Microsoft and Amazon couple to fight spam
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Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc., two Seattle-based technology rivals, came to cooperation against deceptive and fraudulent e-mail.
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Microsoft, America Online (AOL), Yahoo and Earthlink have filed a handful of lawsuits against spammers, allegedly targeting some of the world&#39;s largest unsolicited mail offenders.
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SINGAPORE -- If you didnât think anybody else could possibly get any more spam than you, then think of Bill Gates. The Microsoft Corp.
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Attempts to fight spam by identifying e-mails have hit problems over Microsoft&#39;s involvement in the process. The Internet Engineering Task Force, an international standards body, has rejected Microsoft&#39;s contribution to the so-called Sender ID proposal.
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It wasn&#39;t long ago that competitive entities seemed to be joining together to combat Internet users&#39; common foe, spam. However, despite the fact that big Internet players
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The Microsoft chairman is the world&#39;s most spammed person: about 4 million messages arrive in his mailbox on daily basis. The king of Microsoft his Excellency Williams Gates and his silent voodoo doll Steve
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Email users inundated with unsolicited &quot;spam&quot; messages have reason to hope Microsoft will develop better tools for tackling the problem: Bill Gates is suffering more than anyone.
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Challenge/response e-mails accidentally marked as spam by AOL and EarthLink.
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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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E-mail users inundated with unsolicited &quot;spam&quot; messages have reason to hope Microsoft Corp. will develop better tools for tackling the problem: Bill Gates is suffering more than anyone.
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Internet companies have begun to change the way e-mail works in order to weed out spam, but experts on Tuesday clashed over whether the underlying technology should be controlled by any one company.
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SEPTEMBER 28, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. today said they have filed one joint and several separate lawsuits against companies and individuals accusing them of trying to defraud
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Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have filed several lawsuits in various Seattle courts aimed at computer spammers and &quot;phishers&quot; who use a look-alike Amazon.
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Seattle-area neighbors Amazon.com and Microsoft today announced the filing of several lawsuits in connection with spoofing and phishing scams that deceive consumers and misuse Amazon&#39;s brand name.
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Now that Microsoft&#39;s (Quote, Chart) two patent efforts regarding e-mail authentication are publicly available, anti-spam advocates are raising even more questions about how the patents might impact an industry-wide anti-spam protocol effort called Sender
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Seattle, September 29: Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc jointly filed lawsuits against e-mail spammers and scams to get unsuspecting users to divulge credit card and account information, the two companies said on Tuesday.
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America Online, Microsoft, EarthLink and Yahoo are teaming up again to turn up the heat on spammers. The four companies, which make up the Anti-Spam Alliance, announced on Thursday that they have each filed