This week, CNET’s Robert Vamosi talks with Jose Nazario, a senior security researcher at Arbor Networks, about the link between spam and botnets. Recently, Symantec said in its February 2008 "State of Spam" report (PDF) that 78.5 percent of all e-mail is spam; they also said most of that is now coming from Europe. That’s [...]

Doha � Swinging into action after receiving complaints of cellphone users receiving spam and messages from scamsters, the country�s telecom regulatory authority, ictQATAR yesterday issued tips to avoid being a victim. The body reacted after complaints from subscribers telling them they had been chosen by Vodafone as winners of $160,000 in a random selection. All [...]

Virginia’s Supreme Court on Friday upheld the first US felony conviction for spamming. The spammer will serve nine years in prison for sending what authorities believe to be millions of messages over a two-month period in 2003. Jeremy Jaynes is the man who will make history. A Raleigh, North Carolina, resident who made Spamhaus’ top [...]

When people started discovering Facebook, it was a such a refreshing change to MySpace, with more to do, and less pointless spam inhibiting the experience. Unfortunately, it seems that Facebook has now caught up with its rival, and is just as spammy and annoying. I was a big fan of Facebook for a few months, [...]

Technology has put a stop to a lot of mischief. For instance, you no longer can call the store and ask if they have Prince Albert in a can. Thanks to caller ID, they’ll know exactly which idiot you are when you say, “well, you’d better let him out!” The Prince Albert-in-a-can joke may be [...]

The third episode of the GeekCast Show was roughly an hour of Sam Harrelson, Jim Kukral and myself chatting it up about web celebs, affiliate network interfaces, iJustine, Jim’s super masculine GuyLights, and my new GeekCast hat that was banned by my wife. My Banned GeekCast HatWe also opined on the TechCrunch presidential endorsements, Sam’s [...]

I’ve heard a lot about the "hey, you could break CAPTCHAs by showing people porn in exchange for solving them!" theory, but I haven’t seen a live example yet. Just found one linked to from a word salad spam blog that came up in Google Blog Search results. (No, don’t click on it, it has [...]

One year ago this month, Spamhaus launched the Policy Block List, also known as the PBL. Now a year later we look back to see what effect it has had. The PBL was created to be a used together with our other DNSBL zones, the SBL and the XBL. At the same time as the [...]

Spam has risen for the sixth quarter in a row, with 96.4% of all e-mail now spam, says network monitoring firm Ipswitch. Using its Spamometer system, which measures e-mail that is received, Ipswitch said the increase in spam for the quarter just gone compared with 95% the previous quarter, and the 84% for the same [...]

Spam emails, purporting to deliver a money-transfer notification from Western Union, but containing an attachment with an executable trojan, have been spotted in the wild by researchers at Sunbelt Software. The emails tell the recipient that $3,750 has been transferred to them by Western Union and includes a tracking number and transfer sheet, Alex Eckelberry, [...]