The Mob Moves In

By | November 24, 2011
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You know if AccountancyAge are reporting it, there’s money involved. According to the bean-counters, organised crime is looking at how it can make money from spam and virus writing, which means attacks may become less common than now but more dangerous. Quoting Russian antivirus expert Eugene Kaspersky, the latest MiMail worms were the first in a new type of attack aimed at deriving financial profit from viruses and malware.

Recent MiMail variants collected and forwarded PayPal account details to the worms’ creators. ‘The business of the mafia is business, and there could be a lot of money to be made from malware and spamming. As they consolidate control, the business of hacking and virus writing they will squeeze out independents. Spam will be an early target,’ he said.

What’s the interest for the mafia? Stealing commercial valuable secrets, bringing down networks for extortion, grabbing money from PayPal accounts.

Worm Hits Diebold’s Windows ATMs

By | November 24, 2011
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It’s not happy days for Diebold, the company behind ATMs and electronic voting. Its e-voting machines have been the source of much controversy — earlier this month it withdrew its suit against people who had posted leaked documents about alleged security breaches in the software. Now its automatic teller machines have been hit — by viruses.

Wired reports that ATMs at two banks running Microsoft Windows software were infected by a computer virus in August, the maker of the machines said. The ATM infections, first reported by SecurityFocus.com, are believed to be the first of a computer virus wiggling directly onto cash machines. (The Register said in January that the Slammer worm brought down 13,000 Bank of America ATMs, but they weren’t directly infected: the worm infected database servers on the same network, spewing so much traffic the cash machines couldn’t process transactions.)

But how can an ATM get infected? SecurityFocus says that while “ATMs typically sit on private networks or VPNs, the most serious worms in the last year have demonstrated that supposedly-isolated networks often have undocumented connections to the Internet, or can fall to a piece of malicious code inadvertently carried beyond the firewall on a laptop computer.” In other words: the folk who write worms are smarter than we are.

Do You Know Anyone Who Buys From Spammers?

By | November 24, 2011
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There’s another campaign on the road: This time it’s telling you not to buy anything advertised on spam. I don’t know anyone who would do this kind of thing, but there you are. According to Mike Adams (“President & CEO, Arial Software, LLC, Permission Email Pioneer and founder of the “Spam. Don’t Buy It.” public education campaign”) says: “While Internet users are rightfully raising their voices and urging legislators to outlaw spam, few users examine their own contribution to the problem. It is true that the primary blame for spam falls on spammers, but it is equally true that spam wouldn’t exist at all if Internet users stopped buying products offered by spammers.”

His argument: “Every user’s inbox is a reflection of what Internet users are buying through spam. No spammer sends emails in the interests of the public good: they do it for profit, and that profit is only generated when Internet users open spam, read spam, and buy from spam. To stop spam, we have to stop buying from spam. That’s why I have created the “Spam. Don’t Buy It.” campaign, to help educate Internet users on their role in the ongoing spam problem.”

Actually, the website does have some interesting bits. I’m just not quite sure what a “Permission Email Pioneer” is.

Spam Law Passed, Not Many Impressed

By | November 24, 2011
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The U.S. Congress has passed the anti-spam bill, after the House voted to approve minor Senate amendments, The Register reports. Not everyone thinks it’s a good idea. The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act does more harm than good in the fight against spam, according to critics.

The bill criminalises common spamming tactics, such as using false return address. But it overrides Californian laws which had allowed spam recipients to sue spammers. The bill requires online marketeers to act on requests to “opt out” of future emails, unlike European Union legislation which requires them to seek the permission of consumers first.

The Can-Spam Act is expected to be signed into law by President Bush before the start of next year.

Anti-Spam Mail Service Aliencamel Adds Humps

By | November 24, 2011
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One anti-spam service I tried a few months back was Melbourne-based Aliencamel, which I thought was good but not perfect, have just announced some new features which may make the product more competitive in a tight marketplace. Aliencamel works as a mix of different anti-spam and anti-virus elements designed to keep out the riff-raff so you only download what you want.

The new version turns Aliencamel into a kind of email account in its own right, including the ability to preview email in a web browser before tagging it as spam or downloading via your normal email program, full webmail access to your mailbox, as well as disposable email addresses you can use to deal with suspect web sites and third parties you’re not sure about. On top of that the service’s Pending Email Advisory — a sort of floating alert that lets you know of new email that is suspect without actually sending it to you — changes to reduce frequency of advisory emails.

Most important, I think, is the fact that Aliencamel are going to embrace Bayesian filters — the simple method of assigning a probability of spamminess to emails by looking at the innards of the email (content, header, HTML code) and comparing it to other emails it has looked at. I adore Bayesian filters (I still use POPFile) so I think it’s great that Aliencamel are moving in that direction.

(Aliencamel, by the way, is an anagram of clean email. It took me months to get it.)