You’ve read coverage before here at AllSpammedUp on anti-spam legislation pending in Canada; but as the legislation approaches its date of enforcement, there’s a lot of rumbling out in the world about what Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) means for businesses, both in and outside of Canada’s borders. By the time you are reading this, the period for comments will have come to a close. Here’s what you need to know.

It may sound like the setup for a cheesy punch line, but just for fun, try it out on your friends: What do India, Rolex and Viagra have in common? The answer? They’re all invading your inbox. The venerable folks at Cisco have just released their 2013 Annual Security Report, and as you might expect, it contains a wealth of information detailing all the ways the cyberpunks, crooks, scammers and spammers are working hard to make your day more memorable.

Some of the highlights of the article are head turners, for sure:

• Android malware has grown 2577% over 2012
• Mobile only makes up 0.5% of total web malware encounters
• Online advertisements are 182 times more likely to deliver malicious content than pornographic sites
• Global spam volumes are down 18% overall, with spammers keeping banker’s hours for a 25% drop over the weekend.

Banker’s hours, huh? Yet another reason to hold disdain and contempt for spammers. Of course, not all the information contained in the Cisco report is eyebrow-raising, although it’s still very interesting. We’ve known for a while that India’s contribution to the world includes more than delicious curry and high-tech prowess. The country continues to top the list of the world’s biggest sources of spam. The breakdown of the top ten spam producing countries is as follows:

  A new type of malware has been discovered and it’s using one of the tools designed to prevent email spoofing, spam and the malware it often contains. A new Trojan uses Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to keep itself connected …

I recently read an interesting article about a spam email that was, for all accounts, poorly crafted according to the author. I am inclined to agree with him on the surface because when you look at this message it looks like an early attempt at mass email marketing:

Subject: Consideration

Message body:
Thank you for taking the time to contact us.

Within two weeks we should be able to provide you with a decision in regard to your question, and we want you to know that we will be giving your question our fullest consideration.

We would like to thank you again for your time and consideration and will be in touch with you as soon as we have some definitive information for you.

Also you can track your request by visiting our Tracking System Page.

Yours very truly, Venessa Robison.

Hopefully, you were able to pick up on the many mistakes made in the message, but if you missed let’s go over them:

Suppose you meet an alien from a far distant galaxy, and she asks you to explain the identifying features of email spam. At face value, it sounds like a simple proposition, but if you think about it, the answer might be more difficult than you realize.

Spam comes in so many forms and flavors that it’s hard to nail down a definitive set of characteristics. When you toss marketing and retail spam into the mix, the definition for spam morphs from a laundry list of all that’s despicable about human nature into a veritable cornucopia of moronic nonsense. Nonsense, however, can be as dangerous as ignorance, and if you’ve ever wondered “what’s the point?” of those nonsensical emails that occasionally invade your inbox, you may want to pay attention.

You’ve used it for years, updated it dozens of times (we hope), and have had to deal with your share of both false positives and negatives, but have you ever bothered to figure out how Outlook’s Junk Email Filter actually works? If you are like most, the answer is probably no; so in this article we are going to take a look at what, for most users, is the last technical line of defense standing between them and spam.

The Junk Email Filter is a component of Outlook that is on by default, and which processes each and every incoming email that is received, regardless of the source or type of email account. Email that is determined to be junk is delivered to the Junk E-mail folder, rather than the inbox. Periodic updates are released by Microsoft, and made available through Windows Update so that users can receive updated settings and improvements to how the filtering works.

  It’s a new year but spam is still making headlines. Although overall levels have dipped, malcious spam and spear phishing campaigns continue to be unleashed in increasing amounts. Here’s a look at the top spam headlines for January: Spam …

Spam must be in the feline family because it seems like every year there are reports of it dying.

Just recently, Forbes reported that, “Spam email is on the wane”.

The credit for the slaying of the beast goes to a heightened level of anti-spam protection. The article goes on to really promote the hard work that so many security engineers are doing and how the average user is becoming more adept at recognizing spam and avoiding, or reporting, it.

So everything is looking good. We can take that security budget and trim it down because after all, spam is dying right?

  Researchers have detected a new type of spam with a very malicious twist. Carefully targeted spam campaigns aimed at specific individuals have been discovered. This campaign bombards the recipient with a deluge of spam, upwards of 60,000 a day …

I caught an article this weekend on The Economist about spam. In that article, the author references a report published recently by Kaspersky Labs that spam has fallen to a low of 67% of all email. The article is extremely light in detail, and does not provide reference to the actual Kaspersky study though it did include a pretty graph. While I would have preferred to discuss the actual study, I could not find it on Kaspersky’s website either. The comments section on both the Economist’s site, and the discussion thread on Fark are both quite amusing, but I will leave it as an exercise for you to review if you please. What I decided to do with this post instead is to ask you, our readers, how you feel the fight against spam is going.