Microsoft Sting Targets Resellers For Alleged Hard-Disk Loading
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Microsoft filed lawsuits late last week against eight resellers nationwide for allegedly buying and selling counterfeit and used Certificate of Authenticity labels.
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Amazon and Microsoft have filed lawsuits against companies that used their names to commit fraud on the Internet. One suit accuses Gold Disk Canada of &quot;spoofing,&quot; or sending e-mails that appear
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Microsoft Windows users need to watch out for several flaws in non-Microsoft media players.
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Microsoft has sued eight US computer resellers who it says bought or sold counterfeit Certificate of Authenticity labels or genuine labels that had been separated from their related software, all in breach of copyright and trade mark laws.
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(InfoWorld) - Hoping to tackle the growing problem of pump-and-dump stock scams Microsoft has quietly filed lawsuits against at least three alleged perpetrators who it says used its MSN Hotmail networks to promote stocks. Hotmail has "received large volumes of unsolicited commercial e-mail messages" promoting stocks for such companiesÂ as Distributed Power, TGC Ventures, China Biolife Enterprises, and Irwin Resources, according to court documents filed during April and May in King County Superior Court in Seattle. Microsoft charges the defendants with violating the federal CAN-SPAM act as well as Washington state consumer protection laws and is seeking unspecified damages, according to the filings. Pump-and-dump e-mail scams are a form of fraud where the criminals purchase stock in a company -- typically an inexpensive penny stock -- and then promote the equity in millions of unsolicited email messages. The technique is one of the more lucrative spamming practices and has been "the fastest growing area in spam" over the past few months, said Craig Schmugar, a threat research manager with McAfees' Avert Labs. Pump-and-dump spam has not only taken up resources and threatened the smooth functioning of Hotmail, but it "continues to result in significant costs to Microsoft," the court filings state. Microsoft executives were not immediately available to comment for this story. Because Microsoft does not know the name of the spammers behind the unsolicited e-mails, it has filed the lawsuits as "John Doe" cases, giving it the power to subpoena information in the case and ultimately name the parties responsible when they are uncovered. It's the latest move in the cat and mouse game between pump-and-dump spammers and the technology companies trying to stop them. Pump-and-dump scams are gaining more attention from criminals and companies like Microsoft for one simple reason: They work. Researchers at Purdue and Oxford Universities recently examined the dynamics of pump-and-dump and found that spammers could realize 5 percent returns in a single day. Because these scams are so lucrative, they've attracted some of the most technically competent spammers to develop new techniques, said Adam O'Donnell, a senior research scientist at Cloudmark. "The pump-and-dump schemes are basically driving spam research and development," he said. Primarily, this research has centered around the creation of templates that can be used by infected PCs to create spam messages and on a form of e-mail known as image spam, O'Donnell said. These image spam messages look just like any other e-mail but are in fact .jpg or .gif images. Image spam is also particularly well-suited to pump-and-dump because the fraudsters don't need victims to click on a link for scam to work. Over the past year, image spammers have developed a variety of techniques to confuse spam filters, said McAfee's Schmugar. They've added colorful backgrounds, wavy text, and filled their messages with nonsense text to try to evade optical character recognition technologies, he said. For example, a recent spam message promoting China Biolife Enterprises, one of the stocks named in Microsoft's suit, contained the following message: "Symbol CBFE Price $1.55 (UP 11.51%) Target $4 Market: Bullish. Strangler minott goodnight bennett rebel rousers." With the jump in pump-and-dump e-mail, O'Donnell said it's no surprise that Microsoft has brought the lawsuits. "Hotmail is heavily used and is viewed by the Web community as one of the most challenging spam environments right now," he said.
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Certificates of authority (COAs) are affixed to software packaging to let buyers know it&#39;s the real thing. But when the COA itself is counterfeit, resellers also feel the pain, Microsoft (Quote, Chart) found.
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Microsoft said Wednesday that it plans to clamp down hard on piraters of its next-generation operating systems, crippling both Windows Vista and Windows Server "Longhorn" if users fail to activate their copies within 30 days.
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A directory reversal within "flat" extensions could lead to system profile attacks.
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SEATTLE - Now that digital cameras have overtaken film cameras in sales, users are beginning to encounter a familiar problem -- what to do with the bulging image files and folders filling up computer hard drives?
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Windows users are being urged to download the latest batch of security updates from Microsoft.
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Amazon and Microsoft have joined forces to launch a legal crackdown on alleged phishers and spammers. The companies have filed a joint federal lawsuit against a Canadian company, Gold Disk Canada, accusing it of spoofing.
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What hope then for Vista toughness? Some, or maybe many, Microsoft volume license customers were told on Monday and Tuesday that their PCs were running pirated software.â¦
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Microsoft on Tuesday announced a settlement with one of its disc replication partners, after the company admitted it had breached agreements with Microsoft by unlawfully producing the Redmond company's server software.
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Memory space on components such as graphics cards, DVD drives and batteries can be used by miscreants to load malicious code onto PCs.
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Visitors with a pirated copy of Windows may lose easy access to company's Download Center.
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Microsoft  is helping law  enforcers hunt down criminals who try to steal bank account  details on the Internet and has initiated 129 lawsuits in  Europe and the Middle East, the U.S. software company said.
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Now that digital cameras have overtaken film cameras in sales, users are beginning to encounter a familiar problem -- what to do with the bulging image files and folders filling up computer hard drives?