The goal of spammers is to make money, and they will use email in any way possible to do just that.

But when we think of spam pharmaceuticals, mortgage scams and dating websites are usually the first topics to come to mind. If we say phishing, images of stolen financial information and stolen online shopping credentials are usually what we think of. But the stock market? How on earth can illicit email be used to make money by the trading of stocks?

Spam. The sleaziest of the sleazy. If only spam could talk, what would it tell us? Therein lies the conundrum, because if we are to use only the product – the waste product – of the spammer as evidence of its existence, then what we’re left with is the impression of a pure idiot. Honestly, read this and tell us if you disagree:

Dear Email user,

This message is from Administration center Maintenance Policy verified that your mailbox exceeds its limit, you will be unable to receive new email, To re-set your SPACE on our database prior to maintain your INBOX, you must click the link below:

CLICKHERE: <Link omitted to protect the reckless>

(If the link above does not appear click able or does not open a browser window when you click it, copy it and paste it into your web browser’s Location bar). Thank you for your cooperation.

Admin Help Desk.

Let’s face it. You have to be pretty damned stupid to construct something like that, source an email list, blast it to the world, and expect anyone with two gray cells to rub together to respond. Right?

So if spammers are so damn stupid, why the hell are they still around? Honestly, if Darwin was correct – and there’s no good reason to believe he wasn’t – then by now, spammers’ typing fingers would have fallen off, they would have grown gills, and they’d be unable to keep down solid food.

So what gives?

Malicious spam levels continued to rise in Q1 of 2013, with overall spam levels rising by 98% and malicious spam by a whopping 157%. In the first quarter, 97.4 billion spam messages a day were sent with 973 million of them …

According to Wikipedia, Mother’s Day is a celebration honoring mothers and motherhood, maternal bonds, and the influence of mothers in society. It is celebrated on various days in many parts of the world, most commonly in March or May. It complements Father’s Day, a similar celebration honoring fathers. When US President Woodrow Wilson made the second Sunday in May an officially recognized national holiday, he probably wasn’t thinking of email, but considering what my mother asked me today, and that a huge number of other countries have Mother’s Day observances that happen either at the same time as in the United States or slightly later, I wanted to take a moment to remind you all of the importance of your mother, and her email.

Just a day after we recognized the 35^th anniversary of that first mass marketing email that Gary Thuerk sent to about 400 users of ARPANET news spread of the Commtouch Internet Threats Trend Report for the first quarter of 2013 was released that claimed around the world an average of 97.4 billion spam emails were sent each day. That is quite a bit of junk mail.

Now any organization with a good anti-spam solution in place, notice I said good, will see a great deal of these messages filtered out because their technological controls will spot these illicit messages and sent them directly to the spam folder.

But what about those messages that make it through? Criminal organizations, and individuals, who send spam are constantly working to circumvent these technical controls so that their messages make it into their victims’ inboxes.

In addition to your technical controls, your organization should be teaching your users the basics about spam and phishing. Organizations who are serious about supplementing their anti-spam solution with a human element should make sure that their users know the following:

Get out the party favors, the cake and the noisemakers: spam turned 35 years old this week, even though it doesn’t look a day over 20. Yes, you heard that right, and stop using your fingers to count. Windows, Mac and Linux all have perfectly good calculator apps. For some of you, it may be difficult to reconcile spam’s age with the 20-something years that the World Wide Web’s been around. To others, it makes perfect sense that email spam and the Interwebs are forever and inextricably joined at the hip. If you find yourself on one side and seem to be arguing vehemently with the other side, fear not. You can both be right. Sort of.

It’s become part of the lore, the mythology, if you will, of the Internet, up there with Grace Hopper’s discovery of a dead moth inside the Harvard Mark II in 1947. Of course, the term ‘bug’ as a way of describing a glitch had been around for at least a hundred years before that, and Admiral Hopper never claimed to have found the moth herself. But that’s the beauty of lore. It doesn’t have to be truthful or accurate, and often sounds better when the facts become distorted. Much like politicians.

The origins of that nasty blight on society called email spam began on May 3, 1978, when the Interwebs was still an unuttered spark in the mind of George W. Bush. Back then, of course, it was known as Arpanet, and only the geekiest members of humankind – university professors, mostly – were permitted to play with it. in fact, it would have been far more appropriate to just get it over with and call it ‘Comicnet’, ‘Spockweb’, or ‘LucasNet’, but the US military had invented it, and they clearly have no sense of humor whatsoever.

Of course, partners to the research efforts promoted by Arpanet – mostly finding better and more efficient ways to kill people – were also allowed access to Arpanet, so it was a massively functional network of a few hundred users back in 1978. Put it into perspective this way: around 1980, there were approximately 20 operational networks on the Internet (Arpanet), while in 1995, the Internet had over 50,000. So, it just wouldn’t be right if the first spammer was a geek. Let’s face it: geeks are cute and mostly harmless, very reminiscent of Furbies.

Researchers at the University of Alabama say data mining is a much more effective way to fight spear phishing attacks than any traditional methods. They say that using “big data” can develop valuable phishing intelligence systems that link phishing attacks to …

If you are considering a hosted or cloud-based antispam solution, there are a few things you should consider to make sure you get the most for your money, have the best results you can get, and have the minimum number of issues. Hosted antispam solutions are a great way to save bandwidth while getting very effective results from your content filtering solution, but there are also some key points to consider, and some missteps you can make when setting them up. Here are some best practices for using hosted antispam with your messaging system.

A group of 12 and 13-year old students at Schoenbar Middle School in Ketchikan, Alaska were able to take control of over 300 computers after crafting a phishing scam and  sending the emails to various teachers. The messages asked them to …

  A new phishing campaign is involved in the compromising of over 100 websites across the net. They are hosting fake login pages asking for Apple IDs and passwords and are linked to in spam messages. This scam has been …