Twam fell from high of 11% in August 2009 to new low of less than 1% in February 2010.

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, wrote the bard. Spam, on the other hand, by any other name still smells as foul.

As people look beyond email for communicating with other people, spammers, too, have expanded their repertoire. In the process, they’ve expanded the list of expletives for their excretory practices.

Spam has always had a negative connotation in cyberspace, but its current connection to email appeared only in the 1990s. Before that, it was used to describe certain obnoxious behavior on local bulletin board systems and later, to the excessive posting of multiple messages on Usenet.

When spammers branched out beyond email, the term spam branched out with them. That dilution of the term, though, proved unsatisfactory to some users, and they began to coin their own terms for specific kinds of spam, with amusing results.

Once the Blogosphere got cooking, for example, spammers began targeting the comment sections of blogs with their ejunk.  That kind of spam, which became known as “blam,” would post bogus comments to a blog, as well as Wikis and Web site guest books,  and was designed to drive traffic to the spammer’s Web site. To counter blam, CAPTCHA was introduced to the Web.

CAPTCHA, or Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, requires a would-be commenter to type into a form some distressed letters that are flashed on the screen. What’s displayed is an image of the letters, not actual type. Because the letters aren’t type, they can’t be read by spambots. And because they’re distressed, it’s difficult for them to be scanned and translated into type by OCR software.

Instant Messaging is another target of spammers. IM spam, or spim, isn’t as widespread as email spam, so most of the time it remains under the media’s radar. However, Microsoft recently settled a spim lawsuit against a Hong Kong-based company called Funmobile. As part of the settlement, Microsoft obtained an injunction against Funmobile to bar it from spimming the users of Softzilla’s Live Messenger service. It also received a cash payment, the amount of which was not disclosed to the public. According to the lawsuit, Funmobile used spimming to obtain the personal information of Live Messenger users, information that was used by third parties to send mass spam and phishing messages to the users’ contacts.

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Security researchers have discovered the first ever SMS virus. Similar in nature to the Koobface virus that hit Facebook last month, the virus, dubbed Sexy View, uses social engineering to distribute itself. Once it infects a smartphone, it accesses the contact list and sends itself to everyone on it via text messaging. The text message invites the recipient to view some “hot pics” and provides an URL. If the URL is followed it downloads the worm onto that phone.

          “Sexy View is important in many ways. It is the first text message worm ever. It’s also the first mobile phone worm that circumvents the signature checks that are meant to secure the latest smartphones. The motive behind it seems to be to collect information for mobile phone spamming purposes. Mobile phone spam is already a big problem in some parts of the world – eventually it will be an issue everywhere.” said an F-Secure researcher.

Previously this worm was confined to phones running the SymbianOS but has now spread beyond them. It’s not yet known if one mobile OS is more vulnerable than the other, but the good news is that at least for now, the threat is largely contained to China. However you can be sure it, or a similar piece of mobile malware will hit other shores sooner rather than later.

A New Zealand man profiled in a book about “Spam Kings” has been linked to a new SMS spam campaign hitting online forums. The spams are sent via text message and hype a site called AntennaBooster.co.nz which sells what it claims is a signal enhancer for cell phones. Vodafone users have also been targeted.

Brendan Battles, the man behind both the site and the spam, has been a known spammer for many years. Back in 2003 he sued Spamhaus for blacklisting his Emarketers.org site, but quickly dropped the suit just a few months later. In 2006, he was accused of spamming for broadband accounts and telephone calling rates. According to the “Spam Kings” book, Battles sent up to 50 million spam messages a day hyping scams such as subliminal weight loss.

Continue reading Newest “Spam King” Turns to SMS Spam»