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The Viagra two step
Online scammers have found a new way to skirt anti-spam filters, this time by making use of Adobe Flash files hosted on free websites.…
Directi strikes back
A company that provides a controversial service to domain name registrars says it is severing ties with Estdomains amid complaints that the Eastern European company makes it too easy to register sites that are used by spammers and scammers.…
And now a word for our illegal online pharmacy sponsor
Note: Officials at LogicBoxes and Directi take strong exception to the reports discussed in this story. Their objections are detailed in this follow-up story.…
Hands off our inboxes
Two in five Brits are worried that free webmail comes at the expense of privacy because firms are scanning their messages in order to serve up targeted ads.…
Time to evolve, aardvarks
The use by spammers of dictionary attacks means those whose email address begins with a less common first character are liable to get less spam.…
A new low
With a sick email malware campaign, pond dwelling scumbags are claiming to have kidnapped the children of would-be targets of infection.…
Zombie farmer suspects sent to the pen
A Brazilian man who allegedly sold access to a huge network of compromised PCs has been charged with computer hacking offences in the US.…
Address harvesting all too easy
Apple has inadvertently made it easy for spammers to create a database of MobileMe email addresses.…
From the penthouse to the Big House
One of the world's most prolific spammers has been sentenced to nearly four years in prison and ordered to forfeit more than $708,000 in income for blasting out tens of millions of unwanted emails.…
'Your friend has paid us to kill you...'
You know how it is - things are a bit quiet in the internet cafes of Lagos, people have sussed MARIAM ABACHA doesn't really have $30,000,000 (THIRTY MILLION DOLLARS) in gold bullion looted from Saddam Hussein's personal vault, and so it looks like it's time to up the email scam ante.…
One minute behind bars for every junk mail
A New Yorker was jailed for 30 months on Tuesday after being convicted for spamming 1.2 million AOL members with junk mail.…
D'oh!
Turkish hackers have taken advantage of an email address that appeared in The Simpsons to recruit marks onto the Kimya botnet.…
Workshop foreman in junk mail hell
Receiving a few hundred spam messages a day is bad enough, but spare a thought for an unfortunate Orange user who's the target of a server-straining 44,000 junk mail missives every 24 hours.…
(Un)happy Talking
Citizens of the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific have been left without a functioning email systems following a denial of service attack on the country's sole ISP.…
China mostly to blame, but so is Google
Almost half the websites pushing malware are hosted by just 10 networks, according to a new report that adds new support to the growing argument that a relatively few number of actors are responsible for most of the net-based threats.…
Junk mail menace canned
Self-styled former spam king Scott Richter has been ordered to pay MySpace $6m over allegations he blitzed users of the social networking website with junk mail messages sent from hijacked accounts.…
Router bricking risk
A security attack that damages embedded systems beyond repair was demonstrated for the first time in London on Wednesday.…
Poked full of Viagra
Social networking sites have become the new front in the war against spam, according to security watchers.…
'Spamford' Wallace hauled over the coals
MySpace has won a $230 million anti-spam judgment against notorious spammer Sanford Wallace and his partner Walter Rines. US District Judge Audrey Collins made the order - reckoned to be the largest ever in an anti-spam case - after the duo failed to appear in court.…
Many unhappy returns
Spam celebrates its 30th birthday on Saturday (3 May).…
Serial nuisance fails to defend case
MySpace has won a lawsuit against notorious spammer Sanford (Spamford) Wallace. The social networking website gained a default judgment against Wallace after he failed to turn over documents or appear in court, CNet reports.…
'Word on the street' says Hotmail downed too
One of the biggest spam block lists on the internet suffered an embarrassing technical cock-up today which blocked emails from some servers at web security monitoring firm MessageLabs and at some ISPs for about five hours.…
Junk mailers set up CAPTCHA-busting sweatshops in India
The growing abuse of webmail services to send spam has led anti-spam services to throttle messages from Gmail and Yahoo!…
MySpamBook
Spammers have found a fertile new marketplace on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.…
Washington state cracks down
The alleged supplier of some of the net's most hated malware titles has been sued by Washington state's attorney general.…
Aims too high to please
Finding fewer emails in your AT&T spam folder? It may be a mixed blessing.…
Al Capone of junk mail heading for the big house
Notorious spammer Robert Soloway faces an extended spell behind bars after pleading guilty to fraud and tax evasion charges last Friday.…
Semi-automated attack or chain-mail gang
Why should miscreants bother to develop cutting edge programming techniques when they can pay $3 to somebody to set up spam-ready webmail accounts on their behalf? Evidence has emerged that people as well as malware are being used to defeat CAPTCHAs, challenge-response systems that are often used to stop the automatic creation of webmail accounts by spammers.…
South Sea junk mail mutiny
Pitcairn Island, the final South Sea island refuge of the Bounty mutineers, relays more spam per capita than any other nation. But with an estimated population of 48, perhaps it's not that surprising.…
Articles of bad faith?
