An email disguised as a message from the IRS is targeting corporate executive’s information. The email contains a Rich Text File (RTF) titled complaint.rtf, which, if opened, downloads a trojan to the executive’s computer. The trojan steals login passwords and sends them to a remote server.

The Anti-Phising Working Group (APWG) reports that the number Phising URLs detected in April was 55,643, almost double the previous record total.

April also saw a departure from Phishing URLs targeted almost exclusively at stealing login information for Financial Institutions to a more broad focus, including Financial Institutions, Social Netowrking, VOIP, and Email.  

Robert Alan Soloway was arrested in Seattle on Wednesday. Dubbed “The Spam King” by authorities, Soloway allegedly spammed tens of millions of messages. Most of these contained links to websites where his company, Newport Internet Marketing, sold products and services.

Soloway was once listed in SpamHuas’s Top 10 list of spammers and is still in the groups list of 135 internationally known spammers. If convicted, Soloway will face a maximum sentence of 65 years with fines up to $250K.

Upon his arrest, writers at publications across the globe suggested that the level of spam would fall dramatically. However, in reality, Soloway was only responsible for a very small percentage of global spam. His place as an uber-spammer has long been filled by Eastern Europoean spam gangs. In fact, spam levels have not decreased at all in the two days following his arrest.

The most positive effect of his arrest is the message it sends to any spammers or would be spammers operating in the US. Now if we could just get the Russins and Ukranians to follow suit… 

MxToolBox, Inc. announced today that it has added six blacklists, also known as blocklists, RBLs, or DNSBLs, to its popular email blacklist lookup tool. The MxToolBox blacklist lookup tool will now check IP Addresses for listing on the MSRBL-Images, MSRBL-Phishing, MSRBL-Spam, MSRBL-Viruses, MSRBL-Combined and SpamHaus PBL blacklists, in addition to the 130 plus blacklists the tool currently checks.

The company added the lists to the tool to improve the quality of results for users. ?We constantly work to make sure we have the most valuable, up-to-date list of Blacklists available to our users,? Founding CEO Eric Rachal said. ?If there is a list that might cause deliverability problems for legitimate email users, we want to make sure that it is included it in our tool.?

Blacklists are lists of IP Addresses that have sent spam or have exploitable characteristics. Blacklists are commonly employed by email administrators to block incoming spam. There are dozens of blacklists available for use and each has a unique criteria for including an IP Address. For example, some lists include IP Addresses serving machines that are infected with worms and viruses, and others list IP Addresses within dynamic ranges. While blacklists certainly help fight spam, they can also block legitimate emails from non-spamming IP Addresses, an event referred to as a false positive.

The MxToolBox Blacklist Lookup tool is a free service that allows email administrators and users for non-spamming organizations who are having email deliverability problems to identify any blacklists that list their IP Addresses and see the reasons for the listing. The company also provides free blacklist consultations to companies who are listed or want to proactively avoid being listed. For non-spamming companies with blacklisted IP Addresses that cannot solve the problem, MxToolBox offers unique paid services to permanently eliminate the problem.

Joel Harvey, Director of Marketing explains, ?The blacklist tool is not about email blacklists as much as it is about email deliverability. That is what our tool and our services are designed to do?enable and ensure the delivery of legitimate, non-spam email. The first step is to find out that you have a problem, like a blacklisted IP. The next step is to find out why. You may have a virus, you may have some configuration issues, or you may have an IP Address in an un-trusted range. The final step is to take action so that your critical outbound email starts flowing again.?

About MxToolBox, Inc.

MxToolBox.com is a popular website among IT professionals across the globe. The website has free tools that help users uncover, diagnose and fix messaging related problems. The company?s suite of free tools include MX Records Lookup, Server Diagnostics, Blacklist Lookup, SPF Records Lookup, and Free Mail Server Monitoring.   

MxToolBox, Inc. offers innovative on-demand messaging infrastructure to the small and medium business market throughout North America. The company provides leading edge ?Flip the Switch” messaging services to small and medium sized businesses, including email spam and virus filtering, blacklist protection, hosted email and groupware, email disaster recovery and email archiving.

France has launched a central platform for French internet users to report spam, which will be used to generate a blacklist, notify ISPs and prosecute spammers.

