Freeze on anti-spam campaign
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A campaign by Lycos Europe to target spam-related websites appears to have been put on hold. Earlier this week the company released a screensaver that bombarded the sites with data to try to bump up the running costs of the websites.
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A variation of spam is sliding past spam filters into inboxes, but it&#39;s not likely the new trick will be successful much longer, a security expert said Thursday.The spam messages, urging recipients to buy a stock, have an MP3 audio attachment but no subject line or text, said John Graham-Cumming, an anti-spam consultant and researcher who is based in France.&quot;I think this is the first time we&#39;ve seen this,&quot; said Graham-Cumming, who tracks new kinds of spam.The audio messages, which vary in length, contain a warbled, robotic voice with a British accent encouraging people to invest in Exit Only, a company that owns a Web site, www.Text4Cars.com, which connects vehicle buyers and sells through SMS (Short Message Service). Exit Only says it&#39;s not involved in sending the spam.Graham-Cumming said the spam falls into the category of &quot;pump and dump&quot; fraud. Scammers invest in a company with a low-priced stock and send out a round of spam, causing gullible investors to buy it and increase the stock&#39;s price.As the stock price peaks, fraudsters cash out, which causes the stock to precipitously fall, burning other investors. The practice is illegal.Exit Only was trading around $0.41 on Thursday. Not much detail is available on the company, but it issued a news release on Tuesday heralding the launch of its Text4Cars service in the Los Angeles area. The news release said the company hoped to be fully launched in the United States in early 2008.Exit Only&#39;s CEO, David Dion, said he learned of the spam around Wednesday morning. He has since notified the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and said his company has nothing to do with the spam run.&quot;I am very distraught by this,&quot; Dion said.Dion said only about 100 shares have been traded so far, so the scam hasn&#39;t been successful.The messages are more annoying than harmful. But there are a variety of defenses e-mail administrators and security companies can employ to stop it, Graham-Cumming said.Spam filters can be configured to cull messages with MP3s, since most companies don&#39;t have a business use for the file type, Graham-Cumming said. Administrators can also change their e-mail server settings to slow down the speed at which they receive messages with MP3 attachments, he said.That method has been proven to frustrate spammers, who typically shut down the connection if the spam isn&#39;t going through quickly enough since the delay consumes valuable bandwidth, Graham-Cumming said.These spam messages are also relatively large -- around 100KB -- compared to other spam, which may be another reason this kind of spam may not be around for long. Spam messages with larger file sizes require more bandwidth to send, meaning spammers can&#39;t send out high volumes of messages, Graham-Cumming said.&quot;Honestly, my prediction is this is going to be around for a while and disappear,&quot; he said.E-mail security company MessageLabs said it was catching about 10,000 spam messages with MP3s per hour since late Wednesday night.
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America Online (AOL) has cut spam on its service for the first time in five years. AOL says it has slashed the annoying email advertisements in 2004 by 75 per cent.
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A law banning spam delivered to wireless devices goes into effect next month. But is it necessary? By Thomas Claburn. In less than a month, it will be illegal to send commercial messages to any Internet domain
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Having shown up at wired.com of all places just the other day, a story claiming that Paul's campaign staff or his supporters have been (email) spamming to get the message out. This is pure bullshit, and I'll explain why.
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The controversial attempt to attack spammers by bombarding their web sites with traffic from thousands of individual PCs is over. After a week of heavy criticism of the company&#39;s plan to launch denial-of-service
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Plus: Most email over holidays will be spam. [News.com Extra]
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Do you have any suggestions for individuals and small businesses to combat spam?
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Get up-to-date information on handling misdirected bounces- those countless spam emails claiming your company's message couldn't be delivered, when you didn't even send one in the first place!
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The increase in spam that arrives with an attached image in order to evade spam filters has caused the amount of bandwidth spam eats to skyrocket.  About 50% of unwanted email is now image spam up from about 2% in September last year, according to Postini, a hosted email security provider.
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Opt-out button in spam used to run exploit
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Spam deluge eclipses virus email threat The number of viruses hitting Irish inboxes has fallen but spam continues to rise, according to figures from IE Internet.â¦
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Can seek compensation, too Microsoft has stopped a man from selling lists of email addresses which were being used for spam. A court has granted a summary judgment against Paul Martin McDonald, stopping him from selling the lists.â¦
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America Online says it will not move forward with deployment of SenderID, the controversial anti-spam protocol being promoted by Microsoft.
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Lycos has apparently been the target of spam attacks following the release of their anti-spam deny of service campaign. The BlogBloke reports on this new happening in the anti-spam wars âItâs payback time!
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As quickly as it came, it left. Lycos Europe&#39;s anti-spam campaign, &quot;Make LOVE Not SPAM,&quot; (see our coverage appears to have been canned, as the screensaver has been pulled from the ISP&#39;s website.
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Spam mail has become one of the biggest problems on the Internet; it consumes precious bandwidth, wastes computer resources, and causes huge financial losses to corporations.