Zango, a company that used to be called 180 solutions, has a long history of making and distributing spyware. (See the Wikipedia article for their sordid history.) Not surprisingly, anti-spyware vendors routinely list Zango's software as what's tactfully called "potentially unwanted". Zango has tried to sue their way out of the doghouse by filing suit against anti-spyware vendors. In a widely reported decision last week, Seattle judge John Coghenour crisply rejected Zango's case, finding that federal law gives Kaspersky complete immunity against Zango's complaint... more
The Seventh Circuit has issued its opinion in the continuing saga of E360 Insight vs. the Spamhaus Project. While it is not a complete victory for Spamhaus, they did about as well as anyone could have hoped for under the circumstances. E360 won on the procedural issue, while Spamhaus won on the substance. The procedural issue was whether the default judgement against Spamhaus was properly granted last September. The court session was so odd that the appeals decision quotes several pages of the transcript. more
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) stops novice spammers but not the professionals, says Spammer-X, a retired spammer who has gone into a lot of the details in his book, "Inside the Spam Cartel". The best way to beat SPF is to join it... First, Joe Spammer rents a dedicated spam host in a spammer-friendly location, like China. Next, he registers 100 domain names, and each domain is registered under a fake name and address. Next, DNS entries for each of the hosts are set up, including a valid pointer record (PTR), an MX record and reverse DNS entries for each domain... more
If there were a lifetime achievement award for losing lawsuits for being annoying, Sanford Wallace would be a shoo-in. Fifteen years ago, his junk faxing was a major impetus for the TCPA, the law outlawing junk faxes. Later in the 1990s, his Cyber Promotions set important legal precedents about spam in cases where he lost to Compuserve and AOL. Two years ago, he lost a suit to FTC who sued his Smartbot.net for stuffing spyware onto people's computers. And now, lest anyone think that he's run out of bad ideas, he's back, on the receiving end of a lawsuit from MySpace... more
DNS rebinding attacks are real and can be carried out in the real world. They can penetrate through browsers, Java, Flash, Adobe and can have serious implications for Web 2.0-type applications that pack more code and action onto the client. Such an attack can convert browsers into open network proxies and get around firewalls to access internal documents and services. It requires less than $100 to temporarily hijack 100,000 IP addresses for sending spam and defrauding pay-per-click advertisers. Everyone is at risk and relying on network firewalls is simply not enough. In a paper released by Stanford Security Lab, "Protecting Browsers from DNS Rebinding Attacks," authors Collin Jackson, Adam Barth, Andrew Bortz, Weidong Shao, and Dan Boneh provide ample detail about the nature of this attack as well as strong defenses that can be put in place in order to help protect modern browsers. more
This is an issue of some concern and should be watched carefully: phishers are now trying to get passwords of domain registrants (domain owners). Currently, correspondents inform me that GoDaddy is the target, but there's no reason to think the phishers won't expand to other registrars. Normally, phishers go after bank accounts or other financial information, or sometimes the online accounts of users so that they may send spam. It's not known precisely why phishers are after domain registration information, but the possibilities are chilling... more
I believe this ruling represents the first time that a CAN-SPAM plaintiff has been ordered to pay attorneys' fees and costs to a defendant. As a result, it's a leading example that courts can and do grow tired of bogus anti-marketing lawsuits, and perhaps it will serve as an expensive warning to CAN-SPAM plaintiffs to ensure the merits of their lawsuit. Gordon is an uber anti-spam plaintiff, leading countless CAN-SPAM lawsuits. As the court describes, Gordon runs a "spam business"--basically, a for-profit plaintiff litigation shop to go after spammers (the court also calls it a "litigation factory")... more
According to the majority of the testimony at this month's "Spam Summit," held by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the state of the fight against spam is pretty much the same as it has been for the last several years. The two days of presentations can largely be boiled down to the following bullets: Spam volumes continue to increase, being driven by the growth of "botnets"... Oh, and the spam wars are a lot less exciting than they used to be. Case in point: unlike last time, there were no fist-fights at this year's shindig. more
The following speech was prepared with the intention of using portions of it during the FTC Spam Summit, but CAUCE was not given the opportunity to participate due to time constraints... "I am here today to question. Yesterday we heard how the tenor of the discussion about spam became more mature. How, in the period of time that has elapsed since the last summit, things have developed as an industry. That may be true, but I question if the discussion at hand here this week is truly a big tent effort. I see few anti-spammers here..." more
News breaking out today is that Google has acquired GrandCentral for something around $50 million. GrandCentral is a service that gives you one phone number that can ring multiple numbers, provide one common voicemail - and all sorts of the other features (see "howitworks" for a list of features)... So will we ultimately see voicemail inside of Gmail? One would assume that we will eventually see integration with GoogleTalk... more
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