The tendency of spammers to use shortened URLs to evade detection has gone from last year's clever exploit to this year's mainstream tactic, MessageLabs has reported.
In the second quarter of 2009, emails using shortened URLs exceeded 1 in 200 emails only once, the company's July 2010 Intelligence report notes.
Internet security outfit Sophos has published a report listing the top 12 countries from which spam is sent.
According to the figures, the United Kingdom has shot up from ninth place to fourth, accounting for 4.6 per cent of the world's spam. The USA is responsible for 15.2 per cent of global spam - an increase on the 13.1 per cent recorded in the last report.
Faced with stricter Internet security measures, some spammers have begun borrowing a page from corporate America’s playbook: they are outsourcing.
Sophisticated spammers are paying people in India, Bangladesh, China and other developing countries to tackle the simple tests known as captchas, which ask Web users to type in a string of semiobscured characters to prove they are human beings and not spam-generating robots.
If you think spam attacks were bad in 2009, just wait until 2010 gets going.
In its 2009 Annual Security Report [PDF], the networking gurus at Cisco predict that worldwide spam volumes will increase by 30 or 40 percent over 2009 levels. So get ready for a fresh glop of discounted penile-enhancement pills, strange women "winking" at you through nonexistent dating sites, and faux Nigerian princes promising $100 million waiting for you overseas. The hardest hit by this gush of obnoxiousness will be social networking sites, especially the king of them all: Facebook.
Europe's ISPs are just about holding their own against the global spam barrage, a Europe-wide report has found. Put another way, things are not getting better, but are not getting any worse either.
The economics behind spam dictate that 2010 will be another active year for spammers.
The distribution of spam emails is set to continue as long as distribution channels remain relatively cheap, botnets continue to be active and shift locations, and spammers develop new and innovative ways to attempt to bypass anti-spam filtering.
The specific predictions have been outlined by Symantec in their latest spam report.
McAfee's December spam report suggests that while antivirus and antispyware vendors continue to improve their security software offerings on a daily basis, hackers are still taking advantage of America's technology and fascination with pop culture to spread their spam.
Jan. 1 will mark the sixth anniversary of the Federal Trade Commission's Can-Spam Act, a piece of legislation that was supposed to help curb the geometric explosion in spamming and phishing attacks in the U.S. by virtue of a $16,000 fine per incident.
Experts have spotted a new spam attack that targets a financial transfer system handling trillions of dollars in transactions annually; it turns out it's yet another case of fake emails.
The spam messages pretend to come from the National Automated Clearing House Association (NACHA), a U.S. nonprofit association that oversees the Automated Clearing House system (ACH). ACH is a widely used by system used by financial institutions for exchanging details of direct deposits, checks and cash transfers.
Wondering if that spike in Twitter followers is actually the work of spammers? Twitter on Tuesday unveiled a new tool that makes it easier to report suspected users.
"Click the 'Report as spam' button under the Actions section of a profile's sidebar and our Trust and Safety team will check it out to see what needs to be done," Twitter's Jenna Dawn wrote in a blog post.
Spammers are increasingly piggybacking on the reputation of big brand names to take advantage of their online audiences, according to McAfee.
In its new spam report, McAfee also said that it was also seeing an increase in ‘targeted’ or 'spear' phishing, and brand abuse in non-phishing emails.
McAfee warned that corporations needed to be vigilant about the type of brand abuse that criminal gangs would use to “tap into” their audiences. The security company said this type of fraud damaged the reputation of companies, costing them prestige, customers and revenue.
