Public Interest Registry announced Wednesday the launch of the DNS Abuse Institute as part of its ongoing efforts to protect Internet users from the threat of DNS Abuse such as malware, botnets, phishing, pharming and spam.
The oracles are screaming. They wave around their yield curves and their poll results and their images of ice and fire. Every headline is a forecast. Every stray observation supports a theory. Something is about to happen. (But when?) Many things are about to happen. (And here’s why!) Nobody is sure they know anything, but everyone is worried that someone knows something. Summer will soon be over, but prediction season has just begun.
In the midst of a raging stream of news-as-prophecy, marketing-as-prophecy, and entertainment-as-prophecy, I’ve found some comfort in a space that’s been operating at a similar pitch for decades, all prediction and promise and clues and theories, but at a slightly lower volume and mostly out of sight: my spam folder.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/style/spam-email.html
One of the largest spam operations in the world has exposed its entire operation to the public, leaking its database of 1.37bn email addresses thanks to a faulty backup.
As well as email addresses, the holy grail of the spam operation, personal information including real names, IP addresses and physical addresses have also been leaked, though on a smaller scale than the email information that makes up the bulk of the dataset.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/06/email-addresses-spam-leak-river-city-media
A US man who sent more than 27 million spam emails to Facebook users has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison.Sanford Wallace, 47, is nicknamed the “Spam King” and last year pleaded guilty to federal charges including fraud and criminal contempt in connection with using electronic mail.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36538541Also see:“Spam King,” who defied nearly $1B in default judgments, sentenced to 2.5 years
A Las Vegas man known as the “Spam King” was sentenced Monday to 2.5 years in federal prison. He pleaded guilty last year to one count of fraud.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/spam-king-who-defied-nearly-1b-in-default-judgments-sentenced-to-2-5-years/
[news release] The latest Kaspersky Lab Spam and Phishing Report has discovered that although the quantity of spam emails has been decreasing, they have become more criminalized. At the same time, the level of malicious mailshots has dramatically increased – Kaspersky Lab products prevented 22,890,956 attempts to infect users via emails with malicious attachments in March 2016, twice the number of attempts reported in February 2016.Since 2012 the level of spam in email traffic has constantly been decreasing. However, the quantity of emails with malicious attachments has increased significantly – in Q1 2016 it was 3.3 times higher than during the same period in 2015. There was also a growing amount of ransomware reported throughout the quarter. This is often propagated through emails with infected attachments – for example Word documents. The main actor on this field in Q1 was the ransomware Trojan Locky, which has been actively distributed via emails in different languages and has targeted at least 114 countries. Locky emails have contained fake information from financial institutions that have deceived users and forced them to open the harmful attachment.Kaspersky Lab’s findings suggest that spam is becoming more popular for fraudsters to target Internet users, because web browsing is becoming safer. Almost all popular web-browser developers have now implemented security and anti-phishing protection tools, making it harder for cybercriminals to propagate their malware through infected web pages.
http://www.kaspersky.com/about/news/spam/2016/Kaspersky-Lab-Reports-Significant-Increase-in-Malicious-Spam-Emails-in-Q1-2016
Spammers are taking advantage of the Ashley Madison hack, IT security company Symantec says.The company’s researchers have observed a surge in spam activity since the breach, with attackers attempting to prey on victims and their partners.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=11504442
People are being sent fewer spam emails than at any time in the past 12 years, according to security firm Symantec.It said that fewer than 50% of emails which it scanned during June were junk – the lowest percentage it had seen in over a decade.The fall suggests that cyber-thieves are looking to other ways to make money from people going online.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33564016
Spammers have settled in on the WhatsApp messaging platform with greater regularity, aided in one locale, by of all things, government regulations.Researchers at AdaptiveMobile yesterday published a report that exposed a number of spam campaigns peddling phony handbags and sunglasses, investment scams, pornography, and more that are moving over the platform, sidestepping SMS in the process.
http://threatpost.com/spammers-take-a-liking-to-whatsapp-mobile-app/110496
Spam, as every user of mobile phones in China is aware to their intense annoyance, is a roaring business in China. Its delivery-men drive through residential neighbourhoods in “text-messaging cars”, with illegal but easy-to-buy gadgetry they use to hijack links between mobile-phone users and nearby communications masts. They then target the numbers they harvest, blasting them with spam text messages before driving away. Mobile-phone users usually see only the wearisome results: another sprinkling of spam messages offering deals on flats, investment advice and dodgy receipts for tax purposes.Chinese mobile-users get more spam text messages than their counterparts almost anywhere else in the world. They received more than 300 billion of them in 2013, or close to one a day for each person using a mobile phone. Users in bigger markets like Beijing and Shanghai receive two a day, or more than 700 annually, accounting for perhaps one-fifth to one-third of all texts. Americans, by comparison, received an estimated 4.5 billion junk messages in 2011, or fewer than 20 per mobile-user for the year — out of a total of more than two trillion text messages sent.
www.economist.com/news/china/21635062-china-flounders-its-efforts-combat-text-messaging-spam-106-ways-annoy
A long trail of spam, dodgy domains and hijacked Internet addresses leads back to a 37-year-old junk email purveyor in San Diego who was the first alleged spammer to have been criminally prosecuted 13 years ago for blasting unsolicited commercial email.Last month, security experts at Cisco blogged about spam samples caught by the company’s SpamCop service, which maintains a blacklist of known spam sources. When companies or Internet service providers learn that their address ranges are listed on spam blacklists, they generally get in touch with the blacklister to determine and remediate the cause for the listing (because usually at that point legitimate customers of the blacklisted company or ISP are having trouble sending email).
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/11/still-spamming-after-all-these-years/