Spam is back in a big way – levels that have not been seen since 201o in fact. That’s according to a blog post today form Cisco Talos that stated the main culprit of the increase is largely the handiwork of the Necurs botnet, stated the blog’s author Jaeson Schultz.
Buffer, a service for scheduling social media posts, said Sunday it has strengthened its security after spammers gained access to its network.
On Saturday, Buffer halted all social media postings after a raft of spam coming from Buffer accounts hit Facebook and Twitter. Later that day, service was restored, but Buffer advised users to access their accounts from its main URL rather than from its mobile applications.
Yesterday afternoon a large number of Twitter users began to notice that they were being added to a bunch of oddly named Twitter lists.
Lists are normally used to group Twitter users by interest: "tech writers" or "top chefs." In this case, however, the lists had spammy names like GTA 5 Giveaway, Ashton Kutcher's Phone Number, and Candy Crush Saga Hack.
Over the past few days, a large number of HootSuite accounts have been hacked and abused to spread links to shady miracle diet websites.
The hacked HootSuite accounts, including ones of celebrities, are used to send out messages on Twitter that read something like this: “get a free groupon of pure garcinia cambogia, according to groupon this stuff is great to stay healthy! [link]”
The University of Illinois has had its email domain blacklisted by some providers after phishing scammers managed to compromise the email accounts of a sizable number of students and staff in a short period of time, the institution has said.
According to a warning posted to the Campus Information and Educational Services (CITES) website, the initial assessment was that the accounts of at least 36 people had been hacked during the attacks but that the true number was probably much higher.
A new wave of spam campaigns are dispensing "Gameover,” the only banking trojan in the Zeus family to use peer-to-peer (P2P) communications to hide its activities.
The threat of the malware has become even more pervasive now that criminals are using Cutwail, the world's largest spam botnet, to deliver malicious emails containing Gameover. The spam is made to look like messages from top U.S. banks, researchers at Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit (CTU) found, with the hopes of luring users into clicking attached PDF files.
The affiliate ad network behind a tidal wave of bogus pitches for Acai Berry weight loss products and colon cleansers has agreed to pay a $2 million penalty to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for deceptive advertising.
The FTC announced the judgement on Wednesday against Clickbooth Affiliate Network of Sarasota, Florida and said the funds recovered from Clickbooth would be used to provide refunds to consumers who were taken in by the company's deceptive marketing practices.
Are you getting spam that has a Facebook friend's name listed as sender but was actually sent from an unknown e-mail address? Me too.
These are vestiges of an attack that exploited a misconfiguration on Facebook that was fixed last week, according to Facebook. Though spammers aren't scraping any new friend information off Facebook accounts, they are apparently using previously obtained data to send spam. That means the messages could come until e-mail providers are able to find the source of the spam and shut the spammers down.
Dropbox's ongoing investigation into a possible security breach has not produced any evidence that its systems have been infiltrated, according to an update Friday to the company's user forum.
"As of today, we've found no intrusions into our internal systems and no unauthorized activity in Dropbox accounts," said the update, posted last Friday.
European Dropbox users have reported a sudden spike in spam received by email addresses associated with their accounts, raising fears that the service has suffered a security compromise.
