Terry Zink proposes a Two-Point spam filtering program on his anti-spam blog. The system would use a large pool of end-users to classify messages as spam/non-spam and then feed those classifications into a Bayesian filter to train it to recognize spam. He claims the system would be fast, but suffer from inaccuracy. Seems to me [...]
Recent reports by google estimate 40 million internet-connected computer could be infected with Trojans. Prolexic says that over half the world’s zombies are in Asia.
40 million x 0.5 = 20 million zombies in Asia
Sound about right?
This may be easily explained as a consequense of population, since China and India alone account for 20% of the [...]
The Ferris daily post pointed me to the Symantec site to see more zombie deconstruction. Take a look at Armado Hidalgo’s post
TAB: So, what is the purpose of all this renewed activity, you ask? The primary goal is to create a botnet that sends tons and tons of penny stock spam (but because the botnet [...]
Our detection center recently caught the following spam.
We see large amounts of it in our classification repository, which means it was quite successful.
The spam isn’t sophisticated at all, and we’ve blocked it based on multiple patterns. It probably posed little challenged to decent anti-spam solutions.
Pay attention to interesting Hebrew spam, mainly in your private email boxes.
First post, and I thought I would chip in with some links to other blogs I read occassionally. I saw a presentation by Mykko Hypponen of F-Secure, who gave the keynote at Virus Bulletin 2006 in Montreal. Amazing presentation, and funny too. Who knew viruses, or Finns were that funny. So you can get to [...]
We all know there are many different technologies to fight spam. the other day I came across a company who develops and uses Challenge Response in its most traditional way. I sent a fully legitimate email (I do not consider myself as a spammer) to one of the company’s employees, and in return got an [...]
There’s been a lot of press lately on the “Storm Worm” which started late last week (Jan 18 to be exact). Commtouch has been part of the media conversation on this, so there’s not too much to add from a blog standpoint, except that the attack is huge, is still going on, and most AVs are missing it.
Here’s [...]
It seems the fake newsletter our spam detection team noticed last week is officially the latest spam tactic. Richi Jennings wrote about why this tactic may be working on his blog:
“The idea is to take advantage of people’s abhorrence of false positives. Spam filters will be carefully programmed, trained, or whitelisted to let legitimate newsletters [...]
David Robinson of Norman Data Defense Systems UK said it best in his recent IT-Observer article:
“The need for protection software that is less dependant on signature-based techniques is seen as paramount. Whilst it is sound business practice to adopt a multi layered approach to malware protection, it is also a sound policy to ensure that [...]
If you thought catching malware writers was the hard part, think again. This Wall Street Journal article shows that prosecution and sentencing are so difficult that most cybercrooks get of will little more than a slap on the wrist.
-Thanks to Haggai for this article