Google has removed Privila sites from its index after the firm was caught attempting to hoodwink the search engine giant.…
Junk bazaar
Porn peddlers and spammers are upping their assault on Google Groups. Many links on the discussion group site link to porn aggregators, some of which redirect to malware sites pushing Trojan horse malware (such as VirusHeat) disguised as video codecs.…
Diary of the Dead
Six botnets are responsible for 85 per cent of all spam, according to an analysis by net security firm Marshal.…
Poker faced fraud
Email fraudsters are increasingly targeting customers of online casinos with phishing attacks. A wave of assaults against punters betting in casinos run from Antigua and the Dutch Antilles shows that attackers are extending their range beyond targets such as online banks and eBay.…
Fresh fruit for rotting vegetables
Spammers, fresh from the success of cracking the Windows Live captcha used by Hotmail, have broken the equivalent system at Gmail.…
17-strong hacking network clubbed
Canadian police have arrested 17 people suspected of running a huge botnet of compromised PCs. Up to one million computers in various countries were allegedly under the control of the suspects, who range in ages from 17 to 26. All but one are male, UPI reports.…
Old skool spam suspect taken in
Japanese police have arrested a "prolific spammer" who allegedly bombarded inboxes with hundreds of millions of messages punting internet gambling and dating sites.…
El Gordo ladrones
Spanish police have arrested ten Nigerians suspected of running a spam-fuelled lottery scam that raked in €19,000 ($28,000) in illicit earnings over three months.…
Spammers'Holy Grail
Spammers are using a sophisticated piece of software that can create thousands of Windows Live email addresses by cracking the protections designed to prevent the large-scale creation of fraudulent accounts.…
When 'free' isn't free
An online advertiser that falsely claimed consumers had won free prizes has agreed to pay a $200,000 penalty to the Federal Trade Commission, which says the outfit failed to disclose that people had to spend money first.…
Feeling phished?
Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button was designed to save web searchers time by automatically opening the first page of a query. It turns out the feature, and similar ones from other search engines, are increasingly helping junk mailers get around anti-spam products.…
The FTC's quest for spam stopping balls
Analysis Anybody who says crime doesn't pay obviously hasn't talked to Sanford Wallace. In just six months' time, the prolific purveyor of spam and spyware engineered a scam on MySpace that netted at least $555,850, according to court documents filed this week.…
Whois also ruled dodgy by North Dakota court
David Ritz, the veteran American spam-fighter, has been hit by $60,000 in fines plus lawyers fees after losing a civil suit that accused him of illegal hacking.…
Pump and dump gang raked in millions
Notorious spammer Alan Ralsky and ten others have been indicted in the US over the alleged use of junk mail to promote stock fraud scams.…
Money wired to Russia and Ukraine
Dutch police have arrested 14 suspects who allegedly lent their bank accounts at ABN Amro to cybercriminals in Russia and Ukraine. After being recruited by the fraudsters, the mules received funds taken from phishing scams, which they transferred overseas.…
Elephant Viagra
Six weeks ago, a small blizzard of spam promoting Ron Paul, the Republican underdog running for US president, touched off a lot of head scratching. Had politics finally stooped to a place where candidates would resort to such a reviled means of communication?…
Acrobat Reader to display 'message from our sponsor'
Despite my ma always saying ‘if you knew your times tables as well as your adverts’, people today still can’t escape advertising and the problem’s set to get even worse. Yahoo! has signed up with Adobe to incorporate targeted adverts into PDF documents.…
Stealth botnet responsible for huge spam surge
A copycat spam gang has launched an effort to compromise PCs that rivals the botnet created by the infamous Storm Worm Gang.…
Penis pill outrage
A blog on a site promoting Al Gore's climate change documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, has been hacked by penis pill-promoting spammers.…
Collateral damage
Email phishing attacks tarnish the reputations of targeted firms, according to a new UK survey. Two in five UK adults (42 per cent) quizzed feel that their trust in a brand would be "greatly reduced" if they received a phishing email purporting to represent it.…
Spammers feel lucky
Advanced features in Google's search engine are being used by spammers to disguise the URLs of spamvertised sites. Hackers have been using Google search functions to hunt for vulnerabilities. Now their peers in the junk mail business are getting into the act, Symantec reports.…