Confronted with a large number of reports of Dropbox-associated email addresses being targeted by spammers, the cloud storage company brought in “outside experts” to probe the issue earlier this month.Those experts have now concluded their investigation and identified the exact cause behind this entire fiasco.
If your junk mail folder seems smaller as of late, there's good reason for that. Computer security experts collaborated to take down Grum, the world's third largest botnet, which they say was serving up 18 percent of spam around the globe by way of 18 billion spam messages every 24 hours. A few more victories like that and it may become easier to buy fake Rolex the old fashioned by -- by seedy looking individuals wearing trench coats.
Two security issues have been identified in McAfee's SaaS Total Protection anti-malware software suite, one of which could allow an attacker to misuse an ActiveX control to execute code and turn affected PCs into spam servers. The other vulnerability involves a misuse of McAfee's "rumor" technology to allow an attacker to use an affected machine as an "open relay," which could also be used to send spam. Fixes for both are coming.
Many people on Wednesday received an email claiming to be from the venerable New York Times. It requested them to reconsider their recent decision to “cancel your home delivery subscription.” But after being contacted by a number of puzzled people regarding the email, the paper said it appeared to be spam. However, as it later turned out, the paper had no idea of what was going on.
Security firm Symantec this week announced the results of its November 2011 Intelligence Report, a monthly analysis on the state of security and trending cyber threats. The roller coaster report notes that the number of targeted attacks quadrupled since January (boo!), but the global spam rate in November is not only the lowest all year, but for the past three years as well (yay!).
Don’t click on suspicious links from unknown sources. We know you know, but the rise of link shortening services like bit.ly make it next to impossible to know where you’re being directed half the time, especially on Twitter. Unfortunately, spammers have caught on to the fact (C’mon, it was only a matter of time). Legitimate link shorteners have been doing a good job of eliminating malicious links, but b new report says that a gang of spammers have set up 87 URL shortening sites and are using them to flood inboxes around the world with junk.
Symantec noticed an uptick in social engineering attacks in September, a trend the security outfit attributes to a rise in polymorphic malware in email, the company said in its recently released "Symantec Intelligence Report: September 2011." Spam levels dipped slightly in September to 74.8 percent of all email, a decrease of 1.1 percent from August, but a "deluge of malicious email-borne malware" more than made up for the drop in spam.
Yahoo is denying accusations that it knowingly and willingly censored email messages related to "Occupy Wall Street" protests, a leaderless non-violent resistance movement upset over the disparity of wealth and power in the U.S. Protestors accused Yahoo of foul play when their emails containing a link to the organization's website were flagged as suspicious and blocked from being sent.
Sanford Wallace, the man who calls himself the Spam King, surrendered himself to the FBI on Thursday during a trip to Las Vegas. Now he'll face the throne of justice for being (allegedly, of course) a general pain in the backside of email users everywhere, and in particular to Facebook, in which he already owes $711 million in civil damages from a suit dating back to 2009.
Thirty-four-year-old Tien Truong Nguyen is finding out the hard way that you shouldn't do the crime if you can't do the time. U.S. District Judge Morrison England Jr. ruled that Nguyen was in fact guilty of scamming more than 38,000 victims by designing copycat banking websites intended to dupe users into inputting their personal information, and ordered him to serve 12 years in prison.
-
Technology
Entertainment
-
Music
-
Creative
Sport & Auto
- About Future
- Jobs
- News
- Advertising
- Digital Future
- Privacy Policy
- Cookies Policy
- Terms & Conditions
- Shop
- Investor Relations
- Contact Future
© Future US, Inc. 4000 Shoreline Court, Suite 400, South San Francisco, California, 94080. All Rights Reserved.