On May 16, 2008, Yahoo decided to play the Spammer lotto by suing a whole bunch of spammers that have been using their name in online lottery scams. The article over at Wired.com points out that Yahoo didn’t decide to sue until MySpace.com won a huge award from spammers:

The one thing that strikes us as a little curious here is the timing of the lawsuit. These scams have been around almost as long as the Internet — why would Yahoo finally decide to sue now? It probably has something to do with a $234 million judgment for MySpace in a case against “spam king” Sanford Wallace. The judgment, believed to be the largest anti-spam award, came shortly before Yahoo filed its complaint on May 16.

It will be interesting to see if this goes anywhere, or is just another waste of time in the war on spamming.

Share This

Techworld reported this morning that Youtube.com is just one of the latest trusted online brands that spammers have figured out how to use to bypass user’s anti-spam software and spam filters. The Spammers are using the “Invite New Friends” feature to send emails to users with spam messages inside.

By using a trusted brand, like Youtube.com, spammers get 2 benefits. The first one is that since it is such a major brand, with millions of users, most email programs are going to let messages from service@youtube.com through their filters. The second is that since it is from Youtube.com, most people are going to open it and read it, thereby giving the spammers a better chance that users will read their emails.

For more information, read the rest of the story at Techworld.com.

Share This

PCmag reported a story that the United States Postal Service, in conjunction with a few other countries, has seized over 2 billion dollars in bad checks. Wow, that’s allot of money, fake or otherwise.

Here’s how the scams work:

1. The scammers spam you and offer you a 10% fee for letting them use your bank account to deposit money in the United States.
2. They then send you checks to deposit into your account.
3. Your bank then credits your account with the money.
4. You then send them some of the money back.
5. They have your money and are laughing as they dance naked on the beach in Cancun.
6. Your bank finds out that the check is bad and removes the deposit from your account.
7. You cry and whine and gnash your teeth because you tried to get something for nothing.
8. The big problem is that this scam is used to finance terrorism around the world, and your greed and stupidity could have just cost someone their life!

Now that you know the truth, try not to get greedy and fall for it. OK?

Share This

Internet users in South Africa are getting hit really hard lately by crime syndicates in Russia, the Philippines, Indonesia and the United States. The amount of phishing emails to South African users from crooks purporting to be one of the many banking companies in South Africa is on the rise, and the police can’t really do anything about it because of how sophisticated the crooks are at hiding their back trails.

Read the article on the South African news site IOL.

Share This

I read an interesting study this morning in the Washington Post that said that the weakest part of a spam campaign was the website. Since it doesn’t do the spammers who sell stuff any good to send you spam if you can’t buy their products, if you could block their websites, you could effectively shut them down.

Think about it, what if someone could set up a system where there was a national monitoring facility that could update Domain Name Servers to block certain IP addresses if they saw a spike in spam email pointing to that address. Of course, it would also be a great way to get your competitors websites blocked, so the idea needs a better head than mine to work out the details. LOL

Here is some of the Washington Post article, and you can read the rest of it here:

They [researchers at the University of California, San Diego] concluded that while spammers may use many different servers to send out their e-mail, it’s a different story when it comes to hosting the Web page that sells the watches or male enhancement products featured in the spam.

In fact, 94 percent of the time, the scam could be traced back to a single Web server. “Most scams are hosted on a single IP address, providing a potentially convenient single point for network-based interdiction either via IP blacklisting or network filtering,” the researcher wrote in a paper to be delivered Thursday at the Usenix Security 2007 conference in Boston.

Anyone have anything to add to this?

Anti-Spammer

Share This

If you are looking for an anti-spam and anti-virus application, all rolled into one, you should try Kaspersky® Internet Security 7.0, which offers antivirus, anti-spyware, anti-spam and anti-hacker personal firewall protection. While it’s not the free anti spam software everyone is looking for, it does come with a free 30 day trial period and all of these features: Internet Security 7.0 Features.

Kaspersky Lab’s also offers “Kaspersky® Anti-Virus 7.0” and Kaspersky® Anti-Virus Mobile, which is a convenient and reliable solution that protects smartphones from malicious programs

According to Kaspersky Lab’s, they disarms up to 200 viruses a day and provide unprecedented security with the industry’s only hourly anti-virus updates. Kaspersky Spam Lab’s also evaluates 34 million or more messages each day and provide updates every 30 minutes to their virus and spam database. These guys definitely have a complete line of anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-spam and anti-hacker solutions. Visit Kaspersky Spam Labs website if you want more information about their software.

Share This

An article posted today by Sharon Gaudin over at InformationWeek says that stock scammers have been pushing a company called Prime Time Group Inc.. Here’s how pump and dump spam/scam campaigns work, according to Sharon’s article:

Pump-and-dump refers to potentially fraudulent spam that hypes small company stocks. The spammers invest in these generally low-cost stocks before the spam campaign begins. Once people are duped into buying the stocks, the share prices go up and the spammers sell off and cash in. The sell-offs, though, usually drive the stock prices down, and the other investors lose their shirts.

The article goes on to quote a consultant from Sophos, an anti-spam software company, as saying:

“The scale of this stock pump-and-dump spam campaign is like nothing we’ve seen before, and it looks like it is working for the cybercriminals behind it,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, in a written statement. “The share price in this company has rocketed as a result of bogus news being blasted to Internet users worldwide. In an attempt to get past anti-spam products, criminals are now regularly using PDF files to carry their slick enticements for potential investors.”

Share This