United States Cited As Top Spam Nation

The United States and China remained atop the list of countries spewing spam for the third quarter, U.K.-based security vendor Sophos said Monday, and the former had the dubious honor of extending its lead in the battle for spam share. more»

Reviving Concerns Over Internet Control

Starting next week, about 1,200 diplomats and technology ministers will gather at a hotel in the outskirts of Athens to resume a debate that has often pitted the Bush administration and a handful of its Western allies against Brazil, India, China and African countries. Officially, the inaugural meeting of the United Nations' Internet Governance Forum is designed to explore topics like free speech, security, spam and multilingualism... more»

Microsoft Opens Access to Its SenderID Spec

Microsoft has made the Sender ID framework specification for email authentication available to users at no cost and with the guarantee that it will never take legal action against them. more»

Judge Rejects Domain Name Suspension of Spamhaus

A federal judge presiding over a spam dispute rejected a marketing company's request to suspend the domain name of Spamhaus, an anti-spam group that ignored an $11.7 million judgment against it.

...The Spamhaus Project did not bother defending itself and refused to recognize Kocoras' $11.7 million judgment against it, saying the court had no jurisdiction over the U.K.-based group. So e360 Insight asked that the judge order the spamhaus.org domain suspended. more»

Spamhaus Agrees to Fight US Court Case

Spamhaus has switched legal tack and decide to appeal an $11.7m judgment against it by a US court obtained by a firm it labelled a spammer. ...In a default ruling made by a US court last month, Spamhaus was ordered to pay $11.7m in compensation to e360 Insight, pull the organisation's listing and post a notice stating that it was wrong to say e360 Insight was involved in sending junk mail. Spamhaus did not defend the case and the ruling was made in its absence. more»

Spamhaus Case Could Test ICANN

ICANN has agreed that only registrars can suspend individual domain names. It believes that there is no way it could enforce the proposed court order. But as the organization responsible for the Internet's top-level domains, ICANN does have the authority to accredit registrars like Tucows, based in Toronto.

Princeton University's Edward Felten believes it is possible that ICANN could be forced to comply with this type of court order.  more»

EU Trademark Officials Rejected Hormel's Spam Trademark

The producer of the canned pork product Spam has lost a bid to claim the word as a trademark for unsolicited e-mails. EU trademark officials rejected Hormel Foods Corp.'s appeal, dealing the company another setback in its struggle to prevent software companies from using the word "spam" in their products, a practice it argued was diluting its brand name. more»

Email Security an Ongoing Battle, Focus on Manageable Risk Instead

The IT industry will never eradicate security threats to email systems and organizations should take a holistic approach to securing their communication systems to the level where they believe risk is at a manageable state, according to panelists at this week's Inbox email conference in San Jose...

At a packed panel session on email accreditation and reputation, the panelist told audience members that reputation services have taken off rapidly. These services profile the sender's behavior to determine the likelihood that a message is legitimate or spam. The sender's reputation is determined based on multiple criteria then assigned to categories, or lists. more»

Antispam Effort Backfires Forcing Company to Shut Down

Anti-spam firm Blue Security is to scrap its spam-fighting effort after deciding its escalating conflict with a renegade spammer was placing the internet as a whole in jeopardy.

Blue Security established a 'Do Not Intrude Registry' (akin to the Do Not Call Registry for telemarketing) with around 450,000 members. Participants downloaded a small tool, called Blue Frog, which systematically floods the websites of spammers with opt-out messages. Depending on your point of view, this initiative can either be viewed as community action or vigilantism. more»

Governments Need to Pass More Anti-Spam Laws, Says OECD

Governments need to pass more anti-spam laws, give law enforcement agencies more resources and work better across borders to combat unsolicited e-mail clogging up inboxes, an international economic group said Wednesday.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an international forum of 30 countries established to promote economic growth and trade, also called on private industry to cooperate with government spam-fighting efforts and to help governments establish nationwide spam education campaigns. In addition, countries need to pass laws that provide "clear directions" on rules regarding bulk e-mail, the group said. more»

Microsoft to Push Adoption of Sender ID at Email Summit

Microsoft Wednesday plans to promote adoption of the Sender ID email specification and introduce a new program for helping ISPs protect the integrity of email messages at the Email Authentication Summit in Chicago.

Citing research figures from MarkMonitor, Craig Spiezle, director of technology care and safety for Microsoft, said that Sender ID use among Fortune 500 companies has increased from 7% in July 2005 to 21%. About 32% of all e-mail sent is Sender ID compliant, added Spiezle, who plans to speak about the adoption of Sender ID at the summit.  more»

MIT Spam Conference on Phishing as the Worst Spam Problem

At the fourth annual MIT Spam Conference held in Boston Tuesday, speakers said that while the volume of spam ebbs and flows, the nature of unwanted email is steadily becoming more dangerous...

Fresh from an IETF meeting last week, Sendmail's Chief Science Officer Eric Allman spoke about the progress being made with DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), a sender-authentication proposal from Yahoo and Cisco that's wending its way through the standards body, and how it can be used to fight phishing. more»

Antispam Confab Looks Beyond Filters

The fight against spam, phishing and e-mail fraud should focus on economic incentives and aiding law enforcement, according to attendees at a conference examining the problem this week.

Speakers at MIT's 2006 Spam Conference were notably cognizant of the recent proposals of white lists and AOL's Goodmail, a pay per e-mail service offering preferential treatment in e-mail delivery for marketers. It is also one year since the implementation of Can-Spam, the federal law that sets e-mail marketing standards and makes it less complicated for law enforcement to go after John Doe spammers. more»

New Code of Practice to Combat Spam

Australia has cracked down on junk mail with an industry code for tackling spam.

Under the new code, internet service providers (ISPs) will bear some of the responsibility for helping fight spam. Service providers must offer spam-filtering options to their subscribers and advise them on how to best deal with and report the nuisance mail. ISPs will also be compelled to impose "reasonable" limits on subscribers' sending email. more»

Coalition Recommends Tools to Combat Phishing

ISPs and e-commerce sites can employ more tools to combat phishing scams, including "white lists" of legitimate Websites and using false identification information to scam the scammers, according to a report released Thursday.

The report, released by a coalition of consumer groups, technology vendors, financial services organizations and law enforcement agencies, also calls on Internet companies to step up their consumer education efforts. more»