Mr Ritcher has accepted the judgement and will pay the stated amount pointing out it is 95% less than what had originally been asked for. Steven Ritcher, Scott’s father and business colleague in their company Media Breakaway said:

We respect the decision of the arbitrator, and we’re not going to appeal it … We’re going to pay the money he awarded.

Scott Ritcher has already paid US$7 million to Microsoft in a previous ruling over spam and the use of website OptInRealBig.com. With the MySpace spamming, Ritcher had used MySpace accounts acquired by phishing and directed users to the website ConsumerPromotionCenter.com.

MySpace released the following statement regarding the ruling:

This award reflects MySpace’s continued momentum and holistic approach to ridding the site of spammers and phishers … We will continue to do our part in cleansing the Internet of this invasive onslaught of spam.

Read more at Computerworld.com

Matthew’s Opinion
Unlike the huge payout last month it looks like MySpace are going to get this money; and US$6 million is not to be scoffed at. They would do well to re-invest the money back into the site, improving their infrastructure and increasing their security measures just to make sure they are well prepared for the future.

The ongoing action taken against spamming is an important one alongside better spam controls and more user knowledge on what spam is and what to do with it. If court cases keep being won against spammers then there is more risk in doing it in the first place and hopefully less people attempting it.

Gary Theurk, an employee at Digital Equipment Company, sent a message on Arpanet to hundreds of fellow users on 1 May 1978.

The message advertised the latest DEC computer systems, and received a less than enthusiastic reaction from fellow users.

Arpanet has since evolved into the modern day internet, and DEC was purchased by Compaq and later HP.

Security firm Sophos noted recently that some 10 per cent of respondents to a recent survey admitted to purchasing spammed products.

"If users didn’t buy the goods, or invest in the pump and dump stock, spam would soon dry up," said Mark Harris, director of Sophos Labs.

"The spammers wouldn’t make any money from their activities and would go out of business."

Sophos has launched a Spam Pledge in a bid to stamp out the scourge of spam.
 

Wellington-based Graphic Dimensions, which provides IT support and services to architectural design companies, has had problems sending email to xtra.co.nz addresses since the beginning of February.

Email from the company, which is also an Xtra customer, is classified by the YahooXtra mail filter as spam, says Graphic Dimensions’ technical director, Paul O’Brien.

This is causing problems for Graphic Dimensions because important messages from its clients, primarily architects, to contractors are going AWOL, O’Brien says.

“If an Xtra user uses a POP client [for example Microsoft Outlook] the messages are not downloaded, appearing to the user that the email has never been sent,” he says.

Xtra users will only be able to see the messages if they log on to their webmail at YahooXtra Bubble — but the messages will then be in the spam folder, he says.

“Xtra has not advised customers that legitimate email may be in their bulk folder and the only way to see it is via Yahoo Bubble,” he says.

Xtra has also advised O’Brien that Telecom has no direct influence on Yahoo’s anti-spam policy, and referred him to Yahoo’s html help page. O’Brien has contacted Yahoo but has had no reply.

“To say the only way to deal with this is by logging on to WebMail and going through the spam messages and adding the email address to the ‘not spam’ is not a practical solution for any business,” he says.

Now, when they are aware of the problem, O’Brien’s clients have to ring to confirm that the emails have gone through.

“This is having a major impact on our clients,” O’Brien says.

Four of his clients say the situation is causing business continuity problems. O’Brien has also talked to a number of other support companies that have the same problem with sending email to xtra.co.nz addresses.

One of Graphic Dimensions’ engineers sent email from his work address to his xtra.co.nz address and this was placed in his spam folder, says O’Brien.

Xtra does want to ensure that senders’ legitimate email gets through to its customers, and has been working to provide information on the minimum standards that are required to ensure uninterrupted delivery, says Xtra spokesman Nick Brown. The company is also working to educate customers so they can use their spam filtering most effectively, he says.

Brown says the Yahoo spam filtering process provides management based on international best practices and operate in a different way to the previous localised Xtra anti-spam service, says Brown. “So we’ve changed the way we filter emails and how our customers deal with spam,” he says.

O’Brien says it appears as if New Zealand domains that do not have an Xtra IP address or their domain name handled by Xtra, are having email “mis-classified” as spam.

“From our tests we have isolated this problem to domains with sending mail servers that do not have their DNS hosted at Xtra, and those that do not use Xtra as their ISP,” says O’Brien.

Brown says all the major email providers in New Zealand manage the reputation of their mail systems on behalf of their customers who use their mailboxes. If you are managing your own mail server, you need to ensure you’re adhering to best practice to ensure you have a good reputation, he says.

Xtra has sent O’Brien’s information to its security team for investigation.

Source: computerworld.co.nz

According to the company’s Intelligence Report for February, 4.6 percent of spam originates from webmail-based services, notably Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail. While Yahoo still remains the most targeted webmail provider – accounting for 88.7 of all webmail spam – the amount of spam being sent through Gmail doubled from 1.3 percent in January to 2.6 percent in February.

