MS Sues Web Hoster Over Spam
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Microsoft dons its lawyers with shining armor as it goes after 9 more companies responsible for SPAM, including some for hosting companies which send unsolicited mail and offer to protect them.
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SEATTLE - Microsoft Corp. filed nine new lawsuits against spammers who send unsolicited e-mail, including an e-mail marketing Web hosting company, the world&#39;s largest software maker said Thursday.
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Lycos Europe has released a special screensaver for Windows and the Mac OS platforms that will attack spam web pages. The screensaver âMake Love No Spamâ will overload a variety of spam servers by flooding
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October 29, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Internet service provider EarthLink  announced on Friday that it has filed a new lawsuit in federal court in Atlanta as part of its continuing fight against spam.
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(InfoWorld) - Hoping to tackle the growing problem of pump-and-dump stock scams Microsoft has quietly filed lawsuits against at least three alleged perpetrators who it says used its MSN Hotmail networks to promote stocks. Hotmail has "received large volumes of unsolicited commercial e-mail messages" promoting stocks for such companiesÂ as Distributed Power, TGC Ventures, China Biolife Enterprises, and Irwin Resources, according to court documents filed during April and May in King County Superior Court in Seattle. Microsoft charges the defendants with violating the federal CAN-SPAM act as well as Washington state consumer protection laws and is seeking unspecified damages, according to the filings. Pump-and-dump e-mail scams are a form of fraud where the criminals purchase stock in a company -- typically an inexpensive penny stock -- and then promote the equity in millions of unsolicited email messages. The technique is one of the more lucrative spamming practices and has been "the fastest growing area in spam" over the past few months, said Craig Schmugar, a threat research manager with McAfees' Avert Labs. Pump-and-dump spam has not only taken up resources and threatened the smooth functioning of Hotmail, but it "continues to result in significant costs to Microsoft," the court filings state. Microsoft executives were not immediately available to comment for this story. Because Microsoft does not know the name of the spammers behind the unsolicited e-mails, it has filed the lawsuits as "John Doe" cases, giving it the power to subpoena information in the case and ultimately name the parties responsible when they are uncovered. It's the latest move in the cat and mouse game between pump-and-dump spammers and the technology companies trying to stop them. Pump-and-dump scams are gaining more attention from criminals and companies like Microsoft for one simple reason: They work. Researchers at Purdue and Oxford Universities recently examined the dynamics of pump-and-dump and found that spammers could realize 5 percent returns in a single day. Because these scams are so lucrative, they've attracted some of the most technically competent spammers to develop new techniques, said Adam O'Donnell, a senior research scientist at Cloudmark. "The pump-and-dump schemes are basically driving spam research and development," he said. Primarily, this research has centered around the creation of templates that can be used by infected PCs to create spam messages and on a form of e-mail known as image spam, O'Donnell said. These image spam messages look just like any other e-mail but are in fact .jpg or .gif images. Image spam is also particularly well-suited to pump-and-dump because the fraudsters don't need victims to click on a link for scam to work. Over the past year, image spammers have developed a variety of techniques to confuse spam filters, said McAfee's Schmugar. They've added colorful backgrounds, wavy text, and filled their messages with nonsense text to try to evade optical character recognition technologies, he said. For example, a recent spam message promoting China Biolife Enterprises, one of the stocks named in Microsoft's suit, contained the following message: "Symbol CBFE Price $1.55 (UP 11.51%) Target $4 Market: Bullish. Strangler minott goodnight bennett rebel rousers." With the jump in pump-and-dump e-mail, O'Donnell said it's no surprise that Microsoft has brought the lawsuits. "Hotmail is heavily used and is viewed by the Web community as one of the most challenging spam environments right now," he said.
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Amazon and Microsoft have filed lawsuits against companies that used their names to commit fraud on the Internet. One suit accuses Gold Disk Canada of &quot;spoofing,&quot; or sending e-mails that appear
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LOS ANGELES (CBS.MW) - Microsoft Corp. on Thursday said it filed seven lawsuits against so-called spammers who allegedly sent hundreds of thousands of sexually explicit e-mails to Internet users in violation of federal laws.
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When you get frustrated with an avalanche of spams sent to your email box, spare a thought for Bill Gates. The Microsoft Corp. chairman is the world&#39;s most spammed person with
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Microsoft filed nine lawsuits against individuals and companies alleged to be involved in the distribution of spam, the company says.
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Blog: Spammers appear to defeat Captcha and use fake Microsoft and Yahoo Web mail addresses to spread spam.
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Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) filed nine new lawsuits against spammers who send unsolicited e-mail, including an e-mail marketing Web hosting company, the world&#39;s largest software maker said on Thursday.
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SEATTLE  - Microsoft Corp. filed nine new lawsuits against spammers who send unsolicited e-mail, including an e-mail marketing Web hosting company, the world's largest software maker said on Thursday
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Burst.com, a streaming-media firm suing Microsoft for patent infringement, alleges that Redmond axed e-mails crucial to the case.
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Malware arrives in German spam that claims to contain an update from Microsoft.
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BOSTON - Microsoft Corp. filed nine lawsuits against individuals and companies alleged to be involved in the distribution of spam, the company said Wednesday.
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REDMOND, Wash. - Microsoft has filed seven lawsuits in Seattle against spammers who send unwanted e-mail with visible pornography.
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Texas sued one of the world's largest  "spam" e-mail operations on Thursday, seeking millions of  dollars from two men it says are responsible for sending  illegal messages on the Internet, the state's attorney general  said.