Where does all that spam come from? Here’s a list of the top ten cities that we are blocking spam from. City State/Country Percentage of Total Spam Scranton PA 2.58 Chicago IL 2.29 Dallas TX 2.00 Sunnyvale CA 1.81 New York NY 1.22 Sao Paulo Brazil 1.13 Atlanta GA 1.05 Los Angeles CA 0.93 San [...]
We might imagine a spammer starting up their spam server and relaxing to enjoy their ill gotten gains on the beaches of Lagos or the Black Sea, but this is not the case. Just as Cloudmark’s spam filtering requires constant monitoring and enhancement by our dedicated operations and engineering staff, so a spammer needs to [...]
This year we have seen an increasing trend in spam from hacked domains. This is where the spammer hacks into a third party web site and places a file or script there that will redirect traffic to their web site. The web site continues to operate as usual, except that one or more URLs have [...]
In Chaucer’s day, the milder weather of April marked the start of the pilgrimage season. These days we have heat waves in March, and April is the time to render unto Caesar rather than God. As April 15th looms, American thoughts turn to taxes, not pilgrimages. Of course, where there is money involved, the spammers [...]
Think of Belgium and what comes to mind? Fries, waffles, beer? Maybe even the Manneken Pis. What you might not think of is spammy domain names. A couple of weeks ago, the Internet pharmacy verification site LegitScript released a report detailing how the domain registrar Internet.bs was helping to support the rogue online pharmacy trade [...]
An email I received this week offering tools for spamming Pinterest.com (yes, I am on those sorts of mailing lists) brought up once again the topic of spam on social networks. As soon as any social networking site starts to become popular, people start wondering how they can monetize that traffic – and some of [...]
ICANN met last week in Costa Rica, and the IETF meets next week in Paris. The one big thing these two meetings have in common is a nascent but significant push to replace the venerable WHOIS protocol, which lets one query a registry for information about the assignee of a network or the owner of [...]
The Nigerian Gold scam has a new form, with emails having subjects like, “DEAR LUCKY WINNER LONDON 2012 OLYMPIC GAMES LOTTERY PROGRAM!!!” and, “LONDON OLYMPICS 2012 INTERNET LOTTERY PROMOTION”. So far in February this type of spam is showing a 43% increase over January in average daily volume. Many events in the London Olympics were [...]
Valentine’s day is not just good news for florists, chocolatiers and restaurants. Spammers also use it to get attention for whatever scam they are currently promoting. For example, we have received a lot of spam reports for the following email Subject: A Valentine’s Gift _For Your Loved One ; up to 99% Off on Gifts, [...]
Cloudmark is seeing a high volume of spam complaints for messages which are using the Super Bowl to convince people to open the mail and click on the links. The messages have subjects such as “Celebrate the superbowl with a brand new iPad 2″ and “How Would You Like A New iPad 2-free?” The messages [...]