http://www.allspammedup.com Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:14:46 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en There’s a chance to win some great prizes this festive season (that would be a few presents taken care of!) over at PST Panic! The first prize is a $250 Amazon gift voucher, whilst 2nd and 3rd places get a $150 and $100 Amazon gift voucher respectively. A $10 Amazon ... http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/11/solve-your-pst-panic-problems-win/ Researchers at Microsoft have discovered that most phishing scams bring in little to no money. Their study blames this on the oversaturation factor. Just as overfishing has caused a deep decline in certain fish populations, the sheer number of phishing scammers seeking maximum returns has resulted in “overgrazing.” The other ... http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/11/study-shows-phishers-dont-really-catch-much/ Security experts say spammers and cyber criminals have already begun sending out holiday spam. The messages hawk fake goods and lotteries, offer info on President-Elect Obama, or temp job hunters and those worried about the economy with messages made to look like employment opportunities from major companies. The shopping spam offers ... http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/11/holiday-spam-has-arrived/ Ars Technica is reporting that a customer of Classmates.com, a people finding and social networking service, is suing them for sending deceptive emails that trick people into signing up for their paid service. Here's an excerpt:           "Your former classmates are trying to contact you! Upgrade now to see their messages!" ... http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/11/classmatescom-sued-over-deceptive-emails/ A web hosting company allegedly responsible for at least 75% of the daily spam volume worldwide has been forced offline, thanks to evidence gathered by security experts. McColo Corp, based in California, had its service terminated by its ISP, Hurricane Electric earlier today. Experts say the company hosts a vast community ... http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/11/source-of-75-of-sent-spam-forced-offline/ As the economic crisis appears to peak, more banks will fail. This has experts predicting that new phishing scams will arise targeted at the customers of those banks, and the agencies helping those customers may be actually encouraging such attacks. For example, IceSave, the British arm of an Icelandic bank, ... http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/11/phishing-scams-rise-as-banks-fail/ The Anti Phishing Work Group’s Internet Policy Committee (APWG-IPC) and Carnegie Mellon University’s Supporting Trust Decisions Project (STDP) have joined forces to educate consumers about phishing and established the AWPG/CMU Phishing Education Landing Page program.   The goal of this initiative is to instruct consumers about online safety at the “most teachable ... http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/11/apwg-and-carnegie-mellon-team-up-to-phish/ Researchers at the University of California, San Diego and Berkley successfully infiltrated the Storm Worm to measure the conversion rate of spam. They found that it took only a single response from 12 million spams sent for spammers to reap huge profits. The infiltration was accomplished by impersonating a component of ... http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/11/researchers-hijack-storm-worm/ A California man has been sentenced to a year in federal prison for hacking into his former employer’s computer system and giving spammers access to the mail server. Steven Barnes was also ordered to pay a fine of over $54,000. Prosecutors say Barnes hacked into Akimno Systems’ network, turned the mail ... http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/11/former-it-manager-sentenced-to-one-year-in-prison-for-hacking-former-employer/ Over the last few months I’ve noticed a resurgence of e-card spam scam from our unfriendly neighborhood spammers. According to security expert Bill Mullins, in the last year, email inboxes have being swamped with similar scamming emails from fraudulent sites like Greetings.com, and 2000Greetings.com, amongst others. This time around, the domain name ... http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/11/fake-greeting-card-emails-resurface/ Over the past three years a powerful Trojan maintained by a cybercrime organization has been responsible for stealing the usernames and passwords of nearly half a million bank accounts and nearly as many credit card numbers. Researchers captured some of the Trojan’s (known as Sinowal, Mebroot or Torpig) code and ... http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/11/trojan-compromises-over-300000-accounts/ Last week one of my clients received the resurfaced American Express phishing email. And yesterday an associate told me a dastardly story about being fleeced out of $2,700 from his Citibank account.  This was the result of responding to a phishing email.  Although email administrators may be more educated and wiser ... http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/11/educate-your-email-users-about-phishing/ ICANN, the organization charged with overseeing the address system of the internet, has revoked the right of notorious registrar EstDomains to sell domain names. EstDomains is known as a registrar that caters to phishers, spammers, and other cybercriminals. ICANN handed down its decision after the company’s president was convicted of ... http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/10/icann-lowers-boom-on-estdomains/ The reports are in and the news is not good. Malicious spam rose sharply in the third quarter. From July to September 2008, one in every 416 emails was malicious spam - compared to one in every 3,333 emails in the second quarter of the year. The rise is blamed on ... http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/10/malicious-spam-on-the-rise/  MillerSmiles.co.uk is one of the internet's leading anti-phishing sites, maintaining a massive archive of phishing and identity theft email scams.  This organizations provides the latest information on phishing scams.  MillerSmiles.co.uk actually keeps its phishing database updated from contributions from people around the world, including email administrators. MillerSmiles.co.uk was originally founded in February ... http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/10/millersmilescouk-provides-latest-anti-phishing-updates/ Security experts say that the current financial crisis even has scammers worried. The recent rollercoaster on Wall Street has cybercriminals scrambling to find other sources of income believing their pool of targets is shrinking. Instead of going after banking information, passwords and credit card numbers, new spam campaigns are focusing ... http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/10/even-scammers-are-affected-by-credit-crisis/ Every day, millions of people receive dozens of unsolicited commercial emails, known popularly as "spam." Some users see spam as a minor annoyance, while others are so overwhelmed with spam that they are forced to switch email addresses. This leads many email users to submit helpdesk requests to email administrators ... http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/10/interesting-study-to-stymie-spam/ This story is near and dear to me.  One day I went into a frenzy, because a good friend sent me an email that she was stranded in Ghana and needed me to send her some money.  She never mentioned she was going to Ghana.  I was taken off guard ... http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/10/virus-cracks-open-email-scam/ Escaping: This technique uses legal URL formatting to hide the address.  Escaping encodes the URL with a percent sign followed by a hexidecimal code. An escaped URL can look like "http://%2E%2E%2E%48%20%18%32%2F%48...". You can easily decode this by copying it into the location bar of your browser and hitting return. The ... http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/10/spammer-hiding-techniques/ French president Nicolas Sarkozy is a victim of a phishing scam. French officials confirmed yesterday that he had money stolen from his bank account after inadvertently giving scammers his username and password through what was later found to be a phishing email.            "[This] proves the system of Internet checking is ... http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/10/french-president-falls-for-phishing-scam/