The Utah-based Anti-Spam company Unspam Technologies has filed a one billion dollar lawsuit on behalf of over 20,000 internet users. The suit was filed in Virginia under the CAN-SPAM Act and Virginia law.
They are targeting anyone who targets our members with email spam, comment spam, or harvesting. This lawsuit is unique because they believe it is the first major case in the US to bring a claim against spammers for harvesting email addresses.
Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spam-bots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it
For more info visit, http://www.projecthoneypot.org/index.php
MessageLabs, a leading provider of integrated messaging and web security services to businesses worldwide, announced the results of its MessageLabs Intelligence Report for March 2007. Quarter on quarter spam levels have raised to 76.3 percent, their highest in two years. Virus and botnet activity has also increased. The report highlights the impact of increased spam levels on small-to-medium sized businesses (SME) as these organizations receive more than double the volume of spam per user each month than in enterprise organizations.
Spammers have figured out a number of ways to embed text into images — where anti-spam solutions based on text analyses can’t get to it. And as security vendors have begun building image spam solutions, spammers have created a series of random images for separate mailings that, again, simply won’t be flagged. Or they can put the text into multiple images in each mail. Or use obscure file formats.
Not only do the images elude anti-spam software, their malicious payloads are more likely to be launched by users. And they’re bandwidth- and storage-eaters; the average size of an image spam is 18 KB, compared to 5.5 KB for a text spam.
News Source : IT Business Edge
Postini, the mail filtering company has seen a 59 per cent spike in spam from September to November 2006. Unwanted email is currently 91 per cent of all email, and over the past 12 months the daily volume of spam rose by 120 per cent. Postini also saw a dramatic increase in overall email traffic with 10 billion more connections in October than in September.