Antispam campaign bites the dust
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While its neighbors, software infrastructure and hardware upgrades, switched places this month, security held its spot at number three.
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Spammers aren't ducking antispam laws by operating offshore, they're just ignoring it.
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Security experts warn of banner ads with a bad attitude--and a link to malicious code. Also: Phishers, be gone.
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falling repeatedly for spam scams that promise software at fire sale prices. In fact, one in five consumers surveyed bought software
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"Sender ID"  technique to stymie junk e-mailers is failing to drawing underwhelming support.
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The surge has left the antispam industry scrambling to develop new techniques to keep up.
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BetaNews: After tackling Spam, AOL is now waging a two front offensive against spammers. America Online has taken the fight to &quot;Spim,&quot; which is crossing over the threshold of disruption.
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After years of being deluged with ever-increasing loads of spam, Internet users are starting to turn to instant-messaging applications instead of e-mail.
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(InfoWorld) - Security vendors and users agree that image spam is finally on the decline, but at the same time a new kind of spam is emerging that uses an attached PDF file to trick recipients into buying stock in a company. Image spam, which has plagued antispam filters for the past year, is finally on the decline as e-mail security vendors have tweaked their products to block it, says Paul Henry, vice president of technology evangelism withÂ Secure Computing.Â Image spam has long fooled filters because the message's text is embedded in an image found in an e-mail's body, and filters until recently couldn't decipher images. At the beginning of July it comprised about 38 percent of all spam and is now down to about half that volume, says Henry.Stats from Symantec also show the volume of image spam, which the company says began to decline in May, has continued to shrink from its all-time high of 52 percent of all spam sent in January. "Image spam does seem to be decreasing ... Antispam software, RBLs [real-time black lists] and other filtering techniques have done a good job at decreasing the previous spammers' attempts; it is now time for them to find a new avenue to annoy us," says Jim DeSantis, enterprise messaging architect with Abhir Technical Consulting. Beginning to take image spam's place is PDF spam, where the spammer sends an e-mail message with a PDF attached -- which most spam filters can't read -- that attempts to convince the recipient to purchase stocks. So far security vendors are reporting two types; a professional-looking PDF of a newsletter pumping a German company's stock that security companyÂ IronPort saysÂ was sent more than 5 billion times in its first few days, and a more rudimentary PDF attachment containing text that pumped a stock which Symantec says was sent to more than 30 million users over a 10-day period in late June. So far, PDF spam isn't approaching the volumes that image spam has enjoyed -- Secure Computing's Henry says in early July it accounted for about 4 percent of all spam sent -- yet this new spam trick could prove to be significantly more malicious. Henry says proof-of-concept code exists that demonstrates security vulnerabilities in PDF files, which means PDF spam could carry malware that is secretly downloaded on the recipient's PC. Image spam was only dangerous to those recipients who bought the stock that messages were touting and likely lost money on it. "I haven't seen any malware yet in PDF spam ...but I'm keeping my eye on it," Henry says. PDF spam does hold some potential for spammers who are advanced enough to take advantage of the technology, some say. "Simply attaching a PDF to an e-mail and randomizing the size and name of the title, to me, does not seem all that impressive, but it seems to be working," says Kyle Ohme, director of technology with W3i.com, an interactive marketing services provider. "I'm interested to see how far this will go, as some may start to use some of the more advanced functions of Adobe to place beacons and other tracking mechanisms that have become limited in the past years," Ohme says. Malware-laden or not, PDF spam is an example of how spammers will continue to innovate in order to get their messages across. "The battle between spammers and spam-filter vendors will always be a game of cat and mouse. The tools are definitely getting smarter ... the better the tools the more creative spammers will be," says Sharon Finney, information security administrator with Dekalb Medical Center in Decatur, Ga. "I am seeing some increases in PDF spam, but no real volume yet. All spam is a nuisance regardless of the technology behind it. I don't think that any one type of spam is more of a nuisance than any other." Â
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Spammers have turned to the use of PDF-based e-mail messages to try to slip under the security radar and get their messages through to unsuspecting recipients.
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A proposed technology for identifying the source of e-mail messages suffered a blow last week when a group within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) established to
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Antispam lawsuits and enforcement actions suggest that companies taking a wink-and-nudge approach to affiliates should be careful about how they lure paying customers. By Ryan Singel.
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Worried about spyware? spam? "spim"? AOL wants to set your mind at rest. Also: Putting patches in place.
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Attack largely unsuccessful, but security experts warn of more to come.
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Plus: Most email over holidays will be spam. [News.com Extra]
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New software allows recipients of spam to band together to target known websites behind the messages. The idea is to bombard the sites with messages, slowing them down and making them more expensive to run.
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Anti-spam vendors hit back on Tuesday against analyst firm Gartner&#39;s claims that the level of spam is falling. &quot;I don&#39;t agree with it at all,&quot; said Mark Sommer, chief technology officer at MessageLabs.