At Cloudmark, we make use of email feedback in numerous forms to help determine what mail is and isn’t spam. Some of that feedback comes in the form of spamtraps (sometimes also referred to as honeypots) and the way those spamtraps were created can vary, resulting in different issues for a sender to consider. Over [...]
Take a look at this message and see if you can tell if it came from PayPal or not? Fig 1. Fake Email from PayPal. This email is NOT from PayPal. It’s from a spammer, who wants you to go to your browser and open the “AccountValidation.html” page that he or she has attached. Why [...]
The Brookings Institute this week released a policy paper postulating the use of legal action to stop the spread of cybercrime. The author, Wired Magazine’s Noah Shachtman, speculates that new pressure from the US government on businesses to report data breaches combined with additional requirements for ISPs to be accountable for the things that happen [...]
Google announced last week via a post on their Groups Announcement Page that they are removing the ‘Add members directly’ option within the service. This feature allowed Groups to be created and email addresses added without requiring any confirmation from the recipient, and not surprisingly this was heavily abused by spammers. We are happy to note this [...]
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) will be meeting next week in Quebec City. The IETF, which produces the RFC document series that defines Internet standards, hosts a lot of activity that is of current interest to the messaging security community. Cloudmark is a very active participant in these processes, as a means of staying [...]
The UK’s Sunday Telegraph yesterday reported that they had been offered more than 1 million UK mobile phone numbers by an Indian Mobile Marketing company, raising concerns that the UK was about to experience a deluge of SMS spam.The agency providing the numbers could provide no evidence that the subscribers had “opted-in” to receive marketing [...]
The BBC reported yesterday that, according to the former UK Justice Secretary Jack Straw, UK insurance companies are selling the details of accident victims to personal injury claim firms for between £200 and £1,000 each. These firms then encourage the victim to make a personal injury claim against the third party that caused the accident. [...]
Spammy text (SMS) messages. Some of you might get a few of them each day, others perhaps the odd one or two a week. Maybe you’re lucky enough not to receive any. It does sound familiar though, right? It should do as this is where we were with email around 15-20 years ago. This week’s [...]
Email is a remarkably resilient technology. For the number of times we’ve heard pundits claim “email is dead” upon the advent of SMS, IM, Myspace or Facebook, it remains an underpinning of communication online. You can’t get a Facebook or Gmail account without some other permanent email address, so I don’t think email is going [...]
uSwitch calls for government pressure to stop spam According to new research from uSwitch SMS spam is rising at an alarming rate in the UK with mobile subscribers receiving, on average, 4 million spam messages per day. The research showed that messages are often fraudulent in nature (mostly premium rate call scams) and others are [...]