Spam

It's taken a while for hackers to figure out how, but it seems that Facebook's on-system apps have finally been subverted to generate spam within the social networking platform. The move also signals the potential for outbound spam from Facebook on to the internet.

Reporting on this nasty turn of events, Christopher Boyd, a security researcher with Sunbelt Software says that the first Facebook app spam is the result of hackings subverting Javascript on the social networking system.

If you don't want spam-bots or bad guys breaking into your site, make them do calculus.

That's the approach the folks at a Croatia's Ru?er Boškovi? Institute are taking. Before you can log in to the research institute's Quantum Random Bit Generator service, you have to enter your name, password and affiliated organization, and then solve a math problem that would make most people run for the hills.

It's been a few years coming, but it looks like China may finally be getting a handle on its spam problem.

Once the largest source of the world's spam, China has been gradually fading off the list of the world's top spam-producers. Right now Cisco Systems' IronPort group ranks it at number 18 in terms of spam-producing countries. That's a big drop from two years ago, when it consistently ranked in the top five.

It seems that Russian police are working steadily to crush the rising tide of so-called pharma spam campaigns, with one security researcher having heard about a raid on the hackers behind the Rx-Promotions scheme.

Rx-Promotions, in case you have not seen the spam messages, is one of the world's largest pharma spam campaigns, having started in the summer of 2007, since when it is thought to have been responsible for billions of spam messages.

While spam declined dramatically in 2010, social networking threats, identity theft scams and phishing campaigns increased in sophistication and complexity, according to Cisco’s Annual Review.

Spam volumes decreased dramatically even as users fell for increasingly sophisticated social-engineering scams in 2010, according to Cisco’s Annual Security Report, released Jan. 20.

A new security report indicates that a majority of those who use Facebook and social sites like it experienced spam, malware, and phishing attacks in 2010. Attacks are up dramatically in all categories.

There was once a time when spam emails were our biggest worry. No longer, says Sophos. In its annual Security Threat Report, the IT security firm found that 67 percent of those using social sites like Facebook and Twitter have been spammed at least once in 2010. Worse, 40 percent of social users were sent malware in 2010, nearly double what it was in the summer of 2009.

Earlier this month, researchers with Symantec's MessageLabs noted spam volumes had dropped dramatically as Rustock, the largest of the spam botnets, went quiet. Researchers aren't sure why this happened - only that global spam levels dropped massively as a result. Not surprisingly as Rustock is responsible for 88 percent of all global spam.

The infamous Rustock botnet, responsible for almost half of all spam sent last year through its command-and-control system exploiting over a million compromised PCs, has suddenly slowed to a crawl, revealed Symantec.

The security firm also said the unexplained event has led to a substantial drop in spam. One of the oldest and most successful spam-producing botnets, Rustock typically would send about 44.1 billion spams per day but that volume suddenly dropped on December 25 to about 500 million per day, according to Symantec.

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In October Commtouch reported an 18% drop in global spam levels (comparing September and October). This was largely attributed to the closure of Spamit around the end of September. Spamit is the organization allegedly behind a fair percentage of the worlds pharmacy spam.

Analysis of the spam trends to date reveals a further drop in the amounts of spam sent during Q4 2010. December’s daily average was around 30% less than September’s. The average spam level for the quarter was 83% down from 88% in Q3 2010. The beginning of December saw a low of nearly 74%.