Spam news

Studies by BitDefender show that image spam and stock spam have declined, and plain text spam, primarily advertising drugs and replica watches, now accounts for most spam.

Security vendor McAfee has reported the results of a month-long experiment that had volunteers surf the web unprotected and reply to as much spam as possible.

Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) servers are being used by spammers, who pay for time on the leased service using stolen credit cards.

Spammers are using offensive subject lines to goad recipients into opening their emails.

The Storm Worm has returned, using bogus headlines as subject headings in a bid to convince users to install the malware on their machines. MX Logic reports detecting over 8 million Storm messages in one day, accounting for 85% of all malware traffic.

A survey indicates that text-based spams are up, and attachment spam has declined sharply. Stock spam now accounts for less than 2% of volume.

The author of a Trojan that broke new ground in botnet circles has agreed to plead guilty to secretly infecting thousands of victims' machines so that he could steal their personal data and launch attacks on websites.

A massive bot recruitment campaign appears to be behind a record surge early this month in the volume of malicious spam, from 3 percent of all spam traffic to nearly 10 percent, according to researchers.

Two best-practice papers covering technical issues that will help block botnet-induced spam and improve the deliverability of emails have been released by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group.

Citizens of the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific have been left without a functioning email systems after an email-based denial of service attack hit the island nation's mail gateway with a flood of spam.

A study by Ironport shows that illegal pharmaceutical supply chain outfits have become the main customers of botnet farmers. Tests showed that pills sold by these suppliers had incorrect dosages of the active ingredient or were sugar pills.

The FBI has warned that Valentine's Day e-greetings from a stranger could deliver a destructive "Trojan horse" that hijacks computers.

Scott Richter and his company Media Breakaway LLC have been hit with $6 million in damages and attorney's fees for sending spam to Myspace users.

The majority of domains advertised in spam are registered through just ten registrars - and there are grounds for suspecting that the registrars may be the actual owners of the registered sites.

Spammers are creating increasing numbers of accounts on popular social networks, taking advantage of higher levels of trust to deliver spam messages to an audience that has grown suspicious of email.