Spam

Spammers are becoming increasingly clever and sophisticated in developing tactics to spread viruses, gain control of computers and encourage recipients to part with cash.

According to recently published research from content security firm Clearswift, phishing scams remain the spammers' most blatant use of social engineering.

As internet banking becomes more popular, phishing is becoming increasingly realistic in an attempt to exploit the lack of experience of many novice online bank users, Clearswift reported.

Surfers were yesterday urged to be wary of unsolicited emails offering training and well paid jobs in the financial sector. Rather than offering a route into a lucrative job such emails are likely part of a devious scam masterminded by Russian spammers, security vendor Sophos warns.

Antivirus experts have discovered a phishing email that redirects users three times through Google to a fraudulent registration Web site in order to beat antispam technology. The email purports to be from Yahoo administrators and attempts to dupe users into signing up for new email accounts with the company. But using a clever combination of Yahoo and their own home-made Web sites, the hackers are claiming the accounts as their own.

South Korean police want to question 15 mobile phone workers and brokers over allegations they traded the personal information of an estimated six million people in the northeast Asian country. The group netted 360m South Korean Won ($314,0000) by allegedly selling the personal details of an estimated one in five of south Koreas 30m net users. Police are still investigating exactly how the group obtained the sensitive data but some details are already emerging.

In what could prove to be one of the great second acts in Internet history, erstwhile king of spam Sanford Wallace takes center stage this week as exhibit A in a federal crackdown on invasive online advertising software.

The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday announced an aggressive new strategy in taking on alleged purveyors of "spyware," a vague term that describes software that may track unsuspecting Web surfers and bombard them with advertisements or even steal log-in information and passwords.

Business email security provider MessageLabs has issued a warning to Internet users not click on the "opt-out" link on spam emails, as the company said it had discovered yesterday a number of messages using this function to open a spam distribution point on the recipient's computer.

Dubbing it the "drag-and-drop javascript exploit", MessageLabs said the scheme uses an Internet Explorer bug to "download an EXE file when the mouse is scrolled across the malicious domain page, allowing the machine to be turned into an open proxy that spammers can control".

A new plague of unwanted messages threatens internet users, according to a US company. Spam and spim - spam by instant messenger – are about to be joined by "spit" - spam over internet telephony. Qovia, based in Frederick, Maryland, have recently filed two patent applications for technology to thwart spit.

The Federal Trade Commission yesterday gave limited endorsement to offering cash rewards to people who help track down e-mail spammers, suggesting that such
bounties might work but in fewer circumstances than had been pushed by some anti-spam activists.

The agency said that although Internet-savvy sleuths often can crack the technical disguises used by spammers to hide their identities and locations, the
amount of information they could gather that would lead to successful prosecutions would be limited.

What would it take to get someone to turn in one of those spammers who send millions of unwanted e-mails? At least $100,000, the Federal Trade Commission figures.

Six-figure incentives are the only way to persuade people to disclose the identity of co-workers, friends and others they know are responsible for flooding online mailboxes with unsolicited pitches for prescription drugs, weight loss plans and other products, according to an agency report Thursday.

A survey shows that spammers are the biggest users of a technique designed to find out if e-mail comes from the net address it says it does.

The system was developed to stop mail senders faking the address in e-mail messages to give them an aura of authenticity and fool spam filters.

However, the system is proving good at stopping spoofing and phishing attacks.

Many junk mail messages try to hide their origins by using a fake address for the place on the net where they originated.