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According to Symantec’s April “State of Spam” report (PDF), junk e-mail accounted for 81 percent of all e-mail sent in March, with occasional spikes as high as 88 percent. The vast majority of the flood (around 23 percent) flows out of the US, with Russia in second place at approximately 6 percent.

Spam content is surprisingly diversified, as the chart below indicates, though Symantec’s categorization is a tad arbitrary. “Product” refers to e-mails advertising general goods and services, but not pharmaceuticals or herbal enhancements—these are categorized under “Health.”

“Adult” is self-explanatory, but Symantec separates “Scams” (Nigerian 419, pyramid schemes) “Financial” (credit reports, refinancing opportunities), and “Fraud” (brand spoofing) into their own separate categories. One thing, however, is certain. If you’ve got a need, an activity, or a burning desire to refinance your house, the spam industry is here to serve you.

When they aren’t bombarding us with e-mails advertising a discount on Lesbian Feminazi Space Goats VII, the collective spam industry is busy attempting to make friends. Social networks are a current hot topic in the digital realm, and spammers want their piece of the pie. Symantec tracked two major spam campaigns against social web sites in March and expects that number to grow in future months. The best way to avoid such attacks, the company advises, is not to respond to friend invites from people you don’t know.

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Source: Ars Technica

Spam originating from Google’s Gmail domain doubled last month, indicating that spammers are still defeating the CAPTCHA , the distorted text used as a security test to thwart mass registration of e-mail accounts and other Web site abuse.

Gmail spam went from 1.3 percent of all spam e-mail to 2.6 percent in February, according to data released by e-mail security vendor MessageLabs on Monday. The new statistics are another nail in the coffin for CAPTCHA, which stands for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart.

Google is the latest free Web mail provider to be victimized by spammers’ efforts to create software to solve the codes, or at times, also employ people to solve the codes en masse.

“It’s only a matter of time before [CAPTCHAs] are comprehensively defeated,” said Paul Wood, senior analyst at MessageLabs.

Last month, security vendor Websense ascertained that spammers were using two hosts to crack Gmail’s CAPTCHAs. The method appeared to be successful only 20 percent of the time. But if the procedure is repeated thousands of times, many new accounts can be generated and used to send spam. Most of the messages use links and images to advertise adult entertainment sites, Wood said

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Source: Info World via Yahoo! News

Six botnets are responsible for 85 per cent of all spam, according to an analysis by net security firm Marshal.

The Srizbi botnet is reckoned to be the largest single source of spam - accounting for 39 per cent of junk mail messages – followed by the Rustock botnet, responsible for 21 per cent of the spam clogging up users’ inboxes.

Spam emanating from the Mega-D botnet, which Marshal reckons was the leading source of junk mail in early February, was temporarily stemmed after control servers were taken out in mid-February. The estimated 35,000 zombie clients associated with the Mega-D botnet were infected with the Ozdok Trojan.

After 10 days of inactivity, spam from compromised hosts began flowing again earlier this week, after hackers re-established control. Despite the break in transmission, Spam-D accounted for an estimated 11 per cent of junk mail hitting Marshal’s spam traps during February.

Other active spam botnets include Hacktool.Spammer (AKA Spam-Mailer) and botnets associated with the Pushdo (AKA Pandex) family of malware.

The notorious Storm botnet, estimated to include about 85,000 compromised hosts, is thought to be responsible for only three per cent of spam.

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Source: The Register

The battle against spam continues, with many of the trends that started in 2007 dying out in favor of older techniques that worked, according to a new report from Symantec Messaging and Web Security.

One new trend, though, has been Europe surpassing the U.S. as the primary source of spam.

For the longest time, it had been botnet-infected (define) computers in the U.S. that pumped out the bulk of offers for mortgages and herbal Viagra, which comprised a staggering 78.5 percent of all e-mail floating around on the Internet according to Symantec.

