Monthly Archives: March 2007

SEC Suspends Trading for Thirty-Five Pump and Dump Touted Stocks

On March 28, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) suspended for ten days the trading of thirty-five stocks heavilly touted in a recent, massive “Pump and Dump” spam scheme. SEC chairperson Christopher Cox described Pump and Dump spam as “…one of the worst menaces of the information age…”


The SEC has initiated a campaign, dubbed “Operation Spamalot,” to tackle the growing menace of Pump and Dump schemes touting often worthless stocks. The suspension of stocks pushed in the emails is just one prong of the agency’s strategy. SEC officials are working with foreign regulators to identify the perpetrators and, presumably bring them to justice (good luck).


The SEC estimates that 100 Million Pump and Dump Spam messages are sent per week, resulting in millions of dollars in profit for the spammers.


 

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Evidence of Botnet Infections at Fortune 1000 Companies

The common perception about Botnet generated Spam–a perception we share–is that it orginates almost exclusively from inadequately secured home user computers and small/medium sized business networks. While this is still mostly true, new evidence compiled by Support Intellegence suggests that at least 28 Fortune 1000 companies, including Oracle, Hewlet Packard and Best Buy, have sent Botnet generated spam from their networks.  


Assuing the evidence is true, what does it mean? Are these Fortune 1000 (Technology) Companies that bad at security, or are the bot herders that good at infiltration? Or, is it a little of both? Regardless, it shows that no machine, network or IT Manager is safe from the threat of bot infection and the potential for damaged reputation.


What do you think? 

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Company Suing Spamhaus is Sued for Spamming

e360 Insight, a Ilinois based mass mailing firm that sued Spamhaus ( a UK based RBL organization) for listing e360 Insight as a spammer has been sued in California for….spamming.  William Silverstein, a California engineer and free lance web host, alleges that he has received 80 plus illegal spam messages from e360 Insight since 2005. The case has yet to go to trial.



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DNSBLINFO

MxToolBox provides email blacklist lookups and mail server monitoring as a free service to the public.  We do not endorse any of these blacklists or even recommend them as reliable information to block spam and viruses in inbound emails.


 


However, many email administrators do choose to use these lists to block emails.  We make as many lists as possible available on our lookup tool to provide as much information as possible to those that are listed and, subsequently, rejected. 


 


We leave the interpretation of the results up to the professional opinion of the user.  


 


DNSBL Info is an “experimental list”. Nonetheless, the list that may be used erroneously by email administrators to reject emails. Theoretically, some email might be rejected by some servers because of this blacklist, and that is what our tool is intended to help diagnose.  Not all servers specify the reason that an email was rejected, so not all bounce messages may be useful in pointing to the source of the problem.  


 


If you received a notice from our free monitoring tool that your IP address is listed on DNSBLINFO, it is probably safe to assume that the listing is innocuous and no emails are being rejected.