| Fight Spam |
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| Image spammers change tactics |
(Frank Washkuch Jr. Jun 15 2007 18:59)
Although numerous security vendors have testified to a decrease in image spam in recent months, that hasn't stopped spammers from tweaking their methodologies. In recent weeks, spammers have taken advantage of online photo-hosting services, such as Imageshack and Flickr, to host their images in a technique researchers at MX Logic said this week that they don’t expect to last long.
See full article here: [LINK] |
| Battle of the Botnets |
| Leading AV researchers at Kaspersky have now identified three criminal gangs which are participating in an increasingly desperate battle of the botnets. This turf war is, as all turf wars have a habit of doing, turning nasty and it is the average computer who is getting caught in the crossfire. No longer are the gangs happy to settle for a slice of the spam pie, they want it all. And that means control over as many compromised third party computers to create the biggest of mega zombie botnets. To accomplish this, the gangs behind the Bagle, Warezov and Zhelatin worms are turning their attention to ridding those compromised computers of rival gang malware infections in order to install their own and gain that control. |
| Major Anti-Spam Lawsuit To Be Filed In VA |
Washington Post is reporting that a John Doe lawsuit will be filed in US District Court today in spam-unfriendly Alexandria, Virginia. The suit will be filed by Project Honey Pot, which is having a week of big announcements.
The suit seeks the identity of individuals responsible for harvesting millions of e-mail addresses on behalf of spammers.
From the Post: "The company is filing the suit on behalf of some 20,000 people who use its anti-spam tool. Web site owners use the project's free software to generate pages that feature unique 'spam trap' e-mail addresses each time those pages are visited. The software then records the Internet address of the visitor and the date and time of the visit. Because those addresses are never used to sign up for e-mail lists, the software can help investigators draw connections between harvesters and spammers if an address generated by a spam trap or 'honey pot' later receives junk e-mail."
W00T!!! |
| Project Honey Pot Begins Tracking Comment Spammers |
We began Project Honey Pot more than two years ago to track one kind of malicious robots: email harvesters. Since then, a new malicious robot has appeared to terrorize bloggers, forum administrators, and search engines: comment spammers. These robots travel the internet leaving links to spamvertised web pages in order to drive traffic and increase their search engine rankings. Today we're announcing that Project Honey Pot is tracking comment spammers as a first step in stopping them.
We have begun to publish a list of the top comment spammers, just as we already publish lists of the top email harvesters, spam servers, and dictionary attackers (click on any of the IP addresses to see more details). You can also see information on the countries where comment spammers are located, as well as the top URLs currently being spamvertised.
Use the following link to check out the Tuesday page, I expect they'll have Wednesday's page up soon; [LINK] |
| Security Firm Says China Fixing Spam Problem |
The amount of spam coming from China nosedived in 2007, says security vendor Sophos.
Robert McMillan, IDG News Service
Wednesday, April 11, 2007 01:00 PM PDT
The amount of spam pumping out of China dropped precipitously in the first three months of 2007, security vendor Sophos PLC reported Wednesday.
A year ago, computers in China were sending out 21.1 percent of all spam messages, but that number has steadily dropped over the past year, totalling just 7.5 percent in the most-recent quarter, Sophos said. |
| Singapore trying to curb spam |
First step to curbing spam pest
By Lee U Wen, TODAY | Posted: 13 April 2007 1121 hrs
It is a much-anticipated piece of legislation meant to put some curbs on that expensive menace to email users. Junk mail, or spam, costs the economy more than $23 million a year in productivity losses and is the subject of 15,000 complaints received every month by the three major Internet service providers here. |
| Virus gets nastier, raising fears of fresh spam flood |
Another deluge of spam emails looks set to hit New Zealand, as a computer virus hijacks computers around the world. By REUBEN SCHWARZ - The Dominion Post | Saturday, 14 April 2007
The virus is a particularly nasty "trojan horse" programme which, once installed on a computer, makes itself invisible, disables antivirus software, steals confidential information and begins sending out many thousands of spam emails to infect more computers. Security firm Postini said the latest spam blast was the largest in 12 months, more than three times similar surges this year. The same virus, called Storm Trojan or Peacomm, was responsible for these spam spurts too. |
| Huge Microsoft Hole Being Abused! |
 **IMPORTANT EMERGENCY NOTICE**
At this moment there is a huge security hole in Windows and it's being abused to infect people via web pages & email.
All windows users should check the US-CERT.gov report (http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/techalerts/TA07-089A.html) and should probably consider using the GANIPatcher fix (http://spamthwart.com/downloads.php?cat_id=2) until Microsoft issues a patch, since this is potentially a very extreme hazard.
Anyone who happens accross a page (I imagine myspace is a huge opportunity too) or email which is abusing this hole will, without doing anything or even knowing, fall pray to whatever malicious software someone wants you to have.
In most cases this will probably either be intended to turn your PC into a zombie for spamming or to intrude further and give someone complete access to your computer (so in many cases things like identity theft may be an issue).
Please be careful and pass the the link to the download page to anyone you can to help keep everyone safe.
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| Hopeless... |
Today I found some old news that a new tough-guy was in town. An anti-spam system much like any of the ones *I* personally have wanted to start.
The basic idea being that if everyone who dislikes spam were to go through the proper channels and report each message completely, the spammers would be forced to stop and no one would want to use them for advertisement anymore..
That new entity in the battle against spam couldn't be found so I did a quick search. Turns out they didn't last long;
"We cannot take the responsibility for an ever-escalating cyberwar through our continued operations," Eran Reshef, CEO and founder of Blue Security, said in an e-mail to SecurityFocus. "As we cannot build the Blue Security business on the foundation we originally envisioned, we are discontinuing all of our anti-spam activities and are exploring other, non spam-related avenues for our technological developments."
They got a bloody nose (and other companies took collateral damage too) so they tucked tail and ran away! To me this just seems like more reason to push, to fight and to win!
..."The closure marks a sudden end to a controversial service and highlights the importance of spam as a source of cash for the underground Internet economy." (as the article goes on to describe the criminal power these people have which can be used with great force, as they desire)
An article that I think most people should read as it gives them a little more understanding about what we're all dealing with. Seriously:
[http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11392] |
| Update: "nolisting" |
From the "but it seemed like such a good idea" department -
Well it is official. Spam levels kicked back up. As Worf said in Star Trek: First Contact, "Captain, they've adapted!!". Though this method made a lot of sense it appeared to help at first but now appears completely ineffective. In addition we've seen scenarios where it really does break mail delivery. There are some cases where sendmail does not respect MX priority and instead grabs a random mail server to deliver to... The moral of the story is don't bother trying to fool them or make them jump through hoops. The only way to stop spam is to get the spammers to stop, ultimately. |
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