Email Security and Spam News

Kelihos botnet BACK FROM THE DEAD

Bloodied spam-spewing zombie staggers in

The spam-spewing Kelihos botnet has returned from the dead.…

Facebook warns investors of potential SPAM DELUGE

IPO filing: Spamvalanche could kill us

Facebook has been the first internet company to baldly state the risks it faces from hacking and spam to the markets since the SEC issued guidance on the issue.…

Virus-slingers abuse WordPress vulns, dose punters with exploit

Blogs also infected with information-harvesting Trojan

Malware-spreaders are hacking into vulnerable WordPress-powered sites in order to drive traffic towards pages loaded with exploits.…

Google, Facebook, Microsoft in PHISH-FIGHTING smackdown

DMARC Brothers back cross-industry standard

Google, Facebook and other internet heavyweights are collaborating together to back a standard designed to curtail phishing by improving the collaboration between legitimate senders and receivers of emails.…

Microsoft's Kelihos kingpin suspect: It wasn't me

Sabelnikov denies botnet herder allegation

The Russian man named by Microsoft as the mastermind behind the Kelihos botnet has stepped forward to plead his innocence.…

Facebook flings clickjack spam lawsuit at ad-slingers

Social network teams up with Washington State to hound marketing firm

Facebook and US state of Washington have filed lawsuits against marketing firm Adscend Media over alleged clickjacking and spam practices, as the social networking giant finally gets tough with scammers operating on the site.…

Nokia busted for dodgy SMS to customers

Spam Act breach draws $AU55k wrist-slap

Nokia has fallen foul of the Australian Communications and Media Authority, incurring a $AU55,000 fine following consumer complaints over its SMS marketing practices.…

Spam-squirting hole found in McAfee antivirus kit

Ironic server-side flaw exploited, patch promised

McAfee is promising to patch a vulnerability in its hosted anti-malware service after it found a flaw that allowed systems where the product was installed to be turned into potential spam-relay nodes.…

Japanese cops cuff six smut-scam ransomware suspects

Victims forced to pay stiff charges

Japanese police have arrested six suspected cyber-crooks over a one-click billing fraud scam that allegedly targeted sweaty smut surfers.…

Five Koobface botnet suspects named by New York Times

Trojan coins millions for its masters, say researchers

Five suspected masterminds behind the infamous Koobface botnet have been unmasked in a move abetted by Facebook to put the heat on cyber-crimelords.…

Zappos coughs to HUGE data breach

Up to 24 million users zappwn3d

Online shoe and apparel outlet Zappos.com has apologised over a massive data breach that exposed the personal details of millions.…

iPad scammers pwn Lady Gaga's Facebook page

We're plastic but we'll still have fun...

Fraudsters have hit gold after they managed to successfully plant an iPad-themed scam on the Facebook fan page of Lady Gaga.…

Fake anti-virus victims in line for slice of $8m payout pie

Scareware swindlers' ill-gotten gains shared out by FTC

US watchdogs plan to refund victims of scareware scams using seized assets from fake anti-virus peddler Innovative Marketing.…

Web scam-busting trio thwarted by mystery DDoS rocket

Backhanded compliment for fraud alert sites

Updated A bunch of anti-scam sites was knocked offline last week by fierce and apparently well-organised distributed denial of service attacks.…

Yahoo! may! never! see! a! penny! of! $610m! anti-spam! win!

Court rules against lotto scammers, whoever they are

Yahoo! has been awarded a $610 million default judgment against spammers who abusing its brand to run a lottery scam.…

Cops bust den of text-spam spewers

ICO survey: Spam texts give us the sads

Police have raided a UK office they suspect was a front for spam texters and are eyeing up other hotspots of SMS spam in a crackdown announced today by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).…

Microsoft researchers build spam filter for HIV

Turns out spammers behave a lot like deadly virus...

Researchers at Microsoft have discovered that tools first developed to fight email spam can be applied in helping to understand how the process by which HIV mutates to avoid attack by the immune system.…

Yahoo! 0-day! exploit! hijacks! status! updates!

Right now I'm: spamming my contacts with malware links

Security researchers have discovered an unpatched flaw in Yahoo! Messenger that allows miscreants to change any user's status message.…

Exoplanet ranking suggests INTERSTELLAR WAR imminent

Too late to recall idiotic message beamed at alien star

An international team of boffins has ranked the various extra-terrestrial planets and moons known to humanity in order of ability to sustain life. It's bad news for the human race, as the planets of the Gliese 581 star system are near the top of the list: and if an intelligent race is present there, we have already mortally offended it.…

The top five spam subjects sullying inboxes

FW: Re: Your malware ARTICLE 123508 is enclosed

Security biz Websense has drawn up a list of the five most common spam subject lines.…

Kaspersky defends 'unworkable' web passports

Internet driving licence stuck in first gear

Flamboyant anti-virus guru Eugene Kaspersky has defended his controversial internet passport plans.…

Beijing to get free Wi-Fi with obvious strings attached

Mobile number needed to access 480,000 hotspots

Over the next five years Beijing will get 480,000 free Wi-Fi hotspots, but using them will require a mobile number and an agreement to have your activities tracked and monitored.…

Google and co join gov's identity marketplace

Midata: A lucrative ID trade-off

Google is among 26 companies that have signed up to the government's latest effort to create a British business sector out of the handling of private data and an individual's online identity.…

Report: Popular CAPTCHAs easily defeated

Researchers build CAPTCHA dispatcher Decaptcha ...

