Spam

Plentyoffish Media Inc. Fined $48,000 for Alleged Violation of Canada’s Anti-Spam Law

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) today announced that Plentyoffish Media Inc. has paid $48,000 as part of an undertaking for an alleged violation of Canada's anti-spam legislation. more

Call Spoofing: Congress Calls on FCC, Russia and China Answer

It is both amusing and dismaying. Last year, Congress passed Ray Baum's Act telling the FCC to do something about those pesky incoming foreign SPAM calls and texts with the fake callerIDs. The FCC a couple of weeks ago responded with a chest thumping Report and Order claiming it has "extraterritorial jurisdiction" that is does not have, and promising it will do something. Don't hold your breath on that one. more

Searching for Truth in DKIM: Part 3 of 5

Last year, MAAWG published a white paper titled Trust in Email Begins with Authentication [PDF], which explains that authentication (DKIM) is “[a] safe means of identifying a participant-such as an author or an operator of an email service” while reputation is a “means of assessing their trustworthiness.”

Spam Is Never Timely Nor Relevant

One of the ongoing recommendations to improve deliverability is to send email that is timely and relevant to the recipient. The idea being that if you send mail a recipient wants, they're more likely to interact with it in a way that signals to the mailbox provider that the message is wanted. The baseline for that, at least whenever I've talked about timely and relevant, is that the recipient asked for mail from you in the first place. more

Addressing Search Engine, Website, and Provider Accountability for Illicit Online Drug Sales

Garth Bruen reports on a paper published by the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics of Boston University School of Law authored by Bryan A. Liang and Tim Mackey titled, "Searching for Safety: Addressing Search Engine, Website, and Provider Accountability for Illicit Online Drug Sales". From the paper: "Online sales of pharmaceuticals are a rapidly growing phenomenon. Yet despite the dangers of purchasing drugs over the Internet, sales continue to escalate. These dangers include patient harm from fake or tainted drugs, lack of clinical oversight, and financial loss. Patients, and in particular vulnerable groups such as seniors and minorities, purchase drugs online either naïvely or because they lack the ability to access medications from other sources due to price considerations. Unfortunately, high risk online drug sources dominate the Internet, and virtually no accountability exists to ensure safety of purchased products."  more

Stopping the Flow of Online Illegal Pharmaceuticals

Reading through Brian Kreb's blog last week, he has an interesting post up on the White House's call upon the industry on how to formulate a plan to stem the flow of illegal pharmaceuticals...It is unclear to me whether or not the goal of this initiative is to stem the flow of online crime in general or to reduce the flow of illegal pharmaceuticals flowing into the United States (since presumably this cuts into the profits of large pharmaceutical companies... more

Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coalition) Joins M3AAWG to Reduce Hosting Industry Abuse

The Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coalition) has joined the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M³AAWG) to continue efforts on developing best practices for hosting and cloud service companies as well as sharing other information that will protect end-users. more

Commentary on the FTC Spam Summit

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

Spam Arrest’s Sender Agreement Fails Because Email Marketer’s Employees Lacked Authority

People hate receiving spam, but most people stopped obsessing about spam a decade ago or more. In the interim, anti-spam filters have improved dramatically. Still, some anti-spammers hate spam so passionately -- or, perhaps, hope to put a little coin in their pockets -- that we still see a steady stream of lawsuits against email marketers. For the most part, those lawsuits don't win; in the past half-decade, repeat anti-spam plaintiffs have rarely won in court. more

Yet Another Unfortunate CAN SPAM Case

The case Melaleuca v. Hansen has been moving slowly through Idaho federal court since 2007. On Sept 30 the court decided in favor of the defendants. Although the outcome is probably correct, the court's decision perpetuates the misreading of CAN SPAM from the infamous Gordon case that makes it in practice impossible to win a CAN SPAM case in the 9th Circuit. more

‘Spam King’ Sanford Wallace Sentenced to 2.5 Years In Prison

The 47 year old Las Vegas man known as the "Spam King" has been sentenced to 2.5 years in federal prison for sending over half-million spam messages to Facebook users resulting in over 27 million spam messages sent through social networking company's servers. He pleaded guilty last year to one count of fraud. more

The Story of Conficker and the Industry Response

On November 2, 2009, Microsoft released its seventh edition of the Security and Intelligence Report (SIR). The SIR provides an in-depth perspective on the changing threat landscape including software vulnerability disclosures and exploits, malicious software (malware), and potentially unwanted software. Using data derived from hundreds of millions of Windows computers, and some of the busiest online services on the Internet, this report also provides a detailed analysis of the threat landscape and the changing face of threats and countermeasures and includes updated data on privacy and breach notifications. The following is an excerpt from the SIR, pp 29-32, about the Conficker worm and the industry response that showed an incredible amount of collaboration across vendors. more

Why DNS Blacklists Don’t Work for IPv6 Networks

All effective spam filters use DNS blacklists or blocklists, known as DNSBLs. They provide an efficient way to publish sets of IP addresses from which the publisher recommends that mail systems not accept mail. A well run DNSBL can be very effective; the Spamhaus lists typically catch upwards of 80% of incoming spam with a very low error rate. DNSBLs take advantage of the existing DNS infrastructure to do fast, efficient lookups. A DNS lookup typically goes through three computers... more

Researchers Use Social Graphs to Detect Spammers, Attackers

A project named S-GPS or Spammer Global Positioning System, by Microsoft researchers uses spammer identification rather than spam identification to identify zombie-based spammers. more

Online Drug Traffic and Registrar Policy

Last month I published an article called "What's Driving Spam and Domain Fraud? Illicit Drug Traffic" which explained how the many of the troublesome online crime issues are related to the online sale of narcotics and dodgy pharmaceuticals. Since this article was published we have witnessed one of the largest international law enforcement efforts against online drug traffic (Operation Pangea II)... more