Items tagged with spam
In 2004, Jeremy Jaynes was the first person to receive a felony conviction in Virginia for sending Spam. He got nine years in jail. His case has made its way through the state court system, losing all the way; and now in a closely divided decision, The Virginia Supreme Court has ruled that the only Spam Jaynes will be allowed to enjoy...
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Russia has climbed into second place, behind the good ol' US of A, in producing junk e-mails, according to the security firm Sophos. One in twelve junk e-mails in the world is sent from Russia. China takes third, with 4.2 percent of the trash in any given inbox. "Countries that continually remain among the top spam-relaying countries...
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Todd Moeller of New Jersey was sentenced to 27 months for his part in sending 'spam' e-mails to more then 1.2 million AOL subscribers. Sadly it seems that the scheme actually made Moeller, and his partner Adam Vitale quite a fortune: almost $40,000 a month!Their spamming was done via traditional monkeying with open mail servers and header...
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YouTube users are starting to gripe about spam being sent over the messaging system. Considering that Google owns YouTube, and has had a working spam filter for their own e-mail service, G-Mail, it makes one wonder why the software hasn't been adapted to work on YouTube.After all, a message is a message, and most of the techniques for...
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Petko Petlov, a "Security Researcher," has described a flaw in Adobe's common PDF format, and it's a doozy. Unlike the annoying PDF spam that we've all become used to and is beginning to subside, this flaw appears to allow a downloaded PDF to allow others to completely take over your Windows -based computer. He considers the flaw so dangerous...
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It seems to be something we will never get rid of - email spam. Right now, an estimated 60 - 150 billion spam emails, that's billion with a "b", are sent daily. That's a huge number, and one has to wonder how much time and effort is spent on stopping, or at least slowing down, the torrent. Unwanted commercial e-mail is growing by...
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Viagra is a Pfizer product, so perhaps they're not too upset about these trojans. Naah. PCs at Pfizer have been hijacked by trojans, which are using them to forward Viagra spam. At least 138 of Pfizer's IP addresses are being used to send the spam after being loaded with Trojan software, it emerged this week. Aside from Viagra, the...
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I'm guessing the Custom Search Blog team hasn't been checking it too much. For one thing, as of this writing, the last entry was 7/17/2007. Because of that, the blog was accidentally marked as spam, and then released ... after which it was promptly snapped up by a cybersquatter. The change was first noticed...
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If you’ve registered for almost any type of online service in the past few years, then you’ve probably run into a Human Interface Proof (or HIP for short). HIPs are those strings of letters and/or numbers that look like they came from some malfunctioning typewriter.They’ve proven to be quite useful in cutting down the number of bot-generated...
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There's bad, and then there's evil. But spammers are worse than evil. And the worst version of evil is to use our beloved Homer Simpson to trick you into giving up your e-mail address, and then signing you up for a spam barrage. Don't click on that survey about the Simpsons movie. The spammed e-mails try to lure...
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The war on spam seems to be heating up, this time with anti-spam sites on the receiving end of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack believed to be coordinated by spammers: "Spammers have been taking over unsuspecting computer users' machines for years in order to send out unwanted e-mails, but recently they have been getting even...
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If you have an e-mail box you know what spam is by now. With the recent arrest of Robert "Spam King" Soloway, there's been no lack of information and/or opinions on the web about spam in general. Most of it, like this Wired story, covers why the legal system isn't really making a big dent.It's certainly a good read if you have the time,...
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It shouldn't come as any big surprise that catching Robert "Spam King" Soloway hasn't had any major impact on the volume of spam going around. Of course he was just arrested, but the impact of his actual removal from day to day spamming operations might never be felt by end users according to InformationWeek: "Even if a judge and jury lock...
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Spam, the other 4 letter swear word that starts with an S, might soon hit a bump in the road thanks to an initiative called DomainKeys Identification. "A key Internet standards body gave preliminary approval on Tuesday to a powerful technology designed to detect and block fake e-mail messages. It's called DomainKeys Identified Mail, and...
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Spam: you know it, you hate it. Who the heck actually reads this stuff and thus makes it profitable for people to send? Arstechnica has an interesting story out about how this is finally the year in which spam will become the dominant form of e-mail: "New research from IDC claims that this will be the year in which spam outnumbers person-to-person...
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When you register a domain name, you have to give them all sorts of contact information about yourself, or risk losing the domain outright. It's become a rich repository of information for all sorts of people, including spammers. Should you be allowed to register domains privately? Privacy...
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According to Daniel Druker, VP of marketing at Postini, 94% of all e-mail sent last December was spam. It's not just the rising volume of spam that's a problem, but the size of the spam messages. Because botnets use stolen bandwidth, spammers can send files of any size at no cost. And that's just what they're doing...
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A U.K. court has ruled that Paul Martin McDonald can no longer sell lists of Hotmail addresses. McDonald had been selling the addresses through his company Bizads, and Microsoft claimed that his actions have damaged the reputation of Microsoft's e-mail service, which the court seemed to agree with. Bizads claimed that those who were on...
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We're making this up as we go along, this internet thing. We stumble from one massive data breach to another software patch and back, and try to keep up with all the clever people--all of whom seem to be trying to send us spam. According to ars technica, it's only going to get worse when low cost computer hardware hits the third world....
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U.S. e-mail security company Postini estimates that nearly every 9 out of 10 e-mails that are sent, are nothing more than spam. We're sure many of you already assumed as much, and we at Hothardware see not shortage of it ourselves. According to the company, 7 billion spam e-mails were sent worldwide this month, compared to just 2.5 billion...
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The reason spammers send out all those e-mails that no one in their right mind will respond to is that it's essentially free to do so. If one person in a billion sends them dough, they're golden. But e-mail advertisers would tailor their messages more closely to their prospective customers if you told them about yourself and agreed...
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