Catching Spammers May Cost Big Bucks
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Putting a bounty on spammer&#39;s heads, as proposed in the CAN-SPAM Act, could be an expensive undertaking, according to a report from the Federal Trade Commission.
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(InfoWorld) - Stolen bank account numbers are commanding the highest price in an underground trade of personal details stolen by hackers, according to a survey released Monday by security vendor Symantec. Bank account details command prices of up to $400, while credit card details sell for between $0.50 and $5, e-mail passwords from $1 to $350 each, and e-mail addresses from $2 to $4 per megabyte, according to Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report, which covers the first half of the year. The online trade in stolen details highlights the commercialization ofÂ Internet crime, with gangs researching, developing and marketing nefarious software for other criminals, said William Beer, director of security practice for Europe. There has been an increase in the quality and quantity of malicious code sold on the Internet, driven by well-funded international groups of criminals, Beer said. The hackers are obtaining the information through increasingly targeted attacks on computers that often involve collecting personal information about a person from social networks such as MySpace or Facebook, Beer said. With specific personal details, the hacker can construct a personalized e-mail that entices the victim to either click on an attachment containing malicious software or visit a phishing site. Symantec is also seeing multistage attacks where the attacker places a small piece of software on a target computer that then acts as a beachhead for downloading other software. "The end user will not even notice the attacks have taken place because it's a very gradual process," Beer said. On the spam front, Symantec said it has noticed a 30 percent drop in so-called "pump-and-dump" spam, where e-mails touting penny stocks are sent out, causing a rise in the stock price before the perpetrators sell the stock early. The decline can be attributed to aÂ crackdown by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Also down is the percentage of spam with images, which started as a highly effective way to bypass spam filters but is now less so. About 27 percent of the spam analyzed by Symantec between April and May contained images, down from 50 percent the first week in January, Symantec said. The decrease is due to an improvement in spam filters as well as the decline in pump-and-dump spam, which often used images, the company said.
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With the increasing popularity of VoIP, &quot;SPIT&quot; (SPam over Internet Telephony) has the potential to be an even bigger problem than its email counterpart.
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A spammer whom authorities say e-mailed more than 9 billion unwanted advertisements for products like erection pills faces a hefty fine: If he needs headache medication or debt relief there's probably an unsolicited ad in his own inbox.
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Internet firm Lycos UK released free screensaver software that allows users to attack spammers using the same mass mailing techniques the spammers themselves use to fill up the worldâs inboxes.
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Spammers are a key adopter of a technology meant, in part, to fight spam.
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A screensaver targeting spam-related websites could help drive spammers out of business.
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A bounty system for catching spammers would need to offer whistleblowers rewards of $100,000 to $250,000 to be effective, the Federal Trade Commission said.
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By Jim Hopkins  SAN FRANCISCO -- The tech quandary  for many small businesses isn't about building a better website or when to buy Microsoft's new Vista operating system. It's an old problem managers thought they'd already licked: spam.
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Spammers have become enthusiastic adopters of technology designed to spot and stop them.
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Spammers have come close to ruining e-mail--and threaten to do the same to Internet telephony. The time to stop them is now.
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By JENNIFER C. KERR    WASHINGTON  -- What would it take to get someone to turn in one of those spammers who send millions of unwanted e-mails? At least $100,000, the Federal Trade Commission figures...
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We're being inundated by spam.  How could community-based approaches help?
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A plan to bump up the bandwidth bills of spammers seems to be getting out of control. Earlier this week Lycos Europe released a screensaver that bombards spam websites with data to try to increase the cost of running such sites.
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Try not to smile: A top spammer may be sentenced to hard time.
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To curb spam, users will be charged for accessing their e-mail via Outlook.
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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.