Holiday-Related Spam Slowing Down E-Mails Sent to Schools
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By Lexington Herald-Leader, Ky.  Dec. 8--Parents might want to pick up the phone instead of e-mailing  Susie's teacher about that late homework.   A nationwide surge in holiday junk e-mail means many legitimate messages  to Kentucky schools are getting held up in cyberspace.
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Spam mail has become one of the biggest problems on the Internet; it consumes precious bandwidth, wastes computer resources, and causes huge financial losses to corporations.
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As image spam declines, a new type of pest takes its place.
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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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Some clever, sexy Christmas-themed spam and a long holiday season helped the criminals behind the notorious&#160;Storm Worm&#160;more than double their network of infected PCs over the past few weeks, security experts say.Storm kicked off its holiday spam-and-malware campaign on the day before Christmas, sending off a flurry of e-mail that invited victims to visit a&#160;Christmas-themed strip show&#160;on Web sites such as Merrychristmasdude.com. Victims who downloaded the strip show found their PCs attacked by malicious software.This site, and about 14 other Storm-related domains, was registered using a Russian domain name registrar called Nic.ru, where staff was largely unavailable during the holidays, according to Richard Cox, the chief information officer with the Spamhaus anti-spam effort.&quot;The trouble was they were quite simply out to Christmas lunch,&quot; Cox said. &quot;And they didn&#39;t get back until Wednesday.&quot;Spamhaus representatives tried to contact the registrar on Dec. 26, but they soon discovered that the company was essentially shut down. Four days later they received an e-mail from a Nic.ru employee saying that they would have to wait until staff returned to work in January before anything could be done, Cox said.Storm&#39;s creators took advantage of another common problem in the domain name registration system. They targeted a registrar that did not have an established policy for taking down malicious domains, so that gave the criminals a little more time to run their scam, Cox said.By Wednesday of this week, Nic.ru had removed the Storm-related domains from its database, knocking the criminal network&#39;s Web sites offline.But now security experts say that Storm has more than doubled in size, adding about 25,000 PCs to a network that had been 20,000 strong.Storm&#39;s creators also changed the configuration of their malware, making it harder for security software to detect it, and this helped inflate the number of infections, Cox said.The Christmas campaign was &quot;pretty effective at growing the botnet,&quot; said Jose Nazario, senior security engineer at Arbor Networks. &quot;The contributing factors there were clearly the successful timing, tied to a major Western holiday, coupled with tweaks to the malware to avoid antivirus detection.&quot;Storm Worm has been attacking computer users since January 2007, when it began tricking victims into downloading malicious software, claiming that it was a video of violent storms that had been ravaging Europe.Since then it has been one of the most virulent sources of malware, although it has shrunk in size as detection methods have improved. Recently the network appears to have begun renting out its infected PCs to phishers, according to some researchers.&quot;Storm is an insidious pest. We&#39;ve learned essentially how to manage it,&quot; said Nazario. But, he added, the success of this Christmas campaign proves that the network can still be a serious threat. &quot;They&#39;re great marketers,&quot; he said.&#160;
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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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If you've been around the net for a while you've been subscribed to a few thousand mailing lists.  I'm on a few big mailing lists now that host more than a few thousand users.  Sooner or later some guy on the list will go on vacation and instead of just letting email sit in their inbox he's nice enough to respond to all his email - with a form letter!  Usually in the shape of:  "I'm on vacation.  I'll be back in January."  Of course they're stupid enough to apply this to *every* folder in their inbox and so everytime someone posts or replies to the list this message is sent out to one of every three thousand posters.  We don't care if you're on vacation.  We don't care when you get back and  ...
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The impact of the W32/Zafi-D worm, which disguised itself as an electronic Christmas card, has reduced from its peak of 1 in every 10 emails earlier this week, to 1 in 30 in the last 24 hours according to reports from Sophos&#39;s global network of monitoring
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Spam reports from America Online members dropped from a daily average of almost 11 million in November 2003 to a daily average of about 2.2 million last month, the company said this week.
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Spammers may be about to get a taste of their own medicine. A British company is today launching software that it claims will allow computer users to hit back at the mass mailers who clog up our inboxes with
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"Offensive" or "inappropriate" spam has been steadily declining, and in February only constituted 3 percent of junk mail, Symantec says.
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US authorities said yesterday computer users everywhere could notice a decrease in junk email after the arrest of a man described as one of the world's most prolific spammers.
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bulk messages clogging instant-messaging accounts. AOL and its Anti-Spam Alliance partners -- EarthLink, Microsoft, and Yahoo
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If you don&#39;t think anybody else could possibly get any more spam than you, think of Bill Gates. The Microsoft Corp. chairman receives about 4 million pieces of e-mail per day, most of it junk, says Steve Ballmer, the company&#39;s chief executive.
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August saw a 10 per cent drop in spam levels, according to email security company Messagelabs. The company said there was a sequential drop in spam with levels falling from 94.
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By The Roanoke Times, Va.  Sep. 8--The Virginia Court of appeals this week upheld protections for people tired of spam in their e-mail inboxes. A state crackdown, however, will not much dent the spam machine. Effective federal legislation and enforcement is required.
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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.