Popular myNBC Site Used By Spammers

By Alan Harten

myNBC.com is being used by spammers and the infection could possibly spread to all the blogs on the site, according to Pacific Coast Information Systems Ltd. (PCIS) who spotted spam and tracked back to the myNBC page.
The worry is that, as a household name, people may not be concerned about clicking on links on the [...]

SPIT anti-SPAM For VoIP

By Alan Harten

SPIT is the unfortunate acronym for Spam over Internet Telephony, a relatively new addition to the world of unwanted male enhancement creams and millionaire making schemes from Africa.
Most spam arrives by email but increasingly spam is being generated in VoIP communications, and the more VoIP grows, the more attention it gets from “We need you [...]

IP 200.63.42.136 in massive blog spam run

By Brian Turner

IP 200.63.42.136 has been really hammering out the blog spam over the past week.
The reach is quite surprising - it’s taking it’s toll out on popular blogs but also little used blogs we monitor.
According to a WHOIS check, it appears 200.63.42.136 is assigned to Uruguay:

OrgName: Latin American and Caribbean IP address Regional [...]

CNN.com Daily Top 10 email spam

By Brian Turner

The news alerts email spam continues to develop, with CNN again the target of the latest wave of email spam.
Titled CNN.com Daily Top 10, the email contains a table of supposed top ten CNN stories plus top 10 CNN video links.
However, none of the story links are to CNN, but instead attacks pages.
If CNN [...]

Auto Identification Card email spam

By Brian Turner

Another common subject line in email spam at present: Auto Identification Card.
The email comes with the following message:

The Auto Identification Card document that you requested is attached
Please do not reply to this email
If you have questions please call your contact at Allmerica Financial

And comes attached with a malware-laden zip file.
Of course, this is fake email [...]

Airlines targeted in new malware threat

By Brian Turner

A string of new email spam this morning, all claiming to be payment receipts from US airlines - provided as a malware-laden zip file.
The following airlines were used in the headers in the ones we got this morning:
- Virgin America
- Delta Air Lines
- AirTran Airways
- Continental Airlines
- Northwest Airlines
- JetBlue Airways
Likely more airline names are [...]

msnbc.com: BREAKING NEWS spam

By Brian Turner

Hot on the heels of the CNN Alerts: my custom alert email spam comes a new variant: msnbc.com: BREAKING NEWS spam.
The emails follow the same format as the CNN spam, with the link to the supposed featured story going to an unrelated third-party website which attempts to attack the users PC.
The site tries to download [...]

CNN Alerts: My Custom Alert email spam

By Brian Turner

A new form of email spam has been deluging the web over the past week.
The emails are all titled “CNN Alerts: My Custom Alert email spam”, and are filled with links to relevant CNN newsletter links.
However, the emails are spoofed with the main link to the “Full story” actually linking to an unrelated attack websites, [...]

194.8.75.x on big blog spam run

By Brian Turner

Various IP’s in the C class (/24) IP block 194.8.75.214 are running like the clappers with blog spam today.
The blog spam is being posted in high volume, and the spam all links to pages on free webhosting accounts, advertising typical high-paying affiliate keyword links.
Unusually for this sort of activity, the IP addresses used are from [...]

Reduce Spam: Block Asia

By Brian Turner

As post spam continues to increase on UGC sites, blocking Asia could prove one of the simplest anti-spam options
Post spam is a time consuming annoyance for any webmaster running User Generate Content (UGC) sites.
The more popular and the larger the number of UGC sites you run, the more it becomes a very real management [...]

PineApp Release App To Battle Zombie Networks

By Rohan Parker

According to a statement released by PineApp, the company has created a new application, titled ZombiCop, which will combat the increasing amount of spam delivered from zombie computers.
This new method of spam has proved almost immune to the current anti-virus and anti-botnet software, however ISPs should now stand a better chance with the creation [...]

Happy Birthday …. SPAM

By Alan Harten

A birthday not too many people around the world will be celebrating on Saturday 3rd May is the 30th anniversary of the birth of that not so beautiful child SPAM.
Back on that day in 1978 nearly 400 employees of a company called Arpanet all received the same annoying email from DEC or Digital Equipment [...]

my-investment.com on spam run

By Brian Turner

A lot of forum spam promoting my-investment.com at present.
The user signs up, then simply copy/pastes the same reply into a string of threads, ie:

Hi everyone,
Thank you very much! Very helpful interestingly to know.

They then post an advert for my-investment.com.
Spammer details:
email address: joe.ncls@gmail.com
IP: 99.135.8.33
One to add to your spam filters. :)

Fortinet wins Deep Throat Porn filter check

By Dave Nixon

The contentious ‘Deep Throat Fight Club’ test of porn filters held at this week’s RSA security show has affirmed a winner. According to organisers Untangle, the best performer was Fortinet.
Fortinet detected 97.7 percent on the main blocking porn test, only a whisker ahead of rivals Watchguard (97.3 percent), Websense (97.0 percent), SonicWall (96.1 percent), [...]

Arbor Networks says 2% of internet traffic “raw sewage”

By Janine de Blois

For the last 18 months Arbor Networks has been gathering data from ISPs using Peakflow SP systems in order to evaluate internet traffic and attack characteristics over time.
Chief Research Officer, Danny McPherson says, “We’ve currently got 68 discrete ISPs participating, covering over 100k interfaces on nearly 1300 routers, and peak inter-domain traffic rates [...]

April Fool’s Day not so funny for Storm victims

By Isabelle Chaize

This April Fool’s Day saw a new offensive launched by the now infamous Storm worm.
The attack makes use of greetings cards sent by email to trick users into downloading and launching the Trojan.
Users are told, on receipt of a spam message, that they have been sent an online April Fool’s Day card.
When they cloick on [...]

Google Calendar used to deliver spam

By Isabelle Chaize

According to Trend Micro, the Google Calendar tool is being used by spammers to get round spam filters, which is the first time they have seen such a mechanism being used.
Trend Micro have been tracking spam in all its different forms over the last 12 months, and have discovered this new method for delivering [...]

Spam hits 200 million cell phones in China

By Janine de Blois

China Mobile issued an apology to it’s customers after almost half the country’s cell phone users received unsolicited commercial text messages.
Seven online advertising firms took advantage of a management loophole that allowed them to send unsolicited SMS messages to over 200 million users.
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos called it a SMS [...]

HSBC, Natwest and CitiBank top three phishing targets

By Isabelle Chaize

HSBC, Natwest and CitiBank were the brands most targeted by phishers last month.
That’s according to a report on internet security by McAfee’s AVERT labs that also investigated the most popular methods of phishing and the most common types of malware.
It found that 40% of phishing scams were targeted at HSBC, followed by CitiBank which was [...]

85% of spam comes from six botnets-February report from TRACE

By Janine de Blois

TRACE’s (Threat Research and Content Engineering) spam traps show February’s spam output as the six main botnets vie for position.
In the beginning of February the Mega-D botnet was responsible for 32% of all spam, with male enhancement pills being its main use.
It has since dropped to fourth position as Srizbi has [...]

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