Symantec: Image spam climbs
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(InfoWorld) - Pornographic spam dropped to an all-time low in February, as spammers concentrated on health-related products and other general product pitches, according to a report from vendor Symantec Corp. And similar to software, spam is also increasingly being localized. The Symantec report on spam also said that there was a rise in gambling-related spam in German, Italian and French, while previously it was only mostly in English. Symantec drew the conclusions from its own data, as do many security vendors that publish trend reports based on their own monitoring methods. Pornographic spam comprised just 3 percent of the total amount of spam last month, the lowest figure ever recorded, Symantec said. Overall, about 70 percent of the e-mail messages monitored by Symantec were spam, half of which originated from computers in North America. Improvements in blocking and filtering methods have driven spammers to use new techniques to get into inboxes. Some 38 percent of the spam sent in February used images in messages, which makes it more difficult for security software. Messages appear to be more unique, allowing them to bypass a filter. Spammers also are using text slanted at upward or downward angles. The method hampers optical character recognition technology, which tries to read the text within images, Symantec said. Â
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The increase in spam that arrives with an attached image in order to evade spam filters has caused the amount of bandwidth spam eats to skyrocket.  About 50% of unwanted email is now image spam up from about 2% in September last year, according to Postini, a hosted email security provider.
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Infected graphical images that can implant a backdoor into a Windows computer if they are viewed have been spotted on Usenet. EasyNews, a provider of Usenet newsgroups, said it has identified two JPEG images
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AN ISP CALLED Lycos has come up with a way of fighting spam that attacks the spammers servers. All you have to do is load a screensaver - &quot;Make Love Not Spam&quot; - available from Lycos Europe and it will requests
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A tool that makes it easy to craft malicious JPEG images then let them loose against vulnerable Windows PCs has appeared, security experts said Friday, leading many to believe
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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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SAN JOSE, Calif.) - Phreaks, spoofers and spammers want to invade your home computer, and the tricks of their trade include airsnarfs, wabbits and fork bombs.
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Tool fights spam and digitizes books by requiring users to identify two words displayed in an image.
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Security researcher demonstrates a way to use cross-site scripting to remotely spam an internal network printer.
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(InfoWorld) - Financially motivatedÂ malwareÂ attacks areÂ on the rise,Â with automated software packages making it easy for unskilled hackers to earn a living by sending out spam, researchers at messaging security vendor Secure Computing say. A malware kit calledÂ MPack,Â released by Russian hackers last December, allows pretty much anyone with $200 to become a master spammer because it is easy to use and exploits vulnerabilities in FireFox, Internet Explorer and Apple's QuickTime, says Dmitri Alperovitch, principal research scientist for Secure Computing. The trend that "kind of defines 2007" is the convergence of traditional e-mail with Web-based attacks, in which message recipients are prompted to click on links to malicious Web sites, rather than to download attachments, Alperovitch says. "Certainly, exploiting Web browser vulnerabilities has been common. We've seen that for a long time," he says. "Now we're seeing that capability being merged with traditional e-mail worms that sort of blanket the Internet." Information-stealing malware now accounts for 10 percent of all threats, up from 8 percent in January, new research from Secure Computing has found. Trojans comprise 63 percent of all newly discoveredÂ malware, up from 58 percent in January. SpywareÂ and phishing are also becoming more problematic as attackers use more targeted attacks to steal personal and financial information. "The barriers to entry into cyber crime have been lowered so much," Alperovitch says. "People are realizing that they can make very serious money with almost no accountability, almost complete anonymity." Quoting the analyst firm Gartner, Secure Computing's researchers say that 75 percent of enterprises will be infected by "undetectable professional-grade malware" by year-end. About 90 percent of all e-mail is malicious, but that figure will rise as the holiday season gets closer, according to Alperovitch. "There's a good chance we'll reach 95 percent, maybe higher, of all e-mails being malicious by the end of the year," he says. As the storm worm showed, the automation of online attacks is allowing the creation of more botnets, he says. E-mail delivery mechanisms are also being optimized to bypass spam filters. Unfortunately, many Web surfers are far too trusting. "If you're walking down the street and someone asks you for your Social Security number or your bank account pin, you're not going to give it to them," Alperovitch says. "Yet on the Internet, people freely give them out to anyone who sends them an e-mail message." Here are some key security trends and events identified by Secure Computing in the first eight months of 2007: -- TheÂ Storm worm,Â named after subject lines like "230 dead as storm batters Europe," and similar worms became widespread in January and the following months, with new variants being created every 15 minutes. -- A password-stealingÂ Trojan hit visitors to the Miami Dolphins' stadium Web siteÂ during the Super Bowl, when attackers took advantage of a vulnerability in Internet Explorer's rendering of vector markup language documents. -- A mass-email with pictures of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in April lured people to a Web site that hosted a zero-day exploit related to Windows' handling of animated cursor files. Microsoft released a patch to fix the vulnerability. -- More than 10,000 European Web sites hosted malware attacks in June after being compromised. "Hidden IFRAME's" were injected into the Web sites, referring visitors to malicious sites using MPack to deliver banking Trojans. -- So-called backdoor Trojans affect home users around the world, including nearly 100,000 PCs now infected by a new wave of storm malware. "The mailings that came with subject lines such as 'You've received a postcard from a family member!' directed users to Web-hosted exploits for several different vulnerabilities; they infect users' computers and attach them to the Storm family's P2P botnet," Secure Computing writes. Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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A new Trojan horse program that attacks and removes troublesome advertising software, known as "adware," is circulating on the Internet, according to antivirus company Symantec Corp.
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A seemingly routine investigation into spam has unveiled a world-spanning network of spam.
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Spammers may have found a way to thwart the CAPTCHA image-recognition system commonly used to combat spam.
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Researchers this week reported a spam run that tried to trick users into downloading a Trojan horse posing as a video of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
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McAfee, Inc. today announced the availability of "Image Spam, the New Email Scourge," a whitepaper designed to explain how image spam has evolved, why it is more difficult than text spam for most anti- spam filters to detect, and what McAfee is doing to help customers combat the problem.
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Say hello to 3D spam Spammers have added a fresh dimension to the fight against junk mail with the creation of image spam rendered in a pseudo 3D layout.â¦
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Hackers are using porn images posted on Usenet newsgroups to take advantage of the flaw in Microsoft programs regarding JPEGs. An overflow occurs in the GDI+ JPEG decoder from malicious code in the JPEG.