Soloway Court Case Reveals the Sophisticated World of Online Fraud

Testimony received during the sentencing hearing for notorious spammer Robert Alan Soloway has offered an inside look at the big business of online fraud. Although anti-spam efforts implemented by ISPs have deterred many small-time spammers, sophisticated players remain active and they have developed tools to make their efforts easier. From the stand on Monday, investigators revealed some of the techniques that Soloway allegedly used to send out massive amounts of email. After the government seized Soloway's computer servers, investigators found files with as many as 10 million email addresses on each server along with Dark Mailer software on each server. more»

Notorious Spam King Scheduled to be Sentenced on Monday by the U.S. District Court

Notorious spammer Robert Alan Soloway is scheduled to be sentenced on Monday by the U.S. District Court in Seattle after pleading guilty to single counts of mail fraud, e-mail fraud, and tax evasion. The long list of individuals testifying in federal court for the sentencing of the so-called 'King of Spam' has resulted in an unusual two-day hearing which began on Friday. Soloway is the second person to be convicted of criminal spamming under the 2004 "Can-Spam" law. more»

Gmail Collaborate With eBay and PayPal to Fight Phishing

Google has recently announced that it has succeeded in working with eBay and PayPal, also owned by eBay, to fight phishing by using authentication standards DomainKeys and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). According to Google, this is the main tool used by Gamil to keep spam out of its inboxes. However, Brad Taylor, Google's Software said in a blog post, that "these systems can only be effective when high volume senders consistently use them to sign their mail -- if they're sending some mail without signatures, it's harder to tell whether it's phishing or not. Well, I'm happy to announce today that by working with eBay and PayPal, we're one step closer to stopping all phishing messages in their tracks." Google hopes this will set a good example for other organizations to follow suit and work towards making email trustworthy. more»

Cloud Computing Services Increasingly Used by Spammers to Host Their Junk

The spam attacks which occurred this weekend and claimed to have come from Microsoft, are reported to have used Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) servers. Brian Krebs of Washington Post's Security Fix has investigated this issue -- from the report: "...to spammers and scammers accustomed to paying for all kinds of Web services with stolen credit cards, Amazon's service is another place to host their junk, said Suresh Ramasubramanian, head of anti-spam operations at Outblaze, a Hong Kong-based outfit that has listed all of Amazon's EC2 Internet space on its spam blacklists..." Also reported: "Anti-spam group Spamhaus also has flagged a large swath of Amazon's EC2 Internet address space on its "policy blocklist," which subscribers use to block e-mail from dynamic Internet addresses..." more»

Antispam Group, MAAWG, Outlines Defenses Against Botnet-Induced Spam

A major antispam organization is pushing a set of new best practices for ISPs to stop increasing volumes of spam from botnets. The guidelines, from the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), were drawn up at a meeting in Germany last week and deal with forwarded email and email that is sent from dynamic IP addresses. From MAAWG's news release issued yesterday... more»

New Report Found Over Half of Malware-Infected Websites Based on Chinese Network Blocks

The majority of the Internets malware-infected websites are located on Chinese networks, finds a new report released today by StopBadware.org, the university-based research initiative aimed at protecting users from dangerous software. The report also identifies the 10 network blocks that contain the largest number of badware sites. Six of the 10 are located in China. more»

Anti-Spam Law Violates Free Speech Protections, Says Virginia Court Appeal

A lawyer for Jeremy Jaynes, a man once considered one of the world's most prolific email spammers, has urged the Virginia Supreme Court to strike down a state anti-spam law, arguing it violates free speech protections under the First Amendment. more»

ICANN Responds to "Worst Spam Offenders" and the Recent Knujon Report

ICANN has made an official announcement following earlier reports which suggested domain names registered by most spam sites where linked to a handful of domain registrars. From the ICANN Annoucement: "ICANN has sent enforcement notices and notices of concern to certain registrars, including those reported this week as being the registrars for the majority of websites advertised in spam emails... more»

Most Spam Sites Linked to Just About 10 Domain Name Registrars

New research suggests that more than three quarters of all websites advertised through spam are clustered at just 10 domain name registrars. The data comes from millions of junk messages collected over the past year by Knujon ("no junk" spelled backwards and pronounced "new john"), an anti-spam outfit that works by convincing registrars to dismantle spam sites. more»

Spammers Handed Record $230 Million Anti-Spam Judgment

A federal judge in Los Angeles has awarded MySpace close to $230 million in its lawsuit against "Spam King" Sanford Wallace and his business partner Walter Rines. Judge Audrey B. Collins of United States District Court in the Central District of California ruled in MySpace's favor on Monday after the two men failed to show up in court, according to MySpace... While many spammers have been designated "Spam King," Wallace earned the title back in the late 1990s as a result of spam messages sent by his company Cyber Promotions. more»

Serious Gmail Flaw: Security Group Demonstrates Sending Unlimited Spam Using Google's Own Servers

Researchers at Information Security Research Team (INSERT) have dissevered a serious flaw in Google's Gmail service. The group demonstrates how anyone with no special Internet access privileges other than being able to connect to SMTP (TCP port 25) and HTTP (TCP port 80) servers is able to exploit a single Gmail account in order to be granted nearly unrestricted access to Google's massive whitelisted SMTP relay infrastructure. Read more from the report... more»

Significant Chunk of IP Address Space Hijacked by Notorious Mass Emailing Company

Internet address space long ago issued to San Francisco Bay Packet Radio, an organization that was involved way back in the 1970s in testing ARPANET, a predecessor to the global commercial Internet that we all use today. That organization was given the rights to do whatever it wanted with 134.17.0.0/16 address block. That entire swath of Internet space is now registered to an entity in Westminster, Colo., called SF Bay Packet Radio LLC, but except for a similar name, this company has no relation to San Francisco Bay Packet Radio... ? more»

Spam Turns 30

Thirty years ago next week, Gary Thuerk, a marketer at the now-defunct computer firm Digital Equipment Corporation, sent an email to 393 users of Arpanet, the US government-run computer network that eventually became the internet. It was the first spam email ever. That commercial message, sent on 3 May 1978, drew a swift and negative reaction. more»

15 Years Ago Joel Furr Referred to Unsolicited Bulk Messages as 'Spam'

Spam continues to blight email exactly 15 years after the term was first coined and almost 30 years since the first spam message was sent. The term is thought to have been coined by Joel Furr, an administrator on the net discussion system Usenet, to refer to unsolicited bulk messages. Mr Furr first used the term to refer to bulk postings on discussion boards on the internet but in the years to come spam became associated with email. Today, more than 90% of all email is spam, according to anti-spam body Spamhaus. more»

Escalating Attacks on U.S. Military Networks Linked to China

Numerous hacks from the Far East sure look like concerted attacks against U.S. military installations, but nobody's saying for sure... A Wall Street Journal article March 12 described how military networks are increasingly the targets of hackers. The targets are not limited to actual Department of Defense networks, but can also include defense industries and think tanks. more»