News: AOL reports drop in spam messages to its subscribers
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AOL, the world's largest Internet service provider, believes spammers are starting to give up _ at least when it comes to sending junk to its subscribers.
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To curb spam, getting your Hotmail via Outlook/Express won&#39;t be free much longer ... posted 12:49pm EST Tue Sep 28 2004 - submitted by Christopher R. Anderson.
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An insistent upgrade alert from AOL is annoying some users of its IM service.
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Add America Online Inc. to the growing list of companies and organizations shunning a spam-fighting proposal from Microsoft Corp. AOL cited &quot;tepid support&quot; for Microsoft&#39;s so-called Sender ID technology, which
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America Online said yesterday that it has seen a substantial decline in unsolicited e-mails this year, though some anti-spam experts said the company may be the only Internet provider experiencing such a drop-off.
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A spammer accused of sending unsolicited mail to 1.2 million AOL subscribers pleaded guilty and faces potentially substantial fines and jail time, but one observer said the victory was at best a moral one for AOL.
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You&#39;ve got less spam, according to America Online, the world&#39;s largest online service. The online unit of Time Warner Inc.
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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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The Storm Worm botnet network may be shrinking in size, but it has managed to send out 15 million of those annoying audio spam messages in October, according to anti-spam vendor MessageLabs.It&#39;s hard to believe that the Storm messages were effective. Recipients had to first click on an attachment -- usually given a misleading name&#160;such as&#160;beatles.mp3 or Britney.mp3 -- to hear the stock pitch, which featured a warbly robotic woman advising people to invest in online car seller, Exit Only.This kind of scam, called &quot;pump and dump,&quot; tries to nudge up the price of penny stocks by a cent or two, giving the spammers a way to make a quick buck by selling the stock before it crashes. Spammers have been delivering their messages in different formats, including&#160;PDF and Excel files, over the past few years as part of a cat-and-mouse game with spam blockers. This&#160;move to MP3 spam&#160;is the latest development in this battle, observers say.Spam watchers say that pump-and-dump schemes are the hottest and most lucrative area for spammers today.The spam run began on Oct. 17, and lasted about 36 hours, using infected computers in the Storm Worm network to send out the mails, MessageLabs said in a statement released Tuesday. The spam sounded strange and warbly because the voice in the message was &quot;synthesized using a very low compression rate of 16KHz to keep the overall file size small, at around 50KB, to avoid detection,&quot; the company said.Storm is thought to have landed on as many as 15 million PCs over the past year, but recently&#160;its network of infected PCs has been shrinking. University of California, San Diego, researchers recently pegged it at about 160,000 computers, only 20,000 of which are accessible at any one time.Exit Only said it was not involved in sending the spam. Its stock was trading around $0.41 on Oct. 18, the day after the Storm spam started. On Tuesday it closed at $0.20.
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America Online said it had cut spam on its service for the first time in five years, slashing the annoying email advertisements in 2004 by 75 percent.
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Microsoft files new lawsuits against spam while AOL battles &#39;spim&#39;- unsolicited messages sent to users of its instant messaging service.
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A new MessageLabs report says more than 86% of the E-mail it sampled in June was spam--and nearly one in 10 contained a virus.
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It&#39;s an ill wind, as they say. If you believe the word on the anti-spam lists, Hurricanes Charley, Frances and Ivan have all disrupted one of Florida&#39;s major internet businesses: spamming.
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Spam: Death By A Million Paper Cuts  The organization I work for receives 19-20 UCEs (Unsolicited Commercial Email) per second, 1.7-2 million potential UCEs per day, 11.7 million UCEs per week. I only have 13,000 email users. These users were desperate and email for many was unusable. Me and another co-worker had 3 months to implement a plan to get rid of most of it. I had to document every step we took and I had one shot to accomplish this. At the end of that time it had to work and it had to be noticeable.    I am not an expert on spam. However, I have learned many things about UCEs and what can be done to fight it and how to adjust to UCEs' dynamic nature.
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America Online Inc. (AOL) has decided not to fully support Microsoft Corp.&#39;s Sender ID spam-fighting plan after the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the open- source
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America Online (AOL) has cut spam on its service for the first time in five years. AOL says it has slashed the annoying email advertisements in 2004 by 75 per cent.
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Microsoft resurrected its anti-spam Sender ID proposal this week by making changes to appease some critics, and immediately won over one of its biggest detractors: American Online (AOL).