Spam

Oklahoma Anti-Spammer Loses Big in Court

In November, Mark Mumma, who runs a little design firm at webguy.com, lost an appeal in the Fourth Federal Circuit. He'd filed suit against cruise.com and their parent Omega World Travel under CAN SPAM and an Oklahoma anti-spam law. Omega countersued for defamation. The court threw out Mumma's case, and allowed part of the defamation case to proceed. At first blush, this looks like a big win for spammers. more

Reply-All Creates a DDoS Attack?

One can read in an Associated Press article that the US State Department have their email system bogged down due to too many people use the Reply-All function in their email client. IT Departments have asked people to not use Reply-All and also threaten with disciplinary action. To me, that is the wrong path forward. more

Solving the Spam Problem

Last week, I read Ed Falk's blog post where he commented on a possible solution to the spam problem. He himself was commenting on a study done by researchers out of the University of California where they discovered that credit card transactions for stuff bought in spamvertisements are handled by three companies: one in Azerbaijan, one in Denmark and one in the West Indies. Presumably, if security experts and law enforcement went after these companies, spammers would have their financial supply cut off. No money = no incentive to spam. more

Fight Phishing With Branding

Phishing, stealing personal information by impersonating a trusted organization, is a big problem that's not going away. Most antiphishing techniques to date have attempted to recognize fake e-mail and fake web sites, but this hasn't been particularly effective. A more promising approach is to brand the real mail and real web sites. more

Do Spammers Change Their Tactics Based on Recipient Verification? Yes, They Do

Or, to be more precise, it sure looks like they do. I wrote on another post on a publicly available spam tool, and I mentioned that I came across a page that allowed people to verify whether or not an email address is actually live. The question naturally arises: do spammers clean up their email contact lists based upon whether or not the address is legitimate? Spammers would have an incentive to do this... Do we actually observe spammers changing their sending patterns? I believe that we have evidence that they do. more

US Court Levies $15 Million Fine Against Spammer

Earlier this year, the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs, the US Federal Trade Commission, and the Australian CMA broke up a large fake drug spam ring known as Herbal Kings, run by New Zealander Lance Atkinson. The NZ government fined him NZ$108,000 (about US$80,000) which, while a substantial fine, seemed pretty small compared to the amount of money he must have made. But today, at the FTC's request a US judge fined Atkinson US$15.5 million, and got his US accomplice Jody Smith to turn over $800,000, including over $500,000 in an Israeli bank. more

Over a Billion Email Addresses of Major Spam Operation Exposed via Unprotected Backups

A spamming group called River City Media (RCM) has had its database of 1.4 billion records leaked. This was revealed today by MacKeeper Security Researcher, Chris Vickery in cooperation with CSO Online and Spamhaus. more

Facts & Tips for Consumers About the Epsilon Breach

There has been a lot of talk, blogging, tweeting and press reportage about the Epsilon breach, but little in the way of concrete information to consumers as to where they stand, if their personal information (PII) such as their name and email address has been lost to criminals. The CAUCE Board of Directors have developed the following FAQ that provides facts and guidance for those affected by the breach. more

Email’s Not Dead, Neither is Spam

Over the past few years, we have seen a plethora of over-hyped articles in the popular press and blogosphere crowing wrong-headedly about how 'email is dead'. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter, new and as-yet unproven technologies are the supposed death-knell for our old reliable friend, e-mail. I wrote about the rumours of email's death being exaggerated back in 2007 in response to such inanity. Since then, we've seen such a cornucopia of silliness of the 'Such & such is killing email' variety that Mark Brownlow compiled a bunch of articles, and their rebuttals at his excellent site... more

BMW Goes After BMW.cat

In one of the first (if not the first) UDRP cases for .cat, the auto giant BMW appears to have filed a WIPO case over the BMW.cat domain name. Other prospective new TLD operators have tried to suggest in ICANN meetings that these new TLDs do not cause problems with cybersquatting or defensive registrations... Obviously, given the above WIPO case, that statement is false. more

Are Botnets Really the Spam Problem?

Over the last few years I've been hearing some people claim that botnets are the real spam problem and that if you can find a sender then they're not a problem. Much of this is said in the context of hating on Canada for passing a law that requires senders actually get permission before sending email. Botnets are a problem online. They're a problem in a lot of ways. They can be used for denial of service attacks. They can be used to mine bitcoins... more

Coordinating Attack Response at Internet Scale

How do we help coordinate responses to attacks against Internet infrastructure and users? Internet technology has to scale or it won't survive for long as the network of networks grows ever larger. But it's not just the technology, it's also the people, processes and organisations involved in developing, operating and evolving the Internet that need ways to scale up to the challenges that a growing global network can create. more

DMARC: New Email Authentication Protocol

A consortium of companies including Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Paypal have announced that they were collaborating and coming up with a new protocol known as DMARC -- the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. What is DMARC? more

CAN-SPAM Plaintiff Slammed With $800K Attorney Fee Award - Asis Internet v. Optin Global

A federal court granted a request for attorney's fees (in the amount of $806,978.84) against prolific CAN-SPAM plaintiff Asis Internet. I thought things were looking good for Asis - whose lawsuits have generated substantial blog fodder - when it recently obtained a 2.5 million dollar default judgment in a spam case. more

Compromised Accounts - Are Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail Seeing an Increase in Spam Sent Out?

Last week, I commented on the the Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo username and password leak. The question we now ask is whether or not we are seeing an increased amount of spam from those services. On another blog, they were commenting that various experts were claiming that this is the case. more