Spam

I stopped following the spam problem in detail a while ago, but assumed that China was a major source of the stuff. It just sort of seems like it would be, but it turns out this is no longer the case.

In most countries it's cheap and easy to register a domain name. Not in China where the government makes you run things past them. A side-effect was to kill off spamming from Chinese domains. It all began with a directive from CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center), which administers the .CN domain:

US talkshow host Jay Leno, singer Madonna, actress Cameron Diaz and President Barack Obama share an unpleasant secret their publicists are powerless to do anything about.

A new analysis by security company BitDefender has identified these celebrities as the most commonly-used lures in US spam campaigns, usually combined with bogus and sensational headlines designed to pique the interest of naive Internet users.

The Wellington-based IT services firm Xannax has changed its name to XWL, due to the similarity with the word “Xanax”; the name for an antidepressant drug commonly sold over the internet and often hawked by spammers.

In a statement announcing the change, XWL business development manager Andrew Thompson-Davies says, “When we originally came up with the name Xannax, to us it was simply a catchy palindrome that stood out a bit from the crowd with, we thought, no real-world associations or connotations.

In what may very well be the first major cybercriminal campaign exploiting the Google+ brand, spammers are sending out bogus Google+ invitations that in reality point to online pharmacies.

The messages look similar to the real emails that users may receive from friends who are already members of Google+.

Spam levels have dropped massively in recent months, though researchers fear this is simply because botnet operators have switched their attention to more lucrative activities.

Junk mail volumes - which reached 90 per cent last summer - are down to 75 per cent this summer, net security firm Symantec reports.

No stone is left unturned, no option unexplored when it comes to online spamming, and the latest approach has shown that malware authors are not the only ones who have taken advantage of the fact that Android apps are written in Java and are, therefore, easily cloned.


"We've been seeing a rash of repackaged applications posted on the official Android Market," says an F-Secure researcher. "The repackaged application has the same modules as the original, but includes an advertisement module."



Spammers have started setting up bogus URL shortening services to act as relay points for traffic generated by their emails, Symantec’s MessageLabs divison has reported in its May 2011 Intelligence Report.

Criminals have for some time embedded URLs created by legitimate URL shortening services as a way of attempting to fool spam filters, which see a real URL rather than a suspect one. Following the link leads to a spam website.

Within days of Facebook rolling out new security features designed to block spam, several new social-engineering attacks were spreading that managed to get by the company's antispam defences.

Microsoft Corp. and federal law enforcement agents seized computer equipment from Internet hosting facilities across the U.S., in a sweeping attack designed to cripple the leading source of junk email on the Internet.