Tag archive: Spam

Email spam has been a problem for even longer than commercial activity has been permitted on the Internet, and thanks to botnet operators, scammers, and outright cybercriminals spam has ballooned to account for the vast majority of all email. Although antispam technologies and filters have improved considerable over the years—and there have been some notable victories, like the takedown of the Rustock botnet last year—email operators and end… Read More

Late Monday, cybersecurity firm Dasient announced that it has been acquired by Twitter, and will be part of its “revenue engineering” team. Dasient specializes in online malware detection. In 2010, the company released the industry's first “anti-malvertising” services, which scans online advertising networks to find malicious ads. The addition of Dasient comes as Twitter gears up to roll out new types of… Read More

Security software is an everyday necessity for most people, especially Windows users, businesses, and enterprises. But one of the ironies of security software is that, once in a while, it turns out to be the source of security problems all by itself. The latest instance involves McAfee's SaaS Total Protection suite, a cloud-based solution designed to provide comprehensive email and and Web filtering along with centralized security… Read More

Earlier this week, Google came under fire for a pay-per-post campaign promoting its Chrome browser. In addition to being hypocritical (Google has made a lot of noise about punishing this type of spammy, page boosting, “thin” content), one sponsored blog post in particular failed to follow Google’s “nofollow” hyperlinking rule. Google dutifully dropped Chrome’s page rank for the next 60 days and in a company statement explained that given its… Read More

After being accused of violating its own sponsored content policy, Google is pointing the finger at a marketing company behind its Chrome browser campaign, Unruly Media. The company, which Google hired, will have to take the blame for the blatant self-promotion. SEO Book first discovered that the phrase “This post is sponsored by Google” returned 400 pages advertising the company. In at least one case, a post failed to follow the “nofollow”… Read More

An email sent by the New York Times to readers asking them to reconsider canceling their subscriptions was only supposed to go out to 300 people, but ended up in the inbox of eight million. The email, sent on Wednesday, should have been sent to a small number of people who had decided to stop having the newspaper delivered to their home. But an employee at the newspaper mistakenly sent it out to millions of people on an email marketing list. Not… Read More

Yahoo was awarded $610 million by a federal district court judge in New York earlier this week in a judgment against spammers who operated a fake Yahoo lottery email scheme. The scheme involved sending emails to people telling them they’d hit the jackpot in a lottery supposedly run by Yahoo. Though the defendants in the case were not named, AP reports that the original lawsuit, which was filed three years ago, alleged that a group of Nigerian… Read More

 Facebook says that the flood of images depicting graphic sex and violence that engulfed many of its users over the past 24 hours was the result of a “coordinated spam attack.” The success of the attack was due to a browser vulnerability, the company said. In addition, a Facebook official tells the BBC that hacktivist group Anonymous, who some have blamed for the attack, was not in any way responsible. A Facebook spokesperson says… Read More

Facebook Messages have come a long way since the site’s origins. What began as a simple, private chat mechanism has evolved into one of the most-used and depended upon inbox clients. Facebook’s mysterious Project Titan announcements last year revolved around the evolution of Messages into a more professional and more chat-interwoven feature, which has its pros and cons. But one element of Messages that managed to elude many was the spam box. If… Read More

According to new information from researchers at Symantec, a group of spammers have created a group of 87 spam-friendly, public URL shortening services and are actively using them to circumvent spam filters on popular sites. Using URL shortening scripts that are free and open source, the spammers are churning spam through the service and the public is also free to create links through the URL shorteners, perhaps an attempt to pass off the links… Read More

LinkedIn users are upset that the company has taken the Facebook approach in regards to online privacy with a recent change to the privacy policy. After providing more privacy settings for the user to alter, the social network automatically opted-in its 100 million users into the social advertising program. LinkedIn informed users of the change with an official blog post and a banner ad that linked to descriptions of the changes as well as a… Read More

One more of the Internet’s bad guys, or spam guys, is in the hands of the law. Sanford Wallace, a known spammer of over 27 million Facebook messages has surrendered on hacking charges. Wallace was actually indicted on July 6th but the announcement wasn’t released until yesterday. Facebook stated on their blog: “A federal grand jury in San Jose indicted Wallace with multiple counts of fraud for sending unwanted messages and Wall posts to people… Read More

As Web filtering and antivirus technologies get most sophisticated at identifying malware and blocking hostile Web sites, spammers and scammers are increasingly turning to individualized email attacks and customized versions of their malware to get their payloads past protection systems—and make potential victims more likely to click. According to Cisco's second-quarter Global Threat Report (PDF), the company identified almost… Read More

A new service called Shortmail launched recently and it’s being heralded as the answer to our supposed email nightmares. It’s been likened to a Twitter for email and requires users to keep their messages to 500-characters and does not allow you to use attachments. As gimmicky as it might initially sound, the idea is clearly taking off and just secured itself $750,000 in Series A fundraising. Shortmail argues that email as we know it is poorly… Read More

Perhaps popularity has its downsides. Google+, thanks to a huge influx of new members, actually ran out of disk space over the weekend resulting in a flood of spam to users. Vic Gundotra, Google's SVP for social networking, explained the problem with a post on his Google+ profile. “For about 80 minutes we ran out of disk space on the service that keeps track of notifications,” he wrote. “Hence our system continued to try sending… Read More