Spam

Affiliates in a spam network can make $180,000 per year or more, delivering traffic to pharmaceutical sites, online casinos or fake anti-virus web pages, according to SophosLabs.

In a presentation at the Virus Bulletin Conference in Geneva last week, Dmitry Samosseiko, manager of SophosLab in Canada, talked about his interactions with the Russian "Partnerka," a group of spam affiliates. The Partnerka are organizations promoting pharmaceuticals or pushing fake security products and otherwise getting money from spam and related activities.

Website administrators using the Parallels Plesk Panel, a web-hosting tool, should be very careful when thinking about activating the shortname authentication feature for all web services. If turned on, attackers could gain access to all shortname authenticated processes, including the SMTP server and use it to relay spam for their own attacks.

Researchers at Cisco recently got a rare glimpse of the inner workings of the botnet underworld after going undercover and meeting an actual botmaster online: the botmaster, who ran a botnet that had infected dozens of machines at a Cisco customer site, said his main job is to compromise a few thousand machines and then sell them off in bulk.

Junk email (SPAM) remains one of the Internets biggest frustrations, and despite many attempts to combat the problem it continues to account for anything from 75% to 95% of all email messages; depending on where you get your statistics. The latest data from security firm Sophos has revealed which countries are most responsible for its spread, though happily the UK is no longer present.

Shortened URLs, a service on many sites that turns lengthy Web addresses into shorter URLs, is rapidly becoming a popular way for spammers to reach unsuspecting readers. New analysis from Symantec's MessageLabs finds shortened URLs now account for 2 percent of all spam in inboxes.

The presence of shortened URLs in spam has skyrocketed just in the last few weeks, according to Matt Sergeant, senior anti-spam technologist at MessageLabs.

Sophos published its latest report on the top 12 spamming countries during the last six months.

Experts at SophosLabs analyzed all spam messages received in its global network of spam traps to identify the top 12 countries of origin for spam. The United States remains the worst offender, but is relaying significantly less of the world's spam than it did a year ago, while spam traffic from China and South Korea increased substantially.

Some people think it might be. Twitter users started using hashtags - a # followed by a unique bit of text - to help them follow conversations. Through some eerie demonstration of the hive mind, Twitter users usually come to a consensus on the tag or tags for an event or topic.

As with email and blog trackbacks, anything that becomes successful on the web ultimately becomes the target of spammers. Users began to notice a few months ago that tweets on popular hashtags often contained marketing messages or links to porn.

Security magazine Virus Bulletin has issued the results of a new test of spam blocking software.

The second edition of the test pitted anti-spam filters against an archived collection of spam messages, and a live stream of email from addresses set up by testers. Products were scored for the percentage of spam messages detected and the number of false positives returned.

Security vendors are reporting a drop in spam since a federal court ordered the shutdown of alleged rogue ISP Pricewert, also known as 3FN. The Federal Trade Commission said the company hosted command-and-control servers for a number of spam-producing botnets.

One security vendor said the shutdown of 3FN has coincided with a 15 percent drop in all spam, mainly from the Pushdo botnet. Another botnet, Mega-D, has fallen off since the shutdown was ordered on June 4th, although the biggest botnet - Rustock - was unaffected.

The shutdown of the Pricewert internet service provider (ISP) looks unlikely to have the same crushing effect of spam as the McColo closure last year.

Security companies are reporting some drop in spam levels and botnet activity but they are quickly recovering. Overall spam and botnet activity is now approaching the levels present before yesterday's shutdown. “So far our guys haven't seen anything different,” Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos told vnunet.com.