Spamford Wallace's MySpace riches come under attack
523421
The FTC's quest for spam stopping balls Analysis Anybody who says crime doesn't pay obviously hasn't talked to Sanford Wallace. In just six months' time, the prolific purveyor of spam and spyware engineered a scam on MySpace that netted at least $555,850, according to court documents filed this week.â¦
205722
Most people just grumble and hit delete, but when Gordon Dick received a spam message advertising Internet services, he fought back.
418889
Ryan points out a handy tool to help keep even more spammers from making their way to your blogs and posting comments - Bad Behavior.    I love Akismet the spam filter for comments that is built into Wordpress. It's blocked 812 spam comments in a little under 2 months for me. I was content with it, but I grew tiresome that it would even get to my site. Akismet is great for blocking spams that are already to your blog, but there has to be something out there that would block the spammers from coming to your site in the first place.   Luckily there is something like that, it's called Bad Behavior.    Luckily, it's also made for Wordpress, so you can download and install directly with no fuss. He comments that he's already seeing results with even more caught than Akismet was before.
681097
(InfoWorld) - Spammers have found a way to mine free Web-hosting services for cash. Online scammers have long used free hosting services such as Yahoo Geocities or Tripod as a way to get around e-mail filters that might otherwise recognize their spammy Web sites. But now some enterprising spammers have begun selling each other these free Web pages, according to security vendor McAfee Inc. For US$25 per week a spammer will sell 50 Web-hosting accounts that can be used to redirect Web traffic to sites that normally would be flagged. "These 'link providers' create and maintain thousands of free hosting accounts on behalf of the spammers," wrote McAfee's Nick Kelly in a recent posting to McAfee's Avert Labs blog. That posting can be foundÂ here. "They know that the bigger hosts are unlikely to get blacklisted because they have so many legitimate users," he added. Scammers also use the free Web pages to try to manipulate search engines, by making it look as if their Web sites are widely linked, said Adam O'Donnell, senior research scientist with Cloudmark Inc., an e-mail filtering company. And while the free hosting providers are taking steps to shut down this abuse, they appear to be fighting a losing battle. In late June, Cloudmark researchers were seeing about 1,500 phony URLs (uniform resource locators) on any given day on one of the most abused free hosting services (O'Donnell declined to name names). One month later, that number had jumped to 3,500. Spammers are simply able to out-pace the hosters' security teams, O'Donnell said. "They will gain more hosts for their pages than the company is able to take down," he said. The free hosters have been placed in a tough position because they do not want to shut down legitimate users, but they also do not have the technical resources to mine spam for Web pages that are being misused, O'Donnell said. Lately, however, the hosters have been partnering with security vendors to address the problem. Cloudmark is working with some hosting providers, hoping to sell them "reputation" information that tells them how many times their member URLs are being seen in spam. McAfee has been providing similar information to an undisclosed service provider, Kelly wrote. "This relationship has cut the abuse observed by us on that provider by over 90 percent in less than a week." He added, "let's hope those spammers are buying their new watches from pound$hop rather than Bolex this summer."
400396
Researchers this week reported a spam run that tried to trick users into downloading a Trojan horse posing as a video of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
335675
p2pnet.net News:- The US Federal Trade Commission has filed its first spyware case against former self-styled Spam King Sanford Wallace, says the Center for Democracy and Technology, which made the original complaint last February.
480693
Popular Web sites like MySpace and Photobucket has banner ads containing malicious code that could lead to the compromise of a computer.
648071
Spammers exploit your Achillesâ heel (or other body part).
202350
ALTHOUGH Microsoft&#39;s anti-spam sender-ID is disliked by Open Sources, it is providing popular with the very people it is targeted against.
52524
Spam makes sense. Sure, most of it reads like filthy gibberish. But the authors of this dreck are not semi-literate perverts. They're cool, rational business folk who have found a sleazy but effective way to make a buck.
336267
Short-lived spike in phishing traffic If it seems like every Tom, Dick and Harry with a MySpace account was getting his account hijacked a couple of months ago there's a reason. Starting in mid-March, the number of page views generated on phish sites increased five-fold, with almost all (95 per cent) targeting the popular social networking site.â¦
467779
The social networking site MySpace.com is under what one computer security analyst calls an &#8220;amazingly virulent&#8221; attack caused by a worm that steals log-in credentials and spreads spam that promotes adware sites.
546335
A malicious Trojan disguised as a Microsoft update is being served up from a MySpace page for which the name and password appear to have been phished. The problem highlights the trouble to which criminal abuse of MySpace can lead.
142822
Application that claimed to "spam the spammers" caused much controversy.
630777
Three Fools chime in on the social-networking site's valuation.
184105
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.
580227
Antispam activists disagree about the effect of the major federal court judgment against three spammers. Antispam activists disagree about whether a $1.08 billion judgment against three spammers in Iowa last