During the last half of 2007 that changed, however. In August, the U.S. accounted for 46.5 percent of all spam, compared to 30.6 percent for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). By January, EMEA produced 44 percent while the U.S. was down to 35.1 percent.

Doug Bowers, Executive Editor in Symantec’s Antispam Engineering group and editor of the report, attributes the change to a two-part condition in Europe: the growth in broadband and a lack of installed security software.

“The more prevalent broadband connections become, then the more potential targets you have to become botnets,” he told InternetNews.com. “We’ve seen the adoption of security software lagging as broadband has exploded in Europe.”

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Source: Internet News

Industry experts believe that attacks over services such as Skype are moving from proof of concept to becoming a real threat

In what looks like a highly developed piece of irony, hackers have proven that Voice over internet Telephony (VoIP) accounts are prone to the nuisance of voice spam - by attacking the university where the co-author of the protocol that VoIP runs on is professor of computer science.

Henning Schulzrinne, co-author of the session initiation protocol (SIP) that is used by all the major VoIP services except Skype, believes the attack (which left unsolicited marketing messages on multiple phone extensions at Columbia University) might have been targeted at him, but could also have been a result of the institution not having a stringent firewall policy in place. Either way, he - like many in the computer and internet security industries - now believes VoIP is the next big target for spammers.

“It’s just too attractive for them to pass up,” he says. “Spam filters are getting so good now that it’s rarer for spam to actually be read, it’s nearly always filtered out and most people know to ignore it if it isn’t. The phone, though, is something you instinctively pick [up] and you would always go to pick up messages. It’s a very tempting new medium for spammers, particularly if they can find a way of building up the huge networks necessary to automatically distribute voice spam as they have done with email spam.”

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Source: The Guardian

Spammers have had to change tactics as the filters have gotten smarter at blocking traditional text-based spam, spam sent as image attachments — such as GIFs or JPEGs — and even the latest rage, spam hidden inside attachments created with Adobe Systems Inc.’s ubiquitous Portable Document Format, or PDF.

Spam is now being served in audio form. The latest in unwanted electronic communication is an MP3 file that began landing in inboxes around the world last week. It features a spooky, synthesized Darth-Vader-sounding female voice touting the stock of Exit Only Inc., traded on the lower-standard Pink Sheets.

“Hello, this is an investor alert!” the halting, at times unintelligible voice says. Her pitch invokes the growth prospects of Exit Only, a Web site operator that runs Text4Cars.com, which links auto buyers and sellers via text messages.

Computer security Relevant Products/Services researchers say the audio blasts — MP3 files with misleading names attached to spam e-mails — reflect spammers’ need to slip their messages through increasingly sophisticated e-mail filters.

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Source: News Factor

France is hoping to shut down spammers more quickly through a system that makes it easier for users to notify ISPs (Internet service providers) when unsolicited e-mails are coming from their network.

The French government funded the development of an open-source toolbar for Microsoft Corp.’s Outlook and Mozilla Corp.’s Thunderbird e-mail programs that people can use to report suspected spam, said John Graham-Cumming, an Englishman who built the software for the project, called Signal Spam.

“From the French perspective, spam is like any other criminal activity that is affecting the French people,” Graham-Cumming said.

Most users today simply delete spam email from their inboxes, in part because they don’t have a simple tool for reporting spam to their ISP. The SignalSpam project aims to provide them with such a tool.

When users receive spam messages, the toolbar provides an easy way for them to forward the message to a central database. The messages are then sent to the ISP whose network they originated from, and the ISP decides whether to shut down the account of the sender, Graham-Cumming said.

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Source: PC World via Yahoo! News

Miscreants pushing Viagra and malware are making new progress infiltrating Google indexes, a feat that’s considered the Holy Grail among spammers.

Google, which by some estimates carries out 60 per cent of the world’s searches, goes to great lengths to filter naughty sites from its results. The proliferation of rogue sites that have made an end run around the controls is giving rise to conspiracy theories that Google has been hacked.

