DoJ alerts US citizens to spam attack
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Pesky phishers impersonate keepers of Justice The US Department of Justice has issued a warning to the public urging them not to respond to a bogus email that purports to be from the DoJ.â¦
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A phishing attack that masquerades as a troubling letter from the IRS is making the rounds, according to the Department of Justice.
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US enforcement agencies have arrested or charged dozens of people with crimes related to junk e-mail, identity theft and other online scams in recent weeks, according to several people involved in the actions.
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WASHINGTON--The US government should be prepared to spend freely if it decides to encourage &quot;bounty hunters&quot; to track down e-mail spammers, the US Federal Trade Commission said Thursday.
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Spam messages in Chinese, Korean and Japanese are on the rise, say e-mail filtering experts.
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(InfoWorld) - The trouble at Franklin D. Azar & Associates PC began with pornographic spam. Last May the Aurora, Colorado, law firm was being bombarded with offensive messages, and enough of it was seeping through the company's spam filters that employees complained to management, and IT administrator Kevin Rea was told to do something. What happened next, as detailed in federal court filings, shows how the fight against spammers can backfire. Spammers have been using increasingly sophisticated techniques to evade filters, so that over the past few years and despite predictions to the contrary, unsolicited e-mail continues to plague businesses worldwide. On the morning of May 21, Rea dialed up the spam settings on the Barracuda Spam Firewall 200 Azar & Associates was using to block unwanted mail. The changes made it harder for spam to land on the desktops of company employees but they also had one unforeseen consequence: the Barracuda Networks Inc. appliance began blocking e-mail from the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, including a notice advising company lawyers of a May 30 hearing in a civil lawsuit. Azar & Associates lawyers blew their court date and this week the judge overseeing the matter ordered the company to pay attorney fees and expenses incurred by the lawyers who showed up representing the other side of the case. Rea did not return a call seeking comment on the matter. What happened to Azar & Associates is unusual, but reflects a legitimate worry for law firms. "This is an IT guy's nightmare if you work in a law firm," said Matt Kesner, chief technology officer with Fenwick & West LLP, a Bay Area law firm with about 250 attorneys. "It doesn't take a very high percentage of false positives in the anti-spam world to misidentify a crucial piece of correspondence." Fenwick & West has missed e-mailed court notices in the past, although it has not blown court dates as a consequence, Kesner said. Over the past 10 years U.S. state and federal courts have increasingly done business electronically in a move to become more efficient and more environmentally friendly. This charge has been led by the federal court system, which uses an electronic document system called Case Management/Electronic Case Filing (CM/ECF), in nearly 200 courts across the country. All federal bankruptcy and district courts use CM/ECF and soon it will be standard in the appellate courts, according to Richard Carelli, a spokesman with the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. "You can be notified other ways, but by and large the business of law is carried on electronically, at least in the federal courts," Carelli said. Putting the federal courts, which use the uscourts.gov domain, on a "whitelist" of approved senders is one way to avoid problems receiving e-mail. In fact, the Colorado federal court judge in the Azar & Associates case criticized the law firm for not whitelisting his court's domain name. "It would have been a very simple task to whitelist the... [domain] to insure that such e-mails within this domain would always be received." The judge's order will probably end up costing Azar & Associates several thousand dollars, said Venkat Balasubramani, principal of Balasubramani Law, who has blogged about the issue. But despite the persistence of spammers, Balasubramani doesn't think that the CM/ECF system is really in any trouble. "I don't think the scourge of spam is going to hurt the viability of CM/ECF," he said. "I see this decision as a little bit of an aberration." Kesner, who was a lawyer before taking over the CTO job at Fenwick & West , points out that missed appointments happen when parties are notified by postal mail as well. He avoids whitelists because they must be manually maintained and there is the possibility for human error. But Fenwick & West IT staff uses several mail filtering systems, each considered to have a low frequency of error and they've also programmed their filters to allow more spam than other businesses because of concern over this issue. His advice for legal IT staff? "You test like crazy," he said. "And then you pray and genuflect."
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The US&#39;s biggest internet companies have launched yet another crackdown against spammers as part of their latest efforts to protect net users from junk email.
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Challenge/response e-mails accidentally marked as spam by AOL and EarthLink.
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CAN-SPAM and other new laws help combat cybercrime, an FBI agent reports.
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By Kyung M. Song and Jennifer Sullivan, Seattle Times  May 31--With the arrest Wednesday of a Seattle man accused of sending out tens of millions of spam e-mails, federal prosecutors say that computer users across the globe should see a significant drop in spam messages.
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Grand jury indictments A 27-year-old man, dubbed the Spam King by investigators, has been arrested in Seattle where he has been indicted on charges of mail fraud, wire fraud, fraud in connection with electronic mail, and money laundering.â¦
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SEATTLE _ With the arrest Wednesday of a Seattle man accused of sending out tens of millions of spam e-mails, federal prosecutors say that computer users across the globe should see a significant drop in spam messages.  Robert Soloway, a 27-year-old dubbed the "Spam King" by Interim U.S.
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Beware of any e-mail claiming to come from "frauddep@ftc.gov"--it carries a nasty payload.
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In an attempt to stem the growing tide of online scams, identity theft and the proliferation of junk e-mail, the Justice Department and state law enforcement officials have initiated what
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Blog: A U.S. Justice Department attorney says more criminal prosecutions of spammers are on the way, but will that warning deter would-be junk mailers?
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In ordering a New Hampshire man to stop sending spyware that takes over parts of a user&#39;s computer, a federal judge has sent a warning shot at spammers in the United States.
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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