Email Security and Spam News

Seattle Spam King Dark Mailer faces 47-month sentence

From the penthouse to the Big House

One of the world's most prolific spammers has been sentenced to nearly four years in prison and ordered to forfeit more than $708,000 in income for blasting out tens of millions of unwanted emails.…

419ers crank up the menaces

'Your friend has paid us to kill you...'

You know how it is - things are a bit quiet in the internet cafes of Lagos, people have sussed MARIAM ABACHA doesn't really have $30,000,000 (THIRTY MILLION DOLLARS) in gold bullion looted from Saddam Hussein's personal vault, and so it looks like it's time to up the email scam ante.…

AOL spammer jailed for 30 months

One minute behind bars for every junk mail

A New Yorker was jailed for 30 months on Tuesday after being convicted for spamming 1.2 million AOL members with junk mail.…

Homer Simpson's email address hacked

D'oh!

Turkish hackers have taken advantage of an email address that appeared in The Simpsons to recruit marks onto the Kimya botnet.…

Meet the UK's most spammed man

Workshop foreman in junk mail hell

Receiving a few hundred spam messages a day is bad enough, but spare a thought for an unfortunate Orange user who's the target of a server-straining 44,000 junk mail missives every 24 hours.…

Spam DDoS assault cuts off south Pacific state

(Un)happy Talking

Citizens of the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific have been left without a functioning email systems following a denial of service attack on the country's sole ISP.…

Almost half of malicious sites tied to 10 networks

China mostly to blame, but so is Google

Almost half the websites pushing malware are hosted by just 10 networks, according to a new report that adds new support to the growing argument that a relatively few number of actors are responsible for most of the net-based threats.…

MySpace wins $6m judgment against Spam King

Junk mail menace canned

Self-styled former spam king Scott Richter has been ordered to pay MySpace $6m over allegations he blitzed users of the social networking website with junk mail messages sent from hijacked accounts.…

Phlashing attack thrashes embedded systems

Router bricking risk

A security attack that damages embedded systems beyond repair was demonstrated for the first time in London on Wednesday.…

Spammers open new front on social networking sites

Poked full of Viagra

Social networking sites have become the new front in the war against spam, according to security watchers.…

MySpace wins record $230m judgement against spammers

'Spamford' Wallace hauled over the coals

MySpace has won a $230 million anti-spam judgment against notorious spammer Sanford Wallace and his partner Walter Rines. US District Judge Audrey Collins made the order - reckoned to be the largest ever in an anti-spam case - after the duo failed to appear in court.…

30 years of Spam - and we ain't finished yet

Many unhappy returns

Spam celebrates its 30th birthday on Saturday (3 May).…

MySpace wins lawsuit against Spamford Wallace

Serial nuisance fails to defend case

MySpace has won a lawsuit against notorious spammer Sanford (Spamford) Wallace. The social networking website gained a default judgment against Wallace after he failed to turn over documents or appear in court, CNet reports.…

Spam busters blacklist MessageLabs and chums

'Word on the street' says Hotmail downed too

One of the biggest spam block lists on the internet suffered an embarrassing technical cock-up today which blocked emails from some servers at web security monitoring firm MessageLabs and at some ISPs for about five hours.…

Spam filtering services throttle Gmail to fight spammers

Junk mailers set up CAPTCHA-busting sweatshops in India

The growing abuse of webmail services to send spam has led anti-spam services to throttle messages from Gmail and Yahoo!…

Link spammers go on social networking rampage

MySpamBook

Spammers have found a fertile new marketplace on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.…

Spyware 'scammer' sued over PC pop-up invasion

Washington state cracks down

The alleged supplier of some of the net's most hated malware titles has been sued by Washington state's attorney general.…

Enraged AT&T spam filter eats legitimate mail

Aims too high to please

Finding fewer emails in your AT&T spam folder? It may be a mixed blessing.…

Notorious spammer pleads guilty to tax evasion and fraud

Al Capone of junk mail heading for the big house

Notorious spammer Robert Soloway faces an extended spell behind bars after pleading guilty to fraud and tax evasion charges last Friday.…