“If a smart spammer has really found a way to game the Google search results with spoofed or cloaked sites, and Google still doesn’t have a fix, this could be a major issue with the underlying infrastructure of the entire Google operation,” according to this post on The Google Watchdog blog. “This is the first time that I’ve ever been worried that Google’s own index has been hacked.”

The site notes that specific search terms return large number of domain names ending in .cn. When clicked, they redirect the user to a different address that attempts to install malware. The rogue sites catch the attention of Google search bots by appropriating keywords and other content from legitimate sites. Amazingly enough, the rogue sites manage to secure a higher ranking than the legitimate ones, according to Google Watchdog.

A major hack of the algorithm used to rank and filter sites is intriguing, but it’s also unlikely. Despite Google’s noble efforts to sanitize results, rogue sites have been slipping through for years, and Google Watchdog provides no data to suggest there is anything new afoot.

According to Roger Thompson, a Exploit Prevention Labs researcher who specializes in finding innocuous search terms that return toxic results, the perpetrators are mainly succeeding through sheer brute force. Spammers register thousands of domain names and create thousands of landing pages for each one and then embed thousands of legitimate sounding keywords in each one. Then they lie in wait. Once a page is entered into the Google index, the miscreants enter code into the page that causes it to redirect to a site that installs malware.

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Source: The Register

Computers inside pharmaceutical giant Pfizer’s network are spamming the internet with e-mails touting the company’s flagship erectile-enhancement drug Viagra, along with ads for knockoff Rolexes and shady junk stocks.

But the e-mails are not part of Pfizer’s official marketing efforts.

Pfizer’s computers appear to have been infected with malware that has transformed them into zombie computers sending spam at the behest of a hacker. Oddly enough, they are spamming the public’s inboxes with ads for the company’s own product.

“There is a disaster inside this company, and they don’t know it,” says Rick Wesson, CEO of Support Intelligence — a small San Francisco-based security company that alerted Wired News to the problem.

Wesson says Pfizer computers have been spamming inboxes for the last six months and that he’s kept 600 spam messages sent from company computers. He says 138 different Pfizer IP addresses have been blacklisted by various groups, but adds that he can’t estimate the number of infected machines without more information or installing monitoring equipment on the edge of Pfizer’s networks.

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Source: Wired

Notorious spammer Christopher “Rizler” Smith was sentenced to 30 years in prison by a federal judge on Wednesday.

US District Judge Michael Davis called Smith a “drug kingpin” before throwing the book at him. Smith was convicted on charges of conspiracy, illegal distribution of drugs, money laundering and operating a continuing criminal enterprise.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that the judge was somewhat hesitant about the length of the prison term recommended by sentencing guidelines, but in the end, decided it was reasonable.

Smith hasn’t exactly been a darling to the court system. In addition to fleeing justice abroad, he didn’t exactly make pals with the prosecution by issuing a death threat to the children of a witness in the case.

Smith was nabbed in 2005 after stepping off a flight from the Dominican Republic, where he had been operating after a federal judge shut down his Minneapolis-based spamming operation. He had fled there, allegedly using a false passport, just four days after appearing in federal court to face charges. While in the Dominican Republic, he even withdrew money that had been frozen by a previous court order.

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Source: The Register

A New York man who was snared in federal investigators’ sting operation targeting senders of junk email pleaded guilty to spamming 1.2m AOL subscribers.

Adam Vitale, 26, of Brooklyn, pleaded guilty in federal court in Manhattan to violations of the CAN-Spam Act. He faces 11 years in prison and a fine of $250,000 at his sentencing hearing, which is scheduled for September 13, according to a press release (PDF) provided by the US Attorney in Manhattan, who prosecuted the case.

Vitale’s undoing came after he and an accomplice sent instant messages to a confidential informant bragging of their prowess in sending massive amounts of spam that couldn’t be traced to their true origins. The pair also boasted of their ability to defeat the specific spam filtering software AOL deploys over its network.

