Internet attackers Storm Valentine's Day

Jonathan Bowers, January 18th 2008, 12:33PM

Following on from an earlier post about spam and the responsibility of the user to avoid encouragement, I thought it worth highlighting a particular attack that shifts its consumer focus.

One of last year's worst viruses is known as Storm. The virus takes many forms and disrupts in many ways, it does not fall into the category of Trojan, Bot or spam agent (which all effect computers in different ways) it is in fact all of the above.

The cyber criminals behind this project are constantly reinventing the emails that deliver it and use red letter days - or special occasions to try and trick users into opening the email and downloading the file.

A report this week from Websense informs us that Storm's focus is now on Valentine's Day having shifted from a New Year focus. It is always worth bearing in mind that any email you receive from an unknown user are likely to be spam and not worth opening. Following this rule and deleting on receipt - without opening - avoids encouraging the machines behind the attack to resend in different forms.

Tags: spam
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Spam increases - are we to blame

Jonathan Bowers, January 9th 2008, 6:12PM

December saw the worst proportion of spam to legitimate email that we have ever experienced according to a report by SoftScan. All the focus is on the perseverence of relentless spammers and not enough thought is being placed on the ways in which we as email users are encouraging this activity.

Too many people are unaware of the technology that is at play behind these emails. Many people believe that as long as they do not respond to the email they have not encouraged it. However, as soon as you open the majority of spam emails it sends a message back to the originator confirming that your address is valid and adding it to a database that they can then sell to others spammers.

As users we are responsible for encouraging spammers often without even realising.

Tags: spam
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We send less spam but get just as much

Jonathan Bowers, April 17th 2007, 9:55AM

It's obviously good news that the UK has fallen out of the 'dirty dozen' spam sending nations in a new report by Sophos but the main reason we have fallen out of the list seems to be because other nations are now sending more, rather than the fact that we are sending less.

The new report which compares Q1 2007 to the same time last year also notes that Europe has now overtaken Asia as the largest spamming continent. Increases across many parts of mainland Europe have been compounded by a huge surge in spam from Poland which has almost doubled in a single year.

India is one of the nations responsible for knocking the UK out of the top 12, as is Taiwan but the biggest newcomer to the Spamming 'dirty dozen' is Italy accounting for 5 per cent of the world's spam.

One last interesting factor is that China, while still in second place has reduced its spam percentile from 21.9 per cent to 7.5 per cent in a single year. In comparison, the US has only managed to reduce its contribution by 3.3 per cent.

Tags: security, spam
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Spam and Google blog search

Jonathan Bowers, January 11th 2007, 11:03AM

All across the news today are reports about spam levels. Image spam is one of the biggest problems in everyone's inbox but it's not just email that delivers spam. Chris Richardson believes that search results spam is a frontier on which Google must improve this year, especially within its blog search.

I have also noticed through the various Google Alerts that I have set up, the amount of blog redirects that are appearing in the blog search rankings. These are manufactured blogs designed to forward you away from what you are looking for and on to a spammers website instead. To further compound Google's problem, Chris points out that the majority of these 'spam blogs' are actually set up in Google's own software, Blogger.

We've already looked at Google's dominance of the search market on the blog this year and the possibility that the only avenues for catching Google lie in emerging formats such as mobile search but this brings up an interesting point. If search engine spam grows at the rate email spam has done how quickly will we be looking for alternatives to the engines that we currently use if the problem is not fixed?

Tags: search, spam
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A serious spate of security concerns?

Jonathan Bowers, July 25th 2006, 9:46AM

The technology headlines are dominated this week by security issues. Specifically in the UK, the government has produced guidelines to educate on the issue of cyber-bullying while globally the latest Sophos report reveals that Asian spammers are more now prevalent that US spammers for the first time ever.

The anti-virus companies are of course riding high on the reports. Symantec has teamed up with Yahoo to reach more users with its Norton software and Kaspersky labs is adding heat by warning us that malware is getting more sophisticated.

I think it is great that the government sees better technology education as a step to avoiding Internet crimes but I am often dubious when reports come out that are generated by the firms gaining the most from our heightened concerns. Often with no firm statistical evidence we are asked to accept that we are in more danger than ever before.

A quick search shows that we may be moving in this direction - the US Department of Justice is currently creating an extensive Cyber Crime survey to assess the impact on US businesses. It would be nice to see the UK government taking similar steps for the 1,500,000 businesses online in this country, not to mention the millions of home users.

Tags: cybercrime, security, spam
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