Experts attribute the overall increases in webmail spam traffic to attackers being able to crack the CAPTCHA functions, an authentication test that ensures the person signing up for the email account is a human – not a bot – by requiring he or she enter in a random number or text image.

Matt Sergeant, senior anti-spam technologist at MessageLabs, said spammers are creating and using artificial intelligence software that can understand and read CAPTCHA tests.

"This is something fairly new in terms of the spammers actually succeeding with this," he said. "They’ve put their minds to it. The spammers aren’t dumb. They have the technology and once they put their minds to something, they can build it."

It appears Gmail’s and Hotmail’s CAPTCHA authentication tools have been more difficult to beat than Yahoo, so some spammers are now actually hiring individuals to manually perform the CAPTCHA tests on new email accounts, Sergeant said.

"They (spammers) are using botnets to sign up for Gmail, but they can’t complete the transaction," he said. "They can’t programmatically beat CAPTCHA, so to close the loop, they have a room full of humans that send the CAPTCHAs. It must be a very boring world. I feel very bad for those people."

According to Webense, spammers are also beginning to have at least some success automatically defeating the Gmail CAPTCHA algorithm.

Representatives from Yahoo and Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

See original article on scmagazineus.com

Secure Computing Magazine

Mail always sorted my mail invisibly, and its built-in spam filter kept the junk out of my Inbox. I use IMAP mail services, which means that all of my mail stays on the server, so I can access it from my MacBook, someone else’s computer via webmail or, I thought, my iPhone. But when I synced the accounts to the phone, the Inbox filled with spam so quickly that my actual email was lost in the mix.

It has taken me a while, but I’ve worked out a solution that leverages several great pieces of technology to make Mail on the iPhone work the way it should. Click onward to learn how I did it.

The truth is that this is pretty easy. All I’ve done is send all of my personal email to a secret Gmail account that nobody knows about. Then I connect to Gmail from the phone and Gmail’s powerful server-side filters keep the junk out. The only hang-up is that when I send people mail, I want them to receive it from my personal account, not my Gmail… but there’s a fix for that, too.

Step one is to get a Gmail account. Even if you already have one, go ahead and send yourself an invitation for another one and give it a crazy log-in that nobody will ever know. Once the new account is created, tell your other email account to auto-forward all of your mail to your secret Gmail account. This means that any mail sent to your personal account will show up in your new Gmail account.

The next step is to fix things on Gmail’s end so that when you send people mail, it looks like its coming from your personal account and not your secret Gmail identity. You can do that from within the Gmail interface in your web browser. Click on the Settings link in the upper-right corner of the Gmail interface (next to your secret name) then click on the Accounts tab. The first option says “Send mail as:” and there’s a link there to add another email address. Click it.

n the resulting pop-up, add your personal account and then check it. Google will have sent you a verification email with a link in it to click to prove that you can access that account. Once you do that, head back to the Settings screen and click the link to make your new “Send As” address the default.

Whew! Once that’s finished, you can add the Gmail account to your iPhone. One caveat: DO NOT use the iPhone’s built-in Gmail account tool when you add the account. Instead, set the account up as an Other account, then click the IMAP tab and use the following values:

IMAP Account Information
Name: What you want your name to appear as when you send
Address: Your personal email address (not the secret Gmail address)
Description: Whatever you want

Incoming Mail Server
Host Name: imap.gmail.com
User Name: Your secret Gmail login (without the @gmail.com part)
Password: Duh.

Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)
Host Name: smtp.gmail.com
User Name: Your secret Gmail login (without the @gmail.com part)
Password: Duh.

You can look at the Advanced settings, but you shouldn’t have to touch them unless you want to. When you’re done, you should be all set up. Now when someone sends an email to your personal account it will show up on your phone via Gmail, but when you respond it will look like your response came from your original account, not your Gmail. If you like, you can even add the account to Mail on your Mac.

"These pages push other porn pages for profit," said Alex Eckelberry, CEO of security company Sunbelt Software, in a blog post. "While not all of the redirects go to malware sites, we did observe some redirects to a site which ultimately pushes a fake codec trojan, which if installed, results in a VirusHeat infection."

Google Groups is a free, online discussion forum available to anyone with a Google Account. Google uses a Captcha challenge to prevent spammers from using automated methods to create and abuse new accounts.

But about a week ago, Websense, an Internet security company, said that spammers have had achieved a 20% success rate cracking Google’s Captcha system.

It’s possible the influx of porn spam is related. Sunbelt security researcher Adam Thomas said in an e-mail that it’s likely that spammers are using bots to bypass Google’s defenses.

Eckelberry said in an e-mail that this apparently automated spam assault on Google Groups appears to be new. "We’ve seen similar types of things with other Google services (Blogger, Pages), but I believe this is a fairly recent phenomenon," he said. "One assumes with absolutely zero cost in setup, and automated systems doing the work, it’s probably quite profitable."

