Archive for the 'News' Category
It is emerging that spammers are increasingly using zombified computers (machines that are infected with Trojan software which allows them to be controlled by the virus author) to distribute spam containing malware such as viruses, Trojans and phishing scams. The malware is usually compressed into a .zip or .rar file, sometimes password protected, as many antivirus filters are set to not reject encrypted archives (i.e. zip files with passwords). A password is often sent with the message and this can trick users as they believe password protected .zip files are more likely to be genuinely from a business contact.
Another technique being used by spammers is that of embedding malicious code within the HTML source of some email messages so that the code is run when the email opens.
Security experts have also identified a rapidly increasing trend in phishing scams exploiting the current global financial turmoil. Phishing scammers are sending messages appearing to provide advice or services able to assist people with concerns over their mortgages, savings and investments.
Some sources have reported that there has been a 101% increase in the number of zombified computers sending spam in the last month, possibly a sign that spammers are realising an opportunity to benefit from the current financial crisis affecting everybody.
Here at Remote Anti Spam we are working closely with our partners and developing new rules and techniques to detect and block this surge in spam and malicious content. In the meantime we encourage our customers and all email users to exercise caution when receiving messages from people they are not familiar with, especially if those messages contain .zip or .rar files (whether password protected or not).
Crucially, users should also ensure that their antivirus software is up-to-date with the very latest definitions and antivirus software engines.
Microsoft and Google are facing renewed challenges in their fight against spammers who abuse their webmail services to send out spam. Earlier this year spammers successfully used bots (software that automatically signs up with online services) to break the CAPTCHA security systems at Hotmail and GMail. Once penetrated these bots proceed to create several accounts, and then use them to send high volumes of spam messages. Both Microsoft and Google responded by strengthening their CAPTCHA systems, but it seems that the spammers have found another way in.
We are all now familiar with CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), the extra step we must all take when submitting almost any type of form on the web. The process involves entering the garbled, often illegible, text displayed on screen to prove that a human is completing the form and not a robot.
While it is relatively easy for humans to decipher the text on screen, computer bots find it much more difficult as the distortion of the text makes it difficult for them to identify the letters using their optical character recognition capabilities. However, in recent weeks it has emerged that Microsoft’s CAPTCHA has been breached by spammers again, and it has been suggested that spammers are getting it right between 10-15% of the time.
If spammers are successfully breaking CAPTCHA on huge services like Hotmail and GMail, who have the resources to implement the most secure techniques available, where does that leave the average webmaster who uses CAPTCHA to prevent the abuse of their contact forms, order processes or blog articles?
Well, some are suggesting that CAPTCHA in its current form is now rendered useless and just not viable anymore. Some industry experts are suggesting a wholesale switch to alternative forms of CAPTCHA, such as Microsoft’s Asirra image based format where users are required to identify and distinguish between photos of cats and dogs. Others, such as Terry Zink, are suggesting a second CAPTCHA challenge post sign up which would statistically reduce the overall success rate of the spammers’ bots.
Nobody quite yet has the perfect solution, and though many believe it’s just a game of cat and mouse, the anti spam industry continues to seek the most effective measures of preventing spam reaching our inboxes.
In a move that could have wide reaching implications in the anti spam effort, US state Nevada – famous for it’s ‘Sin City’ of Las Vegas – today becomes the first to require that all transmissions containing personal, identifiable information sent over the internet be encrypted. Key wording from the new law reads,
“NRS 597.970 Restrictions on transfer of personal information through electronic transmission. [Effective October 1, 2008.]
1. A business in this State shall not transfer any personal information of a customer through an electronic transmission other than a facsimile to a person outside of the secure system of the business unless the business uses encryption to ensure the security of electronic transmission”
At Remote Anti Spam, we believe that this is a bold and progressive move and will monitor developments there closely to see how it is enforced. Having said that, we acknowledge the massive headaches this will give small businesses in Nevada, as they must scramble to ensure compliance.
It is conceivable that many small businesses in Nevada will not have prepared and could find themselves breaking the new law from the outset on 1st October. It is unclear at this point how vigorously the Nevada state government will go after such small businesses, particularly in the period shortly after 1st October.
The state of Nevada originally passed this law in 2005 thus giving industry almost 3 years to prepare for today’s 1st October 2008 deadline. This law is designed, not specifically to prevent or filter spam, but as a move to protect citizens from identity theft, phishing and other similar crimes which can result in the leaking of personal private data over a public medium, such as the internet.
If other states observe and follow suit, we may be so bold as to speculate that we could see some sort of reduction in spam for that region as well as better digital protection for personal data on the internet.
Despite the inherent implication difficulties and the inevitable teething problems that will arise, we applaud Nevada for this pioneering and giant step forward.
Full details of the Nevada state law
Over the weekend it emerged that Google had performed a major deep crawl and updated PageRank (PR) data for sites in their index. Many webmasters seem to be as confused as ever as to why in particular their sites have seen PageRank increases or decreases, but one thing seems to be ringing a resounding bell across many SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) forums.
Webmasters in the SEO forum at Digital Point, for example, are expressing their surprise that sites which they spent considerable time optimising and promoting seem to have had their PR decreased while sites they relatively neglected saw PR go the other way.
Some webmasters are suggesting that the only possible reason for this is that Google could now be taking a dim view on the excessive promotion of websites using social bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumbleupon and Technorati.
Google may now be considering the over marketing of sites within these channels as attempts to spam their index in order to unfairly rank higher in search results. The search giant is constantly tweaking its algorithm in order to filter spam and ensure the integrity of its search results continues to remain the most relevant and most highly regarded in the industry.
Spam filtering measures such as this, if the claims are founded, are just another in a long line of major directional changes Google have implemented into their search engine results spam filter to prevent the poisoning of their index. In the past they have dropped the relevance of the keyword tag, penalised sites which enter into controversial link exchanges and, even developed measures (allegedly) to prevent spammers who create short term sites benefiting from high search result placements in order to sell their dubious spamvertised products (search engine poisoning). These are just a few.
If it is indeed true that Google have rewritten their algo to weed out social bookmarking spam, could this spell the end of the social bookmarking phenomena which has surged in popularity in just a few short years, heavily due to the popularity of the medium with SEO experts and webmasters?
We will be watching developments closely and welcome your comments in the meantime.
In his excellent anti spam blog, Terry Zink discusses measures that can be taken by the webmail giants such as GMail, Yahoo! Mail, and Hotmail to prevent the phenomenon of automated spam bots successfully breaking CAPTCHA to create new accounts and send spam from those services.
Zink rightly suggests that the industry needs to look into some sort of secondary measure to prevent this happening. After all, spammers only need to break CAPTCHA once to win, while service providers must constantly battle to lock them out. However, we feel that his suggestion of sending a link which needs to be clicked in order to complete the email account signup process is seriously flawed. While this may be the perfect solution for newsletters and mailing lists it would not be suitable for email accounts as it assumes too readily that the person signing up (assuming it is a real person) already has an email address at which to receive that link.
While many of us nowadays do actually have more than a handful of email addresses, it is important to remember that there is always a generation of new internet users (students, children at home, people in developing countries, etc) who are signing up to these services for the very first time.
In these cases, where could you possibly send them that authentication link? Anti spam measures must continue to prevent the successful delivery of spam to our inboxes, while minimising the inconvenience to real people. The cops and robbers analogy is perfect to explain this.
The robber can indiscriminately shoot and cause harm to achieve his purpose while the cop must attempt to apprehend the robber yet keep innocent members of the community safe (and relatively unrestricted) during his pursuit.
That’s the anti spam fight in a nutshell.