The informant proposed Vitale and his accomplice, Todd Moeller, advertise an undisclosed product in return for the spammers getting a 50-per cent cut of the proceeds, prosecutors said. During a one-week span in late August of 2005, the men sent junk messages to about 1.2 million AOL users.

The pair employed relays and altered the header information in the spam they sent, both common techniques for concealing the true origins of junk mail.

Moeller has yet to enter a plea. Attempts to reach him were unsuccessful.

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Source: The Register

Four more Internet service providers will start charging banks, e-commerce sites and other large e-mail senders for guaranteed delivery. In deals expected to be announced Thursday, Goodmail Systems Inc. is expanding its CertifiedEmail program to Comcast Corp., Cox Communications Inc., Time Warner Cable Inc.’s Road Runner and Verizon Communications Inc. Yahoo Inc. and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL became inaugural participants last year.

Individuals, businesses and organizations will be able to continue sending messages for free, but they risk finding those missives caught in increasingly aggressive spam filters. With Goodmail, a company can pay a quarter of a penny per message to bypass those filters and reach inboxes directly. Recipients see a blue seal verifying that the message is legitimate; senders get confirmations and can resend messages lost in transit.

Non-profit groups can participate, too, at about a tenth of the commercial rates. At least half of the fees go to the service provider, Goodmail Chief Executive Richard Gingras said.

For now, Goodmail will approve only companies and organizations in existence for at least a year, to thwart fly-by-night operations. Those that have prompted too many spam complaints will be disqualified. The service is designed to certify credit card statements, e-commerce receipts and other communications with existing customers. It does potentially give a boost to larger corporations and groups that can afford the charge, but Gingras says their messages are the ones most likely to be mischaracterized as junk.

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Source: The Daily Item

Back in 2004, Bill Gates made a prediction that within two years spam would no longer be a problem. That was at the World Economic Forum. Now, at the Authentication and Online Trust Summit 2007 held last week, Microsoft has had to admit that 98% of messages going to Hotmail accounts are spam.

Microsoft has admitted that up to 98 per cent of messages sent to Hotmail addresses are spam.

The company’s own research found that between 40 and 98 per cent of messages sent to users of Hotmail, now being rebranded as Windows Live Hotmail, are unsolicited or fraudulent in nature.

The findings will disappoint Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who predicted at the 2004 Davos World Economic Forum that spam would be “eliminated” within two years.

Instead, quarter-on-quarter spam levels hit a two-year high of 76.3 per cent in the first three months of 2007, according to MessageLabs.

The size of the Hotmail spam problem came to light when Microsoft unveiled the results of a study into the use of its Sender ID spam-filtering technology at this week’s Authentication and Online Trust Summit in Boston.

Ryan Hamlin, technology care and safety general manager at Microsoft, said at the summit: “Spam and phishing attacks continue to undermine user productivity, trust and online confidence, but Sender ID is providing tangible benefits.”

Sender ID now blocks more than 20 million unsolicited emails every day, adding up to a total of 3.8 billion.

Microsoft claims that Sender ID has enjoyed a three-fold increase in adoption over the past year, and now protects over eight million domains.

Microsoft opened up Sender ID last year with a royalty-free licence in an attempt to increase its market share.

Source: VNUNet

E-mail scammers will be left with “nowhere to hide” following moves to tighten up European consumer protection, according to the U.K. government.

By establishing a network of national enforcement bodies with powers to work together across the European Union, the Consumer Protection Cooperation regulation, which comes into force this month, will help tackle rogue traders who prey on consumers across European borders.

Previously, wide differences in the structures of law enforcement agencies and the methods they use have hampered prosecutions. The new regulations require enforcement authorities to help each other by exchanging information and cooperating on cross-border cases.

The U.K.’s coordinating enforcement body will be the Office of Fair Trading.

The new measures will tackle cross-border scams, including those using e-mail and those that offer phony prizes, distribute misleading advertising and use pressure selling. Also targeted are phone scams based in other EU countries and rogue traders of time-share and vacation club properties.

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Source: News.com