Russian serfs paid $3 a day to break CAPTCHAs

Semi-automated attack or chain-mail gang

Why should miscreants bother to develop cutting edge programming techniques when they can pay $3 to somebody to set up spam-ready webmail accounts on their behalf? Evidence has emerged that people as well as malware are being used to defeat CAPTCHAs, challenge-response systems that are often used to stop the automatic creation of webmail accounts by spammers.…

Pitcairn Island relays most spam per person

South Sea junk mail mutiny

Pitcairn Island, the final South Sea island refuge of the Bounty mutineers, relays more spam per capita than any other nation. But with an estimated population of 48, perhaps it's not that surprising.…

Google red cards Privila for gaming search engine

Articles of bad faith?

Google has removed Privila sites from its index after the firm was caught attempting to hoodwink the search engine giant.…

Smut peddlers and spammers invade Google Groups

Junk bazaar

Porn peddlers and spammers are upping their assault on Google Groups. Many links on the discussion group site link to porn aggregators, some of which redirect to malware sites pushing Trojan horse malware (such as VirusHeat) disguised as video codecs.…

Most spam comes from just six botnets

Diary of the Dead

Six botnets are responsible for 85 per cent of all spam, according to an analysis by net security firm Marshal.…

Phishers clean up at online casinos

Poker faced fraud

Email fraudsters are increasingly targeting customers of online casinos with phishing attacks. A wave of assaults against punters betting in casinos run from Antigua and the Dutch Antilles shows that attackers are extending their range beyond targets such as online banks and eBay.…

Spammers crack Gmail Captcha

Fresh fruit for rotting vegetables

Spammers, fresh from the success of cracking the Windows Live captcha used by Hotmail, have broken the equivalent system at Gmail.…

Québec cops bust massive botnet ring

17-strong hacking network clubbed

Canadian police have arrested 17 people suspected of running a huge botnet of compromised PCs. Up to one million computers in various countries were allegedly under the control of the suspects, who range in ages from 17 to 26. All but one are male, UPI reports.…

Japan brings down Godzilla of spam

Old skool spam suspect taken in

Japanese police have arrested a "prolific spammer" who allegedly bombarded inboxes with hundreds of millions of messages punting internet gambling and dating sites.…

Spain cuffs Wi-Fi leeching lottery scammers

El Gordo ladrones

Spanish police have arrested ten Nigerians suspected of running a spam-fuelled lottery scam that raked in €19,000 ($28,000) in illicit earnings over three months.…

Automated crack for Windows Live captcha goes wild

Spammers'Holy Grail

Spammers are using a sophisticated piece of software that can create thousands of Windows Live email addresses by cracking the protections designed to prevent the large-scale creation of fraudulent accounts.…

Online advertiser pays $200,000 for deceptive claims

When 'free' isn't free

An online advertiser that falsely claimed consumers had won free prizes has agreed to pay a $200,000 penalty to the Federal Trade Commission, which says the outfit failed to disclose that people had to spend money first.…

Spammers dive into Google's lucky dip

Feeling phished?

Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button was designed to save web searchers time by automatically opening the first page of a query. It turns out the feature, and similar ones from other search engines, are increasingly helping junk mailers get around anti-spam products.…

Spamford Wallace's MySpace riches come under attack

The FTC's quest for spam stopping balls

Analysis Anybody who says crime doesn't pay obviously hasn't talked to Sanford Wallace. In just six months' time, the prolific purveyor of spam and spyware engineered a scam on MySpace that netted at least $555,850, according to court documents filed this week.…

Anti-spammer fined $60K for DNS lookup 'hack'

Whois also ruled dodgy by North Dakota court

David Ritz, the veteran American spam-fighter, has been hit by $60,000 in fines plus lawyers fees after losing a civil suit that accused him of illegal hacking.…

