by Sophos.
In the quarter Australia had fallen from number 25 to 32 in a global ranking of countries known for sending spam.
A group of international agencies and organisations have teamed up to launch StopSpamAlliance.org, designed to be a centralised base for data and resources in the fight against junk email.
The Spamhaus Project has told a U.S. court that it plans to appeal against a recent ruling that threatened it with millions of dollars in legal fines and a possible shutdown of its database of known spammers. The notice was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois by lawyers with Jenner & Block LLP, a Chicago law firm that is now representing the volunteer organisation.
BT is implementing what it says is world?s first fully-automated ?spam buster? system designed to detect and block professional spammers and ?botnet?-infected customers using the BT broadband network. BT is using Content Forensics from StreamShield Networks to scan the millions of e-mails traversing its network every day. This, according to BT provides it with a detailed reports on the location and size of spam-related problems in its BT network.
Spam is no longer simply a tool for mass-mailing unsolicited advertising, it is now being used in some cases to drive up certain prices on the stock market. According to PandaLabs, there has been a series of mass-mailings containing stock market information, advising users to buy stocks in certain companies.
PandaLabs has analyzed one of these cases and found that stock prices in one of the companies mentioned increased significantly over a period of a few days -even rising 12 percent in one day-, thanks to this type of spam.
Spammers are taking a new approach in the language they use in mass emailings: writing like IT professionals themselves.
Researchers have seen a hike in recent months in the amount of spam containing "IT speak," according to email security firm MessageLabs.
The company has collected spam emails containing subject lines referring to support desk ticket numbers and popular technology buzzwords, such as .net, cpan, and xss that attempt to get system administrators to open potentially deadly emails.
A pair of Georgia Tech researchers suggested this week that internet service providers (ISPs) might be able to fight junk email more efficiently at the network level rather than using message content filters.
"Content filters are fighting a losing battle because it's easier for spammers to simply change their content than for us to build spam filters.," said Nick Feamster, a Georgia Tech assistant professor of computing. "We need another set of properties, not based on content. So what about network-level properties? It's harder for spammers to change network-level properties."
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has raided a residential premise in relation to allegations that the occupant had sent billions of unsolicited spam emails.
ACMA issued a search warrant after a tip-off from the Dutch Independent Regulator of Post and Telecommunications, OPTA.
PandaLabs has detected a spam message that uses subliminal advertising techniques. At first glance, it is an advertisement that gives the user the opportunity to buy certain stocks online. However, the user not only sees a static image, but also a sequence of images that are displayed extremely rapidly. To be more specific, there are four images, three of which show the word Buy in different positions.
Bombarding your ex-employer with five million spam emails sounds like a criminal offence worthy of harsh punishment -- the electric chair perhaps? But yesterday the 'Boy Spammer' David Lennon, who was 16 when he electronically snubbed his former bosses, has been told by a judge that as punishment for his crimes he can't leave his house between the hours of 12.30am and 7am on weekdays, and between 12.30am and 10am on weekends, for two months.
