Trusted research on email, mobile, web, and DNS security.
I was watching an excellent presentation by Rob Ragan and Oscar Salazar when I realized that I hate free stuff. Not of course the free stuff that I use, I’m fine with that. It’s all the free stuff that spammers and other cyber criminals exploit that ticks me off. Let me explain what Ragan and […]
Pinterest was hit this week by a vast diet pill spam attack from a well established cyber criminal gang we call the Com Spammers. As well as attacks on social networking sites such as Pinterest, they have also been active for years in email and SMS spam. Their landing pages often contain video clips from […]
In the past two weeks it’s quite possible that you received spam apparently from a friend’s AOL account, saying something like Have a nice day or People say it really works and then a link to what looks like a news magazine web site talking about diet pills. Here’s one of several that I received. […]
April 12th is the 20th anniversary of the first large scale commercial spam – the infamous “Green Card Lawyers” message that was posted to every newsgroup on Usenet News (right). Though there were attempts at spamming starting as early as 1978, they went out to hundreds of users rather than the hundreds of thousands that […]
As the Chinese New Year rings in the year of the Horse, we’re also excited to announce the release of our 2013 Annual Global Messaging Threat Report. Looking back at the year, we discuss the evolving realm of highly targeted, regional SMS spam campaigns, spammers’ preference for financial themes, Apple iMessage abuse, dramatic increases in […]
In a recent blog post, Team Snapchat responded to users who were complaining of a recent increase in spam (emphasis in the original): While we expect to minimize spam, it is the consequence of a quickly growing service. To help prevent spam from entering your feed, you can adjust your settings to determine who can […]
Snapchat may have had less than a happy New Year thanks to the authors of SnapchatDB.info. The site, released on December 31, features approximately 4.6 million Snapchat users’ username, phone number, and area-code-derived geographical region. These records were collected using an exploit published by Gibson Security who has been exploring the undocumented Snapchat API for […]
As many start-ups are teaching us, eyeballs and information are hot commodities. As online marketers branch out, mobile messaging, in particular SMS, as a communications channel is poised to become the next email — completely saturated with legitimate businesses looking to easily connect with and market to end-users. Marketing firms won’t be the only ones […]
Techcrunch reported this week that an app developer had downloaded thousands of phone numbers from active Facebook accounts. This technique has been around for a while and Cloudmark has seen it used by spammers to harvest email addresses and phone numbers, and to make both email and SMS spam more personal and more convincing. The […]
One common form of spam that we see across all sorts of platforms is work from home scams. As well as traditional email, this can also be found on most social networks, and more recently in SMS. She made it big doing this from her home. Check it out www.[redacted].com The spammers often link to […]