Read the full story at: http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry3461.html

We all knew it was going to happen, and that there was nothing we could do to stop it. In fact, it was only a matter of time until the polls had closed and Barack Obama had officially become the President-elect of the United States of America. It is not the election of Obama himself that I am talking about, but rather the inevitable malware that was quick to emerge as a result of that election process.

Read the full story here: http://www.itwire.com/content/view/19992/53/

The key findings of the latest Marshal Threat Research and Content Engineering (TRACE) report for the first half of 2008 have just been published. Unsurprisingly, they make for some pretty ugly reading...

Read the full story here: http://www.itwire.com/content/view/19931/53/

When it comes to endurance races, the Srizbi spambot takes some beating as far as distributing the most malicious spam across the planet is concerned. Thanks to an Olympic surge from new kid on the bot race blocks, Rustock, has sprinted past the old man of spam to take a dubious gold...

Read the full story at: http://www.itwire.com/content/view/19009/53/

Shocking figures suggest Srizbi is taking over the net, or at least dominating the spam distribution business.

Read the full story at: http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2437.html

A report entitled "Exploiting the Trust Hierarchy among Email Servers" published by Pablo Ximenes from the University of PR at Mayaguez, USA and Andre dos Santos at the State University of Ceara, Brazil suggests that Google Mail is flawed in such a way so as to turn it into massive spam machine.

Read the full story at: http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2288.html

Security provider Webroot has today published its State of Internet Security: Protecting Business Email research report and estimates that every single business email account will receive some 42,000 spams during the course of 2008. Or 116 junk messages every single day if you prefer. That is an increase of some 60 percent since 2004 according to Webroot...

Read the full story at: http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2211.html

Apparently the tiddly Pitcairns, with its population of just 47 (yes you read that right) pumps out more spam per capita than anywhere else on the planet (yes you read that right as well.)

Read the full story at: http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2203.html

Which is the worse spammer, Yahoo! Mail or Gmail?

Read the full story at: http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry2163.html

McAfee Avert Labs has warned that the number of spammers which use the 'out of office' functionality of web-based email systems to distribute junk mail is on the increase. The particular technique in question, which involves spammers setting up web-based email accounts which are configured to auto-respond with spam instead of a genuine 'sorry but I am away from the office right now' message, is reaching new heights of popularity.

Read the full story at: http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry1902.html

According to the Managing Your Organisation’s E-mail and Messaging survey, the results of which were announced today by network management developer Ipswitch Inc., the feeling that you are drowning in spam happens for a reason: you are.

Read the full story here: http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry1827.html

I am fed up with silent calls this last week, but it looks like the problem of mobile spam is only going to get worse...

Read the full story here: http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry1722.html

Ever lost an email? How long did you spend looking for it? 5 minutes, 5 days perhaps? How about FIVE MILLION HOURS????

Read the full story at: http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/editorial-blogs/davey-winder/954283/are-spammers-an-endangered-species.thtml

We are experiencing a new wave of junk email that could be best described as Spam 2. What with the tidal wave of PDF spam that hit last month, and the MS Excel attachment spam that has taken over from it this month. But is it really a next generation spam trend, or the desperate death throes of an industry which sees a cash cow shot in the head by ever improving anti-spam technologies?

Read the full story at: http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry1606.html

Although we all like to moan about the amount of spam hitting our mailboxes, the truth is that spam filtering is pretty good these days and only a tiny amount of it actually need bother us at all. Unlike all that stuff we have actually signed up for but cannot be defined as personal mail. Stuff like electronic bank statements, Facebook posting notifications, news roundups or Twitter alerts. The list goes on, and on, and on. Now this stuff has a name other than, well, stuff: bacn.
Pronounced as bacon, bacn can be described as email that you want, or at least that you have asked for, but that you don’t want to read right now thanks very much. The term appears to have been coined only a week or so ago, at a new media monetization event known as Podcamp Pittsburgh. Yet within just a few days it has spread as quickly as any meme when that particular buzzword was fancy of the week, it is almost viral in its infectiousness. Just like bacn itself, as it appears that even those of us who are already drowning in notifications, alerts and sundry opt-in email just cannot help signing up for more. After all, what is the point of online interactivity, social networking inclusion and news alert services if you don’t take advantage of the immediacy of the medium?

