Spam

On the short-messaging service Twitter, space is at a premium: You've got 140 characters to make your point, and you probably don't want to waste half of it on a super-sized link to your latest YouTube obsession.

There's an increasingly popular quick fix: a free URL shortener. On one of these websites, you can plug in a long internet address, known as a URL, and it will assign you a much shorter one that is easier to post in emails, on Twitter, Facebook or anywhere else.

Spammers seem to be working a little bit harder these days, according to Symantec, which reported Tuesday that unsolicited e-mail made up 90.4 percent of messages on corporate networks last month.

That represents a 5.1 percent increase over last month's numbers, but it's nothing out of the ordinary. For years, spam has made up somewhere between 80 percent and 95 percent of all e-mail on the Internet.

Spammers are no strangers to the ever-growing Twitter. From commercial Twitter spamming tools, to re-tweeting trending topics for delivering their message, a new crafty search technique can provide spammers with fresh and valid emails harvested from Twitter’s users in real-time.

Basically, the search query consists of common phrases such as “email me at” and “contact me at” in a combination with a domain of a spammer’s choice.

The largest global trade association working against spam and messaging abuse continued its fifth consecutive year of significant growth, despite the economic downturn. The work produced by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) and the success of its three meetings that attracted a record number of attendees in 2008 reflect the messaging industry's urgency in addressing the fundamental issues underlying spam and in protecting consumers.

The percentage of junk e-mails originating from Taiwan fell to 10 percent of the global total in 2008, while China remained the Asia-Pacific region's biggest proliferator, Internet security company Symantec Corp. said yesterday.

Junk e-mails from Taiwan constituted 19 percent of global spam in 2007, but fell to 10 percent of the 119.6 billion junk e-mails sent in 2008, according to the Cupertino, California-based company.

Internet users have long known that spam emails - offering everything from cheap medicines and sex aids to get-rich-quick schemes - are an unwanted annoyance, but new research suggests that they are also hugely damaging to the environment.

More than 80% of the world's email traffic is now spam and the transmission and receipt of unwanted email gobbles up 33bn kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, according to anti-virus software specialist McAfee. That is the equivalent of the electricity used by 2.1m US homes.

Spam levels rose by a third last month to reach nearly 85 per cent of all email traffic, the highest since the McColo shutdown last year, according to the Threat Forecast and Report (PDF) from email and web security firm MXLogic.

The start of February saw Internet spam levels rise to as high as 79.5 percent of all e-mail messages due to a spike in botnet activity and spammers leveraging the financial crisis and Valentine's Day, according to MessageLabs.

This is despite the fact that spam levels declined by 1.3 per cent to an average of 73.3 percent for the same month, states the February 2009 MessageLabs Intelligence Report.

Chief of Kaspersky Lab Content Filtration, Andrei Nikishin, reveals that the share of spam in Russia touched 82.1% of total mail traffic during 2008, an expansion of almost 2.1% points from 2007, as reported by RosBusinessConsulting on February 4, 2009.

According to Andrei Nikishin, the minimum percentage reported in 2008 was 50.5% on November 13, 2008, while the maximum percentage was recorded at 97.8% on March 1, 2008. The Russian antivirus software developer's experts also said that the spam market was estimated around $150 Million-$200 Million.

Security firm Websense has claimed that new CAPTCHA techniques reworked by Microsoft at the end of last year have already been busted by spammers.

CAPTCHA (Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers & Humans Apart) was developed in 2000 to stop spam robots. Websense said that recent Microsoft efforts to rework it and achieve a balance between security and usability had failed.