No, not really – but a recent outbreak seems to use no technique at all to get recipients to click on a link to a malware-hosting site. The emails (samples below) have no subject (other than RE: or FW:), no text telling you why you should click on the link, no hidden URLs behind on-screen [...]
The Commtouch detection center has confirmed that an email I received yesterday on one of my private accounts was part of a mass phishing attack aimed at Blogger (and Google) users. In this case I suspected it was a phishing email before opening it since I received it via an email address that is not [...]
According to Ultrascan, scammers’ income increased from $6.3 billion in 2008 to $9.3 billion in 2009.
February is Scam Awareness Month – Scamnesty 2010 – under the auspices of the UK Office of Fair Trading. UK Consumers can forward their scam mail and SMSs, and even deliver old-fashioned paper letters to Scamnesty Bins located around the [...]
Next time you have some Viagra to sell or malware to spread, forget those passé, brute-force directory attacks. You don’t have to generate email addresses with all those alphanumeric characters or “typical” names and email structures, such as jane.smith@FORTUNE500COMPANY.com. And you especially don’t have to take days to deliver them slooowly and methodically so corporate [...]
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 [...]
Open source leverages the creativity of thousands while it relies upon 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 famous free Anti-Spam – SpamAssassin – resulted false positives and rejection of legitimate mail. SpamAssassin [...]
Several of us recently returned from various hosting-oriented events, including Parallels EMEA Roadshow and cPanel in Texas. We talked to lots of people there that have developed their own homegrown solutions for email filtering, often based on open source; here are the top 10 reasons we heard for keeping their existing email filtering systems:
1. They [...]
Amir Lev, Commtouch CTO and president, is now blogging over at ComputerWorld. Each week, he’ll explore new and interesting messaging and Web security trends and topics including:
Spammer tricks
Spam legality around the world
Cultural aspects of spam
Cultural aspects of web filtering
Mac OS malware
“419″ advance-fee fraud
In his first post, Spam Culture, part I: China, Amir examines how cultural [...]
In last week’s blog post, I discussed how open source messaging security solutions are not really “free,” as many would believe. These solutions have associated operational, capital and productivity costs that are often overlooked and in the end, might even cost you much more than a good commercial solution.
Have a look at our short video [...]
Hosting providers select open source over commercial solutions as they’re free. But are they really free? Yes, the download is free, but how about managing and supporting the system. Is that free? And if the software isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do, aren’t there costs associated with that?
Ok, here’s the answer. Yes, there are [...]
