SEC cracks down on spam-driven small stocks
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The Securities and Exchange Commission suspended trading on Thursday in the stocks of 35 small companies linked to spam e-mail campaigns urging small investors to buy shares.
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Last Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC to you and me) announced a warning against an investment scam that has caught several hundred people already.
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The US Federal Trade Commission has given its endorsement to a plan that would reward insiders for information leading to the arrest and conviction of people or companies that produce spam.
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Regulators are wielding a new weapon against Wall Street firms instead of multimillion-dollar fines: temporarily shutting down certain business lines.
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Charles Schwab Corp. SCH.N, the  largest online brokerage, on Friday said it would cut online  stock-trading commissions by 35 percent for small investors,  the latest volley in a price war among brokers and a move that  will reduce the firm's revenue.
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The promotion of penny stocks, for years a staple of Internet spam, has recently burst forth in splashy full-page ads in major daily newspapers.
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Questions regarding potential patent issues and skepticism from the  open source community relating to Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) SenderID have prompted global Internet service provider AOL (NYSE: AOL) to drop the anti-spam technology.
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EXPERTS at SophosLabs, Sophos' global network of virus, spyware and spam analysis centres, have identified a "pump-and-dump" stock spam campaign which uses an animated graphic to display a "subliminal" message to potential investors.
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Investors are shunning stocks in favor of mutual funds.
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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has suspended trading for 10 days on shares of 35 companies that it said have been the subject of repeated "pump-and-dump" spam campaigns.
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(InfoWorld) - Security vendors and users agree that image spam is finally on the decline, but at the same time a new kind of spam is emerging that uses an attached PDF file to trick recipients into buying stock in a company. Image spam, which has plagued antispam filters for the past year, is finally on the decline as e-mail security vendors have tweaked their products to block it, says Paul Henry, vice president of technology evangelism withÂ Secure Computing.Â Image spam has long fooled filters because the message's text is embedded in an image found in an e-mail's body, and filters until recently couldn't decipher images. At the beginning of July it comprised about 38 percent of all spam and is now down to about half that volume, says Henry.Stats from Symantec also show the volume of image spam, which the company says began to decline in May, has continued to shrink from its all-time high of 52 percent of all spam sent in January. "Image spam does seem to be decreasing ... Antispam software, RBLs [real-time black lists] and other filtering techniques have done a good job at decreasing the previous spammers' attempts; it is now time for them to find a new avenue to annoy us," says Jim DeSantis, enterprise messaging architect with Abhir Technical Consulting. Beginning to take image spam's place is PDF spam, where the spammer sends an e-mail message with a PDF attached -- which most spam filters can't read -- that attempts to convince the recipient to purchase stocks. So far security vendors are reporting two types; a professional-looking PDF of a newsletter pumping a German company's stock that security companyÂ IronPort saysÂ was sent more than 5 billion times in its first few days, and a more rudimentary PDF attachment containing text that pumped a stock which Symantec says was sent to more than 30 million users over a 10-day period in late June. So far, PDF spam isn't approaching the volumes that image spam has enjoyed -- Secure Computing's Henry says in early July it accounted for about 4 percent of all spam sent -- yet this new spam trick could prove to be significantly more malicious. Henry says proof-of-concept code exists that demonstrates security vulnerabilities in PDF files, which means PDF spam could carry malware that is secretly downloaded on the recipient's PC. Image spam was only dangerous to those recipients who bought the stock that messages were touting and likely lost money on it. "I haven't seen any malware yet in PDF spam ...but I'm keeping my eye on it," Henry says. PDF spam does hold some potential for spammers who are advanced enough to take advantage of the technology, some say. "Simply attaching a PDF to an e-mail and randomizing the size and name of the title, to me, does not seem all that impressive, but it seems to be working," says Kyle Ohme, director of technology with W3i.com, an interactive marketing services provider. "I'm interested to see how far this will go, as some may start to use some of the more advanced functions of Adobe to place beacons and other tracking mechanisms that have become limited in the past years," Ohme says. Malware-laden or not, PDF spam is an example of how spammers will continue to innovate in order to get their messages across. "The battle between spammers and spam-filter vendors will always be a game of cat and mouse. The tools are definitely getting smarter ... the better the tools the more creative spammers will be," says Sharon Finney, information security administrator with Dekalb Medical Center in Decatur, Ga. "I am seeing some increases in PDF spam, but no real volume yet. All spam is a nuisance regardless of the technology behind it. I don't think that any one type of spam is more of a nuisance than any other." Â
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Congress has asked the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to look into spam reduction measures, including a &quot;Do Not Spam&quot; list idea passed with the CAN-SPAM Act.
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Agency suspends all trading in 35 small company stocks hyped in spam e-mails.
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Spammers have turned to the use of PDF-based e-mail messages to try to slip under the security radar and get their messages through to unsuspecting recipients.
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Proposed revisions to a landmark 2002 anti fraud law will include relaxing some rules for small public companies in a bid to curb what they say have been excessive costs related to audits, the Securities and Exchange Commission's accounting chief said yesterday.
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The stock exchanges in the United States would be forced to tighten their governance and move toward separating their self-policing function from their business operations under a plan proposed by federal regulators on Tuesday.