Google Groups are also being set up to promote spam blogs, or splogs, for certain search keywords. For example, the Google Group "air-conditioning–1" was set up to associate the search keywords "free auto info trouble shooting air conditioning" with the splog mctop10.info through a Web link. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of such bogus Google Groups pages.

Or at least there used to be. "We have removed the Google Groups and accounts in question for violating our Terms of Service," said a Google spokesperson via e-mail. "Google is committed to preventing spam and other forms of abuse on Google Groups. We encourage users to notify us of any issues."

Google declined to comment on the integrity of its Captcha system.

John Halloran, a Chicago native, is a successful entrepreneur and President of the Certified Gold Exchange, Inc. Mr. Halloran took a great interest in an employee’s distressful story of how his teenage daughter was receiving pornographic and illicit emails and the employee was unable to shield his impressionable and vulnerable daughter from this unwanted communication. That was ten months ago and the day Halloran set out to create a better way to email online that totally eliminated spam and virus threats and Woomail was born.

Woomail is instant email that is quickly replacing conventional, spam-infested email as the standard. Woomail is interactive with email, but it is not email. Woomail is a superior method to message online; a clever and controlled web based communication service that works in a very easy but effective way, preventing spam and protecting registered Woomail users from any form of illicit or unwanted communication.

John Halloran, Founder and CEO of Woomail.com: “We understood the problems that have infected and crippled conventional email and we set out to change the process and the team succeeded. Woomail is an unmatched echelon of online messaging that verifies each message is hand crafted, pre-screened for virus and delivered instantly.”

Woomail works equally well for personal internet users of all ages, and for businesses large and small. At homes across the nation and around the world, parents can feel comfortable knowing that their teens and younger children are shielded from porn emails or unwanted solicitation. Businesses can get back to work without wasting time searching for relevant messages in a sea of spam. With every incoming message authenticated as being generated by a human and not machine control is transferred to the recipient. Instantly, employees are more productive, operational costs are reduced and frustration is alleviated. Large enterprise users are empowered with the knowledge that all communications never leave their domain or control. Woomail is the universal answer to a universal problem. A free individual Woomail account is available online at www.woomail.com.

About Woomail

Woomail is a groundbreaking communication tool that transfers control of email from the sender to the recipient. Woomail brings online messaging into the 21st century with its spam-free, virus-free, instant email platform. Please direct media and press enquiries about Woomail, The World’s Safest Mail™ to John Halloran at 650-739-8082 or www.woomail.com/1.

Police said the scam e-mails, which first started showing up about eight months ago, told recipients they were being watched, and that they had to send $15,000 or $20,000, depending on the e-mail, to the senders, otherwise, they would kill the e-mail’s recipients.

Police said the e-mails were being sent as spam and that they were advising people not to respond.

Marshal’s TRACE team, which monitors spam, phishing and virus activity around the world, has identified the six botnets that it says are sending the bulk of spam.

Botnets are virtual networks of private computers that are secretly controlled and used to distribute malware or viruses to other machines. Owners of such infected machines are almost never aware their computers are being used maliciously.

The Mega-D botnet, which was the top spammer early last month before disappearing off the radar, has now resurfaced, with a massive 35,000 machines under its control.

"This week, Mega-D returned again to represent 21 per cent of spam after a 10-day period of inactivity," explains New Zealand-based Bradley Anstis, Marshal’s VP of products.

"Owing to the break, Mega-D only accounted for an average of 11 per cent of spam during February. At its peak last month, it was responsible for a third of all the spam we caught in our spam traps.

"While recent publicity spooked the Mega-D spammers into taking their control servers offline, they have now clearly re-established themselves elsewhere."

Top botnet is now Srizbi, which is distributing a massive 39 per cent of spam using what Anstis describes as "advanced and extremely stealthy malware".

"Lately, Srizbi has been particularly active in attempting to spread itself through spam campaigns using celebrities as lures," he said."

The Rustock botnet is in second place, followed by Mega-D. Other significant nets identified by Marshal TRACE are Hacktool Spammer (also known as Spam-Mailer) and Pushdo (also Pandex and Cutwail).

Some botherders are controlling more than one botnet, Anstis believes, after the other main spammers have sent mail containing links to a web page usually contained in Mega-D spam.

Mega-D is well known for concentrating on so-called male enhancement products with names like ‘Megadik’ or ‘VPXL’ and brands like ‘Express Herbals’ and ‘Herbal King’.

Marshal reports that other botnets – including Srizbi and Pushdo – have been simultaneously sending spam with links to the same web page.

"It appears the spammers behind this campaign have access to more than one botnet to distribute their messages," said Anstis. "It’s also a possibility that one group controls more than one of these botnets".

The infamous Storm botnet, which is estimated to control 85,000 machines, is currently responsible for only three per cent of spam.

"The size of a botnet, measured by how many bots it has, does not necessarily correlate with how much spam it sends," Anstis says.