OK the title is a lousy play on words, but the new spam tactic with hyperlinks to Flash files is actually pretty neat. You most likely know by now that spammers will look for any way to bypass content-based anti-spam filters. And they tried a new trick today: sending spam messages whose hyperlink call to [...]
I may have disappeared for the last couple weeks, but the spam and malware did not, so this post is a roundup of various outbreaks that I wasn’t able to report on at the moment they happened. In parentheses is the date I would have (should’ve could’ve) reported on these items had I been truly [...]
Commtouch recently announced our Q2 email threat trend report, which indicated, among other things:
Spam levels throughout the second quarter averaged 77%, ranging from a low of 64% to a peak of 94% of all email towards the end of the quarter
10 [...]
Recently there has been a lot of discussion and reports about an increasing amount of NDR messages triggered by spam. Since the NDR problem become a major factor in the spam world, and I noticed that there are some confusion about it, I thought it’s important that I’ll give a short overview of the problem [...]
Spam in Chinese is problematic for traditional content-filtering anti-spam engines for several reasons:
Chinese characters are “double-byte”, as opposed to “single-byte” like non-Asian languages. The second byte is due to the fact that one byte isn’t enough to transmit all the necessary information since the alphabet is so much larger than western languages like, for example, [...]
Commtouch detection team informed me that a new blended threat outbreak of Chinese Earthquake messages began earlier today, with a similar modus operandi to the previous outbreak, the main difference being that the URL hyperlinks within the messages are to zombie IP addresses (the X’s in the sample below), rather than fast flux domains in [...]
For some people, hearing about China digging itself out of one of the worst earthquakes in recent memory inspires them to do good works, donate money, join the Peace Corps…. For spammers it is merely inspiration for the next wave of social engineering to attempt to recruit a new army of zombies. Building on human [...]
I just returned from Madrid, where I represented Commtouch at 3Com’s TechConnect EMEA event, which was a great time. Together with 3Com’s Sean Newman, Product Manager, I presented the new messaging security in 3Com’s X-Family Unified Security Platforms to eager attendees comprised of their extended sales force. People are excited about the new GlobalView Mail [...]
I guess I should be happy spammers are still sending pump & dump spam, since of course blocking this garbage provides Commtouch’s bread & butter, but still, as a human being (not a marketer for an anti-spam company), sometimes I just throw up my hands and ask “WHY??!!!!!” I mean, do people really fall for [...]
Commtouch detection team identified a new email-borne malware outbreak yesterday, another in the “love” themed attacks. It is a blended threat, with simple love-oriented subjects, and within the body of the email message a hyperlink to a site that downloads a malware file - a Storm worm variant known as Zhelatin or Nuwar. Our lab [...]