Read the full story at: http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/editorial-blogs/davey-winder/951774/spammers-kicking-up-a-storm.thtml

If it were not bad enough that some spamming scumbag were using my email address in the from field of their latest campaign to improve sexual performance through the double whammy of herbal Viagra and cheap company shares, resulting in a huge swathe of bounce messages heading my way to keep me up of a night (and not in a sexual way) I was starting to think that some of the spammed were retaliating by signing me up to all sorts of weird and wonderful online services.

Thankfully this is not the case, but rather the result of a new outbreak of malicious spams as identified by the email content security provider Marshal.

Read the full story at: http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry1582.html

Just when you think you have heard every crackpot theory for fighting the spam menace, a new one comes along that makes you sit up and take notice. How does using pictures of kittens to foil spammers grab you?

Although, for now, CAPTCHA and its ilk are holding out against the spammers, the chinks in the HIP armor are starting to show. HIP systems are forever being tweaked and changed to stay ahead of the computers that are fast catching on and catching up. The clever money is on them overtaking the twisted text concept real soon now.

Larson and his group spend most of their time tweaking the distorted text, looking for ways to make it easier on the human eye and harder for the bots to spot. Larson also wonders whether we could do away with the text altogether and replace it with pictures.

In tests he has found that by displaying a grid of 16 images, cats and dogs for example, and asking the user to identify what is where the spammers can be locked out.

Read the full story here: http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/editorial-blogs/davey-winder/924231/search-for-captcha-find-angry-users-of-google.thtml

Now I have never encountered a CAPTCHA entry box while searching at Google myself, but apparently a number of people have. My mailbox has had a number of queries from concerned readers of various publications I contribute to, including IT Pro, asking just what the heck is going on.

Good question, so I thought I would do a bit of digging and find out.

Most people who have contacted me are concerned with one of two things:

1. The inconvenience factor of adding precious seconds to a quick search routine, enough so to be considering moving to another search engine seeing as the market isn’t exactly short of decent ones.

2. The implication that their security is pants because the CAPTCHA warning screen says that ‘a computer virus of spyware application is sending us automated requests and it appears your computer or network has been infected.’

It is the second of these points that concerns me most as the last thing we need is someone like Google spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) about such things for no good reason. Oh, and the reason that Google is throwing the CAPTCHA’s at ya, well that’s simply because it is countering the automated bot search flooding that it experiences pretty much on a daily basis. Trouble is, innocent parties are getting caught in the crossfire when their ISP, or rather the ISP’s proxy server, is used by the bad guys.

Read the full story here: http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry1534.html

Could we be on the verge of seeing the end of that spam scourge known as the pump and dump scheme? You know the drill, an email arrives urging you to invest in some little known penny stock and beat the experts to the punch. Nice one son, get your own back on those greedy stock broker types, that will teach them. Or maybe not, after all why would anyone with real insider information about cheap stock that is about to go ballistic bother telling you, a complete stranger, about it? What’s more, why would they tell a few million complete strangers about it? Surely, if it were true, they would invest everything they have and retire happy and rich.

Yet thousands of people fall for such scams every week, which is why pump and dump spam has become such a big business. Organized crime has not overlooked this fact, and is thought to be behind much of the pump and dump spam that arrives in mailboxes every day. Reports suggest that the average return made by the spammer for a pump and dump operation is 5%, and not so funnily enough the average investment loss made by the mug punter who falls for it is also 5% within a couple of days and not counting the share trading fees.

Read the full story here: http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry1526.html

Romanian security developer BitDefender has issued a warning about a fast spreading Trojan dubbed Spammer.HotLan.A which is using Hotmail and Yahoo accounts to send spam. According to BitDefencer some 15,000 accounts have already been compromised and the situation is likely to get much worse over the next few days.

The really interesting bit is that 500 new, genuine, email accounts are being created every day by this spambot Trojan, suggesting that it has found a way of bypassing the Captcha system.