Spam King Ralsky indicted over stock spam scam

Pump and dump gang raked in millions

Notorious spammer Alan Ralsky and ten others have been indicted in the US over the alleged use of junk mail to promote stock fraud scams.…

Dutch arrest 14 mules in ABN AMRO scam

Money wired to Russia and Ukraine

Dutch police have arrested 14 suspects who allegedly lent their bank accounts at ABN Amro to cybercriminals in Russia and Ukraine. After being recruited by the fraudsters, the mules received funds taken from phishing scams, which they transferred overseas.…

Tracking down the Ron Paul spam botnet

Elephant Viagra

Six weeks ago, a small blizzard of spam promoting Ron Paul, the Republican underdog running for US president, touched off a lot of head scratching. Had politics finally stooped to a place where candidates would resort to such a reviled means of communication?…

Yahoo! and! Adobe! sign! ad-packed! PDF! pact!

Acrobat Reader to display 'message from our sponsor'

Despite my ma always saying ‘if you knew your times tables as well as your adverts’, people today still can’t escape advertising and the problem’s set to get even worse. Yahoo! has signed up with Adobe to incorporate targeted adverts into PDF documents.…

Celebrity spam gang whips up a storm

Stealth botnet responsible for huge spam surge

A copycat spam gang has launched an effort to compromise PCs that rivals the botnet created by the infamous Storm Worm Gang.…

Al Gore climate change site hacked

Penis pill outrage

A blog on a site promoting Al Gore's climate change documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, has been hacked by penis pill-promoting spammers.…

UK punters lose faith in phished brands

Collateral damage

Email phishing attacks tarnish the reputations of targeted firms, according to a new UK survey. Two in five UK adults (42 per cent) quizzed feel that their trust in a brand would be "greatly reduced" if they received a phishing email purporting to represent it.…

Googlewhack trick used to slip junk mail past spam filters

Spammers feel lucky

Advanced features in Google's search engine are being used by spammers to disguise the URLs of spamvertised sites. Hackers have been using Google search functions to hunt for vulnerabilities. Now their peers in the junk mail business are getting into the act, Symantec reports.…

AOL spammer gets two years in the slammer

Spam scam sting yields results

A New Jersey man has been jailed for more than two years after he was convicted of sending millions of junk mails to AOL members.…

Irish man rescued after falling for 419 scam

After being swindled, man traveled to Ghana to recover funds

An Irish man who was kidnapped after falling for an email fraud scam was rescued when police raided a hotel in the capital of Ghana where he was being held captive.…

Virtual! stripper! game! targets! Yahoo!

Captcha-busting Trojan warning

Spammers have come up with a sleazy - but undoubtedly ingenious - way to defeat anti-spam security checks.…

US smut spam duo jailed for five years apiece

Take them down

A pair of US men were each jailed for more than five years on Friday for their part in a long-running pornographic spam business that racked up revenues of more than $1m.…

Russian spammer murder hoax exposed

Thick Skin yarn punctured

A yarn that a prolific Russian spammer was whacked by Russian hit-men is increasingly looking like a hoax.…

This emergency alert has been cancelled by Hotmail

More friendly fire in the war on spam

Yesterday's story showing evidence that Microsoft has placed Draconian caps on the number of Hotmail recipients who can receive an email prompted a message from reader Jeff Willis. He says Hotmail routinely blocks mass emails his company, MIS Sciences Corporation, sends on behalf of universities and government agencies.…

Admins accuse Microsoft of Draconian Hotmail cap

'Only 10 recipients at a time, please'

Life can be tough when you're one of the globe's biggest email providers. Just ask Hotmail. Users get upset enough when come-ons for Viagra slip through the cracks of the Microsoft-owned service. But there's just as much hell to pay when its war on spam snuffs out legitimate emails.…

Yahoo! Teams! With! eBay! And! PayPal! To! End! Phishing!

If you use Yahoo!, eBay, and PayPal.

Yahoo! has teamed with eBay and PayPal to save you from phishing scams. If you use Yahoo! Mail. And the scams involve eBay or PayPal.…