Security researchers have discovered the vast majority of text-based anti-spam tests are easily defeated.…

Asian countries dominate global spam deluge

Dirty Dozen rankings acquire eastern flavour

Asian countries collectively relayed more than half (50.1 per cent) of the world's spam last quarter.…

Cops should help us slay trolls, says Facebook wonk

But wait, there's a real crime happening over there

LCC Police forces need to be better equipped to deal cybercrime and online misbehaviour, a couple of web grandees have declared.…

Fact check clears Czech in botnet case

Redmond removes dotFREE from defendant list

Microsoft has announced that it’s dropped dotFREE from its ongoing lawsuit over the Kelihos botnet.…

Dutch ISP calls the cops after Spamhaus blacklists it

Had to unfriend TPB chums to get unblocked

Dutch ISP A2B Internet has filed a complaint with the police after it claimed to have been "blackmailed" by London-based anti-spam outfit Spamhaus.…

BT and F1 legend punt miracle diet in Twitter hijack

The return of the Acai Berry scam

BT Business and former F1 driver Nigel Mansell both fell victim to a Twitter hijack punting a well-known diet pill spam scam.…

The security mistakes users make

Because you can't always be there for them

Live broadcast Social networks, local admins, unpatched software, missing USBs: the causes of security problems in your business are often not just the big stuff that tries to get inside the firewall, it's the little problems that are already on the inside.…

Microsoft updates Hotmail to deal with grey spam

Redmond strives to remake its web mail as (somehow) relevant

Microsoft is making a series of changes to its Hotmail service aimed at cutting down the amount of old mail stuck on servers, falsely labeled spam.…

Facebook lets users have separated social, er, Circles

You know when you said no spam? Say it again ... bitch

Facebook slotted a new feature into the ubiquitous social network yesterday that immediately got the blogosphere arguing over whether the company was copying Google+ and its people-curating Circles function.…

Al Gore wants to borrow your Facebook and Twitter accounts

Plans 72-hour green spam avalanche for your followers

Would you trust someone else with your Facebook account, giving them enough access to post status updates on your behalf? What if that person was Al Gore and it was all for a good cause?…

Spamhaus victorious after 5-year fight with mass mailer

Long road leads to dead end, in a minefield, up a creek

Spamhaus has finally prevailed in a long-running US court action against it by e360 Insight, a firm it blacklisted for spamming.…

Video CAPTCHAs target cyberbaddies

Animated Turing tests

NuCaptcha has extended its video-based CAPTCHA service that it claims will make things easier for users while making life more difficult for spammers and other cyber-baddies.…

Travelodge blames 'vindictive individual' for email database breach

Hacker or disaffected worker mystery remains

Travelodge UK has confirmed that a customer database security breach was behind the recent run of spam emails to its customers.…

'Work from home' spam scam floods Twitter

Be Your Own Boss Dupe

Cybercrooks are using compromised Twitter accounts to spamvertise work-at-home scams.…

Google+ disk space cockup creates notification spam-storm

'Yikes', squeals global data centre gigantocorp

Google+ blitzed early adopters of the social networking service with spammy notifications over the weekend following a technical glitch. The Chocolate Factory said the problem was due to the service having run out of disk space.…

Google dumps all 11+ million .co.cc sites from its results

Bigger than .org or .uk - but mostly spam and phish

Google has removed over 11 million .co.cc websites from its search engine results pages on the basis that most of them are far too "spammy".…

Pharmacy spam disguised as Google+ invites

Cock-like-a-rock July 4th specials spamvertised

Scammers have wasted little time in exploiting the launch of Google+ to mount a spam campaign ultimately designed to promote penis pills and other unlicensed pharmaceutical sales from dodgy websites.…

Spam volumes show massive drop - but why?

Botnets switched to denial of service duties. Yay!

Spam levels have dropped massively in recent months, though researchers fear this is simply because botnet operators have switched their attention to more lucrative activities.…

Credit processors targeted in fight against spam

Follow the money

Computer scientists are advocating the targeting of card-processing middlemen as a way of clamping down on spam.…

Tumblr bloggrs ensnared in chain-spam scam

Bumblrs duped by 'blog deletion' curse

Tumblr has become the target of a chain letter-style spam that spread rapidly over the micro-blogging service.…

Facebook spam prevention scam spreading like wildfire

Social media worm d'jour

The growing prevalence of junk messages on Facebook is been used to bait a new scam doing the rounds on the social network.…

Rogue Twitter counter app punts survey scam

#duhhhh

A rogue application ultimately designed to punt a survey scam began spreading rapidly on Twitter on Tuesday.…

Junk mail down 1/3 since Rustock botnet takedown

But Bagle does brisk business

Global spam volumes dropped by a third following the takedown of the infamous Rustock botnet earlier this month, according to MessageLabs.…

RUSTOCK TAKEDOWN: How the world's worst botnet was KO'd

Redmond posse sends bot-herd cowboys a-runnin'

Analysis The unidentified criminals behind the infamous Rustock botnet were paying at least $10,000 a month for US-based command and control servers prior to a successful takedown operation last week.…

MS claims credit for Rustock botnet takedown

All salute the zombie slayer

Action taken by Microsoft and law enforcement agencies was responsible for the takedown of the infamous spam-spewing Rustock botnet, the software giant said today.…

Spam levels plummet as Rustock botnet taken down... for now

815,000 zombies with no master...

Spam volumes shrank on Wednesday after the prolific Rustock botnet fell silent, reportedly as a result of a takedown action.…

Bogus BBC Fukushima radiation texts panic the Philippines

Thanks for that

Hoax BBC text messages are claiming that radiation from the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant has begun spreading in the Philippines.…