Freeze on anti-spam campaign
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A controversial anti-spam campaign by Lycos Europe appears to have been put on hold.
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A contentious campaign to bump up the bandwidth bills of spammers by flooding their sites with data has been dropped. Lycos Europe&#39;s Make Love, Not Spam campaign began in late November but its tactics proved controversial.
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ZDNet UK reports that Lycos Europe&#39;s in-your-face anti-spam promotion may have been more effective than it intended. Ostensibly designed to slow but not take down spam servers, the &quot;Make Love Not Spam&quot; distributed
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Can seek compensation, too Microsoft has stopped a man from selling lists of email addresses which were being used for spam. A court has granted a summary judgment against Paul Martin McDonald, stopping him from selling the lists.â¦
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More international co-operation is needed if spam is to be stopped, a conference is told.
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Ziff Davis - Commtouch's anti-spam software update halts spam by tracking e-mail server sending patterns.
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Sam blogs about his wiki spam problems  and implements a posting throttle.  With new spam-capable zombie PCs and with wikis that aren't updated very often this isn't a solution.  If I were to go back to my wiki after a month it would be covered with spam links.  One strong solution is emergent and distributed social whitelists (AKA my FOAFKey  proposal).  With a FOAFKey enabled wiki/weblog you could allow a whitelist of a few hundred thousand users to post to the wiki without any problems.  All they would need to enter is their email address for confirmation (or the SHA1 hash of their email).  For the rare times when the user isn't within the original whitelist we can just have the user uplo ...
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Services try different approaches to sender authentication to halt spam.
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SEPTEMBER 20, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - An antispam technology proposed by Microsoft Corp. as a standard way of identifying the senders of e-mail messages suffered a blow this month when a group within the
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A variation of spam is sliding past spam filters into inboxes, but it&#39;s not likely the new trick will be successful much longer, a security expert said Thursday.The spam messages, urging recipients to buy a stock, have an MP3 audio attachment but no subject line or text, said John Graham-Cumming, an anti-spam consultant and researcher who is based in France.&quot;I think this is the first time we&#39;ve seen this,&quot; said Graham-Cumming, who tracks new kinds of spam.The audio messages, which vary in length, contain a warbled, robotic voice with a British accent encouraging people to invest in Exit Only, a company that owns a Web site, www.Text4Cars.com, which connects vehicle buyers and sells through SMS (Short Message Service). Exit Only says it&#39;s not involved in sending the spam.Graham-Cumming said the spam falls into the category of &quot;pump and dump&quot; fraud. Scammers invest in a company with a low-priced stock and send out a round of spam, causing gullible investors to buy it and increase the stock&#39;s price.As the stock price peaks, fraudsters cash out, which causes the stock to precipitously fall, burning other investors. The practice is illegal.Exit Only was trading around $0.41 on Thursday. Not much detail is available on the company, but it issued a news release on Tuesday heralding the launch of its Text4Cars service in the Los Angeles area. The news release said the company hoped to be fully launched in the United States in early 2008.Exit Only&#39;s CEO, David Dion, said he learned of the spam around Wednesday morning. He has since notified the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and said his company has nothing to do with the spam run.&quot;I am very distraught by this,&quot; Dion said.Dion said only about 100 shares have been traded so far, so the scam hasn&#39;t been successful.The messages are more annoying than harmful. But there are a variety of defenses e-mail administrators and security companies can employ to stop it, Graham-Cumming said.Spam filters can be configured to cull messages with MP3s, since most companies don&#39;t have a business use for the file type, Graham-Cumming said. Administrators can also change their e-mail server settings to slow down the speed at which they receive messages with MP3 attachments, he said.That method has been proven to frustrate spammers, who typically shut down the connection if the spam isn&#39;t going through quickly enough since the delay consumes valuable bandwidth, Graham-Cumming said.These spam messages are also relatively large -- around 100KB -- compared to other spam, which may be another reason this kind of spam may not be around for long. Spam messages with larger file sizes require more bandwidth to send, meaning spammers can&#39;t send out high volumes of messages, Graham-Cumming said.&quot;Honestly, my prediction is this is going to be around for a while and disappear,&quot; he said.E-mail security company MessageLabs said it was catching about 10,000 spam messages with MP3s per hour since late Wednesday night.
