Recently, our service provider customers have become increasingly vocal about the problem of outbound spam, the spam generated within their own networks. We recently sponsored a survey with Osterman Research asking Web hosting companies, ISPs, and email managed service providers how they manage outbound spam.
As you can see from our beautiful chart – service providers [...]
Zombies, compromised accounts, and malicious users are just some of the friendly neighborhood spammers on service providers’ networks. Every piece of spam going in AND getting out is your problem, long before it becomes someone else’s. Commtouch recently commissioned a survey by Osterman Research to determine the state of the industry with regard to outbound [...]
Being the number one name on the Web and also offering so many useful services naturally attracts misuse by the shadier side of the Internet. We’ve written in the past about the abuse of google docs and spreadsheets. And in our Q1 trend report we discussed the high percentage of spam emails with forged sender [...]
During Q1 we continued to see abuse of the Gmail name by spammers who use fake Gmail addresses in their emails. The Q1 2010 trend report analyzes the percentage of spam that actually does emanate from Gmail.
Other highlights from the Q1 Trend Report include:
Spam levels averaged 83% of all email traffic throughout the quarter
An average [...]
A recent article in the New Scientist entitled “To beat spam, turn its own weapons against it”, describes the work done by a team of academics to find a more effective way to filter spam. The team, from ICSI Berkeley and UC San Diego, have come up with a way of analyzing the spam email messages sent by [...]
During the fourth quarter of 2009, the Mal-Bredo A virus continued to circulate the world for the second quarter in a row. Cybercriminals morphed its packaging from attachments that appeared to be from internationally known package delivery companies to attachments that appeared to be from Facebook, the popular social networking site.
Throughout the quarter, the number [...]
Open source leverages the creativity of thousands whilst relying on the management of a limited number of contributors to maintain and debug the software. While open source creates true positive results such as Linux, a glitch in the most widely-used free Anti-Spam software – SpamAssassin – resulted in false positives and rejection of legitimate mail. [...]
In September, security company Symantec reported a 45% decrease in phishing attacks compared to the previous month. Several security companies rang into the debate with data both supporting and contradicting the claim. You can check out responses and similar studies from SPAMFighter, MarkMonitor and IBM.
Commtouch Labs examined phishing attack data from seven Commtouch Security Alliance [...]
There are a variety of URL filtering solutions out there. As a result, you find yourself evaluating these solutions both on their business and technology infrastructures. In our experience of providing URL filtering solutions, we’ve came across all sorts of methodologies to evaluate the underlying technology. Since there is no standard to test these solutions, [...]
The most important relationships can be hard to maintain but are worth every effort.
Then there are the relationships you don’t want to maintain at all – but once you find yourself in them, you realize you can’t get out.
In a recent study conducted for the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), of which Commtouch is a [...]
