Web-based attack poses as greeting card, tries three exploits June 28, 2007 — A new round of greeting-card spam that draws users to visit attack sites relies on a sophisticated multipronged, multiexploit … via Computerworld
Read More… (From Email Spam News)

My original plan when doing the series on sender authentication (which is not yet finished) was to write a series of uninterrupted posts. I didn’t want to break my mometum by diverting to another topic.

However, as serendipity would have it, the start of my series coincided exactly with the start of a new spam outbreak. I’ve been wanting to comment on it but at the same time wanted to maintain my discipline by staying on topic. My desire to do both were contradictory, and ultimately, my desire to comment on the latest spam outbreak has won over.

On our networks, we are seeing more traffic in the past three weeks than we have ever seen in the history of our network. And, it’s not by a small margin, it’s by a very large margin. In fact, Wednesday, June 27, we saw twice as many messages as the daily average for April and May. I’ve been commenting to others around the office that we are blocking more spam per day than McDonald’s sells hamburgers.

I don’t know what’s behind this latest outbreak. Perhaps Robert Soloway sold his zombie network to spammers who have woken up his sleeping giant; perhaps the virus outbreak we saw a couple of months ago was lying in stasis, just waiting to rear its ugly head. In any event, the spam breakout to the upside (which started in June) is definitely outside of the statistical parameters of standard deviation and we are, indeed, in a new blizzard of spam.

This reminds me of last year when we saw the same thing… at around the same time.

Read More… (From Terry Zink’s Anti-spam Blog)

‘Talktech Telemedia expects gains of 300% in next 5 trading sessions!’. MX Lab has intercepted the first stock spam messages on Wednesday that don’t have content or images attached to the email but instead a full PDF of the German Stock Insider.
Read More… (From Email Spam News)

Pesky phishers impersonate keepers of Justice

The US Department of Justice has issued a warning to the public urging them not to respond to a bogus email that purports to be from the DoJ.
Read More… (From The Register - Security: Spam)

Pesky phishers impersonate keepers of JusticeThe US Department of Justice has issued a warning to the public urging them not to respond to a bogus email that purports to be from the DoJ.Original post by Dougal and a wordpress plugin by Elliott
Read More… (From The War on Spam)

Got an email last night that tugged at my worthy cause heartstrings. But I don’t know if this is legitimate because it came to me through an unsolicited email–some might call it spam it sounds too real to be … via ALLIED by Jeneane Sessum
Read More… (From Email Spam News)

“There’s not a single server, there are multiple exploits [and the e-mail] has no attachments. This will be very difficult to detect.”

Web-based attack poses as greeting card, tries three exploits June 28, 2007 — A new round of greeting card spam that draws users to attack sites relies on a sophisticated multi-pronged, multi-exploit strike … via ComputerWorld
Read More… (From Email Spam News)

A quick Google News search turned up these items of interest in the world of international spam. via Blog for Antispam and Content Filteri…
Read More… (From Email Spam News)

This week’s WSJ.com column (subscription only) is about mobile viruses — or the lack ofthem. First off I talked about CommWarrior, the virus any of youwith a Symbian phone and Bluetooth switched no will have been pingedwith anywhere in the…
Read More… (From loose wire blog)

A nearly forgotten footnote in the history of spam: ISP Adelphia was added to my spam-tracking list in 1998 due to excessive porn spam to the sexual abuse recovery newsgroups, coupled with Adelphia management’s indifference to the problem. They dropped off my radar when I stopped monitoring Usenet spam many years ago.

Today, they dropped back on when a U.S. Judge ordered Adelphia founder, John Rigas, and his son Timothy Rigas to begin serving long prison sentences of 15 and 20 years respectively for their roles in one of the largest corporate frauds in history.

According to prosecutors, the Rigas’ illegally concealed nearly $2.3B in debt from Adelphia stockholders.

More on this story from CNN and the Houston Chronicle.
Read More… (From The Spam Diaries)

“We’ve seen other techniques and technologies rise up to make up”

THE common spam technique of sending unwanted email pitches as image attachments rather than text is on the decline. via NEWS.com.au
Read More… (From Email Spam News)

I first wrote about Scoble, then the Microsoft Blogger Enfant Terrible back in 2004 or something. Maybe even earlier. But he was the breath of fresh air the company needed at the time. Now the ‘markets are naked conversations’ thing…
Read More… (From loose wire blog)