Top executives face personalized e-mail attacks
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MessageLabs reports a surge in malicious spam aimed at individuals in senior management positions--and their family members.
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Gmail can be easily hacked, allowing any past--and future e-mail messages--to be forwarded to the attacker's own in-box, a vulnerability researcher said Tuesday.
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E-mail users inundated with unsolicited spam messages have reason to hope Microsoft will develop better tools for tackling the problem: Bill Gates is suffering more than anyone.
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Filter Corporate Email Through Gmail  Shawn Hogan from DigitalPoint actually started filtering his various corporate email accounts through the gmail mail server. Shawn used many types of spam detection and filtering systems, including Spam Assassin, which I am happy with, to block unwanted email. But for some reason 2,000 spam emails ...
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Billions of emails are sent around the globe each day but are their true meanings getting across? Maybe not.
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BREAKING NEWS - The chief technology officer of the company that makes Core Impact, a very well-known penetration testing product for enterprise networks, has gone public with the discovery of a new and significant vulnerability affecting AOL Instant Messenger, on systems where Internet Explorer 7 is also installed.
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Misusing e-mail or browsing the wrong sites can cost you your job.
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New antispam technology standards are on the way that promise to hit spammers where it hurts the most--their wallets. At issue is the ability to authenticate the original source of e-mail messages, a major
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Bill Gates may be the most-spammed person in the world. The Microsoft chairman receives about four million e-mails a day, most of them spam, according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
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If you didn&#39;t think anybody else could possibly get any more spam than you, then think of Bill Gates. The Microsoft Corp. chairman receives 4 million pieces of e-mail per day, most of it junk, said Steve Ballmer, the company&#39;s chief executive.
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(InfoWorld) - Hackers appear to have stepped up their efforts to trick corporate executives into downloading malicious software programs that can steal company data over the past year, according to new data released Monday. MessageLabs, a security vendor that offers e-mail filtering services to catch spam and malicious attachments, caught an average of 10 e-mails per day in May targeted at people in senior management positions, up from just one a day a year prior, said Mark Sunner, chief security analyst. Those 10 e-mails are a very small percentage of the 200 million e-mails that MessageLabs scans every day, but the composition of those messages is what's alarming, Sunner said. Many of the e-mails contained the name and title of the executive in the subject line, as well as a malicious Microsoft Word document containing executable code. The hackers are trying to trick the victim into thinking the messages comes from someone they know, in the hope that the victim will willingly install, for example, a program that can record keystrokes. MessageLabs won't reveal what companies have been targeted of late, but it has contacted executives who have been targeted and heard their family members have also received messages on their own, non-corporate e-mail accounts, Sunner said. Those methods suggests that hackers may be researching victims and culling data from social networking sites such as Linked In, MySpace, or Facebook, Sunner said. "If you really want to work out somebody's background ... you can actually find out a lot," Sunner said. Tricking a relative into installing malicious code would offer the hacker another way to collect sensitive data, if an executive decides to do some work on a home computer, Sunner said. During June, MessageLabs picked up more than 500 of these targeted messages, with some 30 percent aimed at chief investment officers -- a position that can include handling acquisitions and mergers. Other positions targeted include directors of research and development, company presidents, CEOs, CIOs, and CFOs. Another danger is that the targeted messages are often just single messages sent to a single person, rather than a mass spam run. When hackers send out millions of messages, security companies often either update their software or change their spam filters to trap the bad messages. But single messages have a higher chance of slipping through, although Sunner said MessageLabs' filtering service catches the messages by analyzing the e-mail's attachment and determining whether it is potentially harmful. Other security companies catch malware by updating their software with indicators, or signatures, to detect harmful code or block code from running based on what it does on a computer, a technology called behavioral detection. Tracing where the messages come from is difficult, since the sender's name is always fake, Sunner said. The IP address from which the messages were sent indicate computers that are located around the world. Hackers often use networks of computers they already control, called botnets, to send e-mails. "Certainly, people need to raise the level of vigilance," Sunner said.
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(InfoWorld) - Hackers are trying to play on business' fear of legal action from customers to trick them into downloading a harmful program distributed through e-mail. The e-mails purport to come from the Better Business Bureau, an organization that monitors and arbitrates disputes between consumers and businesses in the U.S. and Canada. The e-mails assert that a customer lodged a complaint against the recipient's business, according to a warning on the Web site of Websense, a security vendor. The e-mails contain aÂ Microsoft WordÂ attachmentÂ with the text of the supposed complaint and instructions for how to respond. But embedded in that document is a keylogging program that captures data on the victim's computer and then uploads it to a server in Malaysia. The keylogger is purposely mislabeled with a ".pdf" extension -- Portable Document Format -- another widely used document format, to make it look harmless, said Henry Gonzalez, Websense's senior security researcher. The trick is another variation of so-called "social engineering" methods used by hackers, which entice users to unknowingly install harmful programs on their computers. A Better Business Bureau branch warned of a similar kind of attack in February. At that time, the e-mails contained hyperlinks to malicious Web sites. Some kinds of malicious software can be installed on a user's computer merely by viewing a site engineered to exploit a vulnerability within a Web browser. The latest attack, using the Word document as the delivery vehicle for the malicious software, is a tactic hackers are increasingly employing. Â ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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In an attack aimed specifically at business executives, criminals claiming to be from the IRS are emailing malware under the guise of informing recipients of a consumer complaint against them.
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E-mail is a victim of its own success. That's the conclusion of IBM Corp. researchers in Cambridge, who have spent nearly a decade conducting field tests at IBM and other companies about how employees work and use electronic mail. It's clear to them that e-mail has become the Internet's killer application.
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Spam messages in Chinese, Korean and Japanese are on the rise, say e-mail filtering experts.
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Also: Companies face new rules on e-mails. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Deluge of unwanted e-mail greets workers, again raising questions about effectiveness of filters. And the onslaught could get worse.