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By PHIL MULKINS World Action Line Editor  Dear Action Line:  Who can I complain to about all the "spam" I get in my computer. There ought to be a law. -- M.T., Tulsa.   Spam is unsolicited e-mail advertising, often pornographic. There are laws limiting it.
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Web-surfers outside the US have been blocked from visiting the official George W. Bush campaign website. UK-based internet monitoring firm Netcraft first noticed the blockage Monday morning.
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We're being inundated by spam.  How could community-based approaches help?
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A controversial campaign by Lycos Europe to attack websites run by spammers has been shut down.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has suspended trading for 35 companies that allegedly benefited from spam e-mail campaigns to hype their stocks. The SEC action Thursday is the most suspensions of companies with stock hyped in spam, the SEC said in a news release. The suspensions, which will last for 10 business days, are part of a stepped-up SEC effort called Operation Spamalot aimed at protecting investors from potentially fraudulent spam campaigns hyping small-company stock, the SEC said. The e-mails used phrases such as "ready to explode," "ride the bull" and "fast money." The 35 companies have been quoted on the Pink Sheets over-the-counter stock service. They are not listed on any exchange or on the OTC Bulletin Board, the SEC said. The SEC estimated that 100 million such stock-trading e-mail messages are sent each week, often triggering dramatic spikes in share prices and trading volumes before the spamming stops and investors lose their money, the SEC said. "When spam clogs our mailboxes, it's annoying," SEC Chairman Christopher Cox said in a statement. "When it rips off investors, it's illegal and destructive. Today's trading suspensions, and actions that will follow, should send a clear message to spammers: the SEC will hold you accountable." The SEC said it continues to investigate the source of the spam. Among the spam campaigns noted by the SEC: * On Dec. 15, shares in Apparel Manufacturing Associates closed at $0.06, with a trading volume of 3,500 shares. After a weekend spam campaign proclaiming, "Huge news expected out on APPM, get in before the wire, we're taking it all the way to $1.00," trading volume on Dec. 18, volume hit 484,568 shares with the price spiking to over $0.19 a share. Two days later the price climbed to $0.45. By Dec. 27, the price was back down to $0.10 on trading volume of 65,350 shares. * On Dec. 19, trading in Goldmark Industries closed at $0.17 on trading volume of 126,286 shares. On Dec. 20, the spam campaign started with e-mail proclaiming "GDKI IS MAKING EVERYONE BANK!" and setting a five-day price target of $2. By Dec. 28, spam boasted of a price spike of 152 percent in two days and promised a five-day price target of $1. That same day, the company's stock closed at $.35 on a volume of more than 5 million shares. By Jan. 9, the closing share price was back down to $0.15. Advanced Powerline Technologies, iPackets International, Software Effective Solutions, Sports-stuff.com, and UBA Technology are among the other companies affected by the SEC suspensions. Secure Computing, a cybersecurity software vendor, praised the SEC for its action. The 35 companies suspended represent some of the most "mass-promoted" companies, the company said. There are more than 600 stock symbols sold on the Pink Sheets and OTC Bulletin Board exchanges that have been promoted through spam in the past year, the company said in an e-mail.
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Lycos&#39; European anti-spam website was taken down only hours after it went live. The outage appears to be the result of a DDoS attack, most likely initiated by spammers in response to the search engine&#39;s &quot;Make
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Lycos has apparently been the target of spam attacks following the release of their anti-spam deny of service campaign. The BlogBloke reports on this new happening in the anti-spam wars âItâs payback time!