Brussels declares war on spyware and spam
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All spams must be of regulation size and weightâ¦ The European Commission called for stronger action against spammers and spy ware merchants today and said it may bring in further legislation to combat the problem.â¦
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Internet searches for bomb-making  instructions should be blocked across the European Union, the  bloc&#39;s top security official said on Monday.
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Just days after releasing a free screen saver program that uses computer downtime to swamp Web sites associated with spam, Lycos Europe has found itself caught in a fight with spammers.
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Authorities in the Netherlands have imposed their first fines for spam originating in that country. The Dutch government&#39;s telecommunications agency OPTA, which is responsible for regulating spam, issued three
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As the United States' presidential candidates pinball their way across New Hampshire on the day of the state's closely watched primary elections, a new form of grassroots activism appears to be taking root across the Atlantic, in Eastern Europe, that melds dirty pool tactics with the cutting edge of malware technology.Researchers with carrier security specialists Arbor Networks claim that they recently discovered several additional incidents of botnet-driven DOS attacks that were tied to political issues. Danny McPherson, chief research officer at Arbor, will report his group's findings to the assembled computer security and law enforcement experts at next week's Department of Defense Cyber-crime conference in St. Louis.Since April 2007, when a campaign of targeted denial-of-service (DOS) attacks against Web sites controlled by the prime minister of Estonia and several regional banks were carried out with crushing results -- crippling the URLs for a period of several days -- experts have wondered aloud to what extent politics played a hand in the scheme.At the time, press reports and IT security experts speculated that tension between Estonia and Russia -- sparked by Estonia's decision to move a Soviet-era World War II memorial of a bronze soldier -- may have motivated the coordinated DOS attacks. With a number of well-known malware distribution and botnet control networks based out of the region, experts speculated that Russian hackers, either on their own or at the behest of a paying customer, took out the Estonian sites to display their displeasure with the statue's removal.Now new evidence has been discovered that indicates the same sort of political activism believed to have driven the 2007 Estonian Web site attacks not only exists but is becoming more popular."We spent some time after the Estonia attacks looking into this part of the world, and we've found evidence of other politically motivated botnet DOS attacks," said Jose Nazario, senior software engineer at Arbor. "It's hard to tell who is responsible for these campaigns, but they definitely appear to be tied to some recent Russian and Ukrainian elections."According to Nazario, who is known as an expert tracker of botnets -- the armies of malware-infected computers that can be controlled remotely to be used for everything from DOS campaigns to the distribution of spam -- two elections in particular appear to have drawn activity similar to the Estonia incidents.In one instance, Nazario said his team uncovered a botnet-driven DOS threat carried out against several Web sites controlled by Viktor Yanukovych, the recently defeated Ukranian prime minister, during his re-election campaign.In another incident, Nazario said that his team was able to discover a DOS campaign aimed at sites controlled by the "Other Russia" political party led by one-time 2008 Russian presidential candidate Garry Kasparov, who is more widely known as one of the greatest chess players of all time.During each of the individual attacks, banks of botnet-infected computers successfully took the candidates' sites down for several days before they were restored, according to Arbor.Additionally, Nazario said the botnets used in both sets of attacks represent the cutting-edge of the increasingly popular and sophisticated malware sub-genre.Rather than using IRC relays to communicate with each other like most traditional botnets, the politically driven threats utilized Web-based requests to speak to each other -- a much harder form of traffic to differentiate from legitimate network throughput, Nazario said.The same advanced botnets are currently being used to distribute malware and spam, but the systems also appear to have been specifically designed to help their controllers carry out different types of distributed DOS attacks, he said.Nazario said the botnets being used in Russia and the Ukraine closely resembled the zombie PC armies that have been used in years past to attack anti-spam efforts such as Spamhaus and CastleCops -- both of which have previously been targeted successfully and had their sites temporarily taken offline.The activity could also suggest that the systems are being rented out by their creators to other people for the purpose of executing their own threats -- or being built through botnet toolkit technologies being developed in the region, the expert said.Whether or not botnet activism will wash ashore in the U.S. any time soon remains unclear, but it seems apparent the trend is taking off across the pond.Nazario said it remains hard to tell if the botnet campaign tactic has become a weapon of official political entities, or merely a tool of groups acting independently to promote some cause or belief, but lean towards the latter scenario."We don't know who is behind any of this activity, and we don't want to speculate, but you have to ask yourself, is this directed by someone higher in the political organizations, or is it merely somebody who is acting as a lone vigilante?" Nazario said. "It could be that this is something that is being carried out by a handful of individuals that have some sort of belief or disagreement to promote, or it could of course represent something bigger."
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Lycos vigilante attack on spammers has been hit by a vigilante attack. Spammers are suspected.
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Companies, governments, and individuals are increasingly vulnerable to Internet attacks by terrorists and hackers.
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Pressure is growing on more nations to implement the Council of Europe's anti-cybercrime treaty.
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Malware arrives in the form of a game, disables antivirus protection.
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The European Commission proposes co-ordinated anti-terror measures targeting flight data and the web.
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A new application from Lycos Europe aims to fight back against spammers, but some experts say the company may be enabling illegal activities.
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[Johannesburg, 12 October 2004] - International consumer law enforcers from 29 countries were yesterday urged to work together to combat the growing threat of spam.
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BRUSSELS, Belgium - An international conference opened Wednesday amid warnings that companies, governments and individuals are increasingly vulnerable to Internet attacks by terrorists, hackers and others that rob them of privacy, money, and secrets.
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Watchdogs in the Netherlands have taken the first strike in an ongoing campaign against unsolicited e-mail by levying fines against three spammers.
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A plan to bump up the bandwidth bills of spammers seems to be getting out of control. Earlier this week Lycos Europe released a screensaver that bombards spam websites with data to try to increase the cost of running such sites.
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The Federal Trade Commission has taken the first step to crack down on the wave of spyware that is being installed on user&#39;s machines without their knowledge.
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A tool that could help in the battle against spam and phishing attacks receives industry approval.