Number of Malicious E-Mails with Bad Links Balloons
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The percentage of threats arriving in e-mail that rely on links to malicious sites has soared 10-fold since the first quarter of the year, a security company says.
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Latest spam blast invites recipients to see themselves in a video, but 'YouTube' link leads to malware.
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Q Some of my buddies' e-mails show up with an unopenable attachment called "winmail.dat." Am I at fault, or are my friends?
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Worm is traveling by e-mail, but does not appear to cause much damage.
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Called W32.Funner, the worm upon infection attempts to spread itself through the host&#39;s MSN Messenger contact list. Apart from altering Windows&#39; host file and adding nearly 1000 URLs, the worm also attempts
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(InfoWorld) - E-mail worms, not long ago the scourge of the Internet, have declined sharply in 2007, a security company has revealed. According to UTM security vendor Fortinet, the incidence of mass-mailing worms has declined by 5 percent each month since the start of the year, putting the once-feared worm well below other types of attack in terms of volume. The figures come from the company's The State of Malware report for June 2007. Viruses, spyware, and software exploits have remained roughly stable in volume throughout the same period, while Trojans have been climbing since February to represent the number one threat. Much less common mobile, IM, Linux, and non-mailed Win32 worms have all shown marked declines, albeit from relatively low levels. The company offers a variety of explanations for the marked decline. Users are now more aware of the need to mistrust e-mailed attachments, while corporates are employing better gateway security to strip e-mails of malicious code. Another possibility is that attackers might be moving from mass-mailing techniques to targeted attacks as a better avenue to profit. This theory is backed up by separate figures from MessageLabs published earlier this week that uncovered evidence of attacksÂ targeting named individuals in companies.Â Although rare by their nature, such attacks are reckoned to have a much higher chance of success than generic mass-mailing attacks. The age of the mass-mailing worms is not about to end, however, and could simply have entered a period during which it will decline to low levels before spiking from time to time. The best recent example of this isÂ the Storm wormÂ of January, which presented a high point against which worm volumes were bound to decline as the year wore on. The unique danger of worms is their ability to spread automatically in ways that can clog bandwidth before systems can react. Because worm detection systems are now so finely tuned, such malware has to do as much of its damage in possible within the first hour of spread, after which it will be filtered aggressively by security gateways. The worm's future could increasingly be as a form of malevolent political or terrorist protest rather than as a tool of criminal profit.
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Duo arrested for 1.6b e-mails   Two computer programmers have been arrested on suspicion of sending out 1.6 billion spam e-mail messages, violating commerce laws, police said yesterday.
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We're being inundated by spam.  How could community-based approaches help?
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I spend 10 to 15 minutes a day adding addresses to my âblock sendersâ list. Is there any way I can block all of these at once and report them to some entity?
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Russian teens fingered as likely suspects A recent upsurge in Storm Worm activity was accompanied by a spike in spam levels 48 hours later, according to an analysis by managed security services firm MessageLabs.â¦
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The Story: Even when there?s good news on the security front, there always seems to be bad news to balance it out. And while we think this news is important for you to know, it?s not an exception to the Good News/Bad News Syndrome.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    The use of e-mail-borne executable virus attachments dropped sharply in 2007. In particular, spammers have dialed back their use of so-called image spam, which tricks filters by embedding text within an attached image.According to IronPort Systems, outbreaks of viruses embedded in e-mail attachments totaled 860 in 2006 and 844 in 2005. But as of mid-October 2007, attacks totaled just 360. Dave Mayer, an IronPort product manager, said it?s likely that outbreaks will total 450 by the end of the year ? a drop of 47 percent. It appears that evildoers are moving on: ?Traditional viruses have been around for years, a long enough time to harden defenses against malicious attachments,? he said.Earlier in the year, IronPort, Symantec, and McAfee all noted that image spam, which appeared about two years ago, is waning, now that defenses have improved. Filters have now gotten better at scanning the contents of the attachments, leading spammers to link instead to images elsewhere.Mayer, whose company specializes in e-mail and Web security, says spammers are now placing those images on free photo-sharing sites ? the ones people use to send vacation photos to friends and family ? and embedding links to those images in their junk messages. These are difficult for spam filters to block because the same sites are used for legitimate photos as well.But as the abuse of e-mail attachments has declined, other types of threats have escalated. For example, outbreaks of macro viruses, aimed at Office-type applications, have risen by 50 percent to 60 percent while URL viruses climbed by at least 250 percent this year, IronPort found.The Bottom Line: It often seems as if the number of threats that you must be on guard against only increases, stretching your resources past the limits. But the truth is that threat profiles change over time, and some things you may be investing in are no longer as great a threat or are now handled by the tools you have in place. So, although you can?t get lax about security, you can focus more on newer threats.Complete list of 2007 underreported tech stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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Bill Gates was wrong: Junk e-mail is clogging inboxes faster than ever. In Furthermore.
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A new virus strain masquerading as electronic Christmas cards is accounting for one in every 10 e-mails hitting in-boxes, security experts warned Wednesday.
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A new family of worms which uses an unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer is spreading widely across the net.
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Challenge/response e-mails accidentally marked as spam by AOL and EarthLink.
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HELSINKI: Internet security experts warned last Tuesday of a new virulent e-mail worm particularly successful in infecting computers as it is disguised as a multilingual electronic Christmas card.
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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.