French speaking Internet users can copy and paste a spam message (and presumably the message headers) into a form on the signal spam website, or they can install a plugin that is compatible with most mail clients that will allow them to report a spam message by simply clicking a button icon in their mail client.

It will be interesting to see if a) this catches on, b) has any effect on spam levels in France, and, c) has an effect on spam levels elsewhere.

In celebration of National Small Business Month, MxToolBox, Inc. is offering free Email Archiving for new accounts with its FlexBox Business Email Hosting service throughout the month of May. Small Businesses that take advantage of the offer essentially will have free email archiving imbedded with a premium email hosting service for life.

?Small Businesses are becoming increasingly concerned with storing and accessing electronic business communications,? said CEO Eric Rachal. ?Recent developments, such as the new Federal eDiscovery Rule and NASD Small Business Continuity Plan Requirements, are driving small business managers to consider the implications of electronic discovery requirements. Preserving the vast amount of business information that is contained within email has also become a major concern? Rachal added, ?But, until now, email archiving has been both technologically and cost prohibitive to most small businesses.?

The imbedded email archiving feature within the FlexBox Hosted Email and Groupware package is ideal for small businesses, because it eliminates the need for multiple vendors and platforms, while ensuring that all company emails are preserved and easily retrieved/reproduced for as long as company policy requires. The email archiving feature saves all sent and received emails withint a given account. Even when a user deltes a message from their mailbox, the message remains in the archiving box. All emails and files are indexed for rapid retreival.

The FlexBox Hosted Email and Groupware service is an ultra-secure, ultra-reliable email hosting system designed to give small businesses all of the features that they would get if they had a professionally managed, dedicated email server in-house, without the excessive cost and administrative burden.

?Small Businesses absolutely need the same level of sophistication and functionality from their email systems as large enterprises,? continued Rachal, ?It usually just doesn?t make financial sense for them to manage those systems themselves. That?s why we created FlexBox?to give small businesses the security, reliability, flexibility, service and collaborative features that they need, at a price that makes sense.?

FlexBox Hosted Email is based on the Hosted Zimbra mail platform and includes shared synchronized calendars, shared synchronized contacts, shared documents, enterprise grade spam and virus filtering, blacklist protection, one gigabyte of storage per user, and more. The system is designed to work with multiple operating systems, including Windows and Mac, plugs into most desktop mail clients, such as Outlook and Apple Mail, and has an intuitive, powerful AJAX web interface. As an additional bonus, customers can opt to add full synchronization of mobile devices.
 

When discussing the system?s features, Joel Harvey, MxToolBox?s Director of Marketing chimed in, ?These features mean less to small businesses than the results they lead to. At the end of the day, FlexBox lets business managers rest easy. They know that their email is going to work. Messages will be delivered when and where they are supposed to be. Inboxes will not be flooded with spam. Dangerous viruses will be kept off of the network. Blacklists will not be a problem. Additional service needs, such as mobile device synchronization and archiving, can be easily added. Support for PC and Mac users is equally simple. And employees will be happier and far more productive.?

To take advantage of the Email Archiving offer, businesses should contact the company at 866-MxToolBox (866-698-6652) or on the web at http://www.mxtoolbox.com.

About MxToolBox, Inc.
MxToolBox, Inc. offers innovative on-demand messaging infrastructure to the small and medium business market throughout North America. The company provides leading edge ?Flip the Switch? on demand messaging services, including email spam and virus filtering, blacklist protection, email hosting, and email archiving.

AUSTIN – April 23, 2006 – eTools Group, Inc announced today that it will immediately begin operating under the name MxToolBox, Inc. MxToolBox will continue to serve the small and medium business customers and IT Consultants that currently subscribe to the company’s spam and virus filtering and email hosting services.

“We are re-branding because the IT community that uses our tools and services knows us as MxToolBox. We are changing our name to make it easier for people to do business with us and to eliminate any confusion that comes from operating under two names,” says CEO Eric Rachal. “For some customers, our name has changed, but our intense customer service ethic and our unwavering commitment to providing value absolutely has not.”

Company officials were careful to emphasize that eTools Group, Inc. was not bought by another company and is run by the same people and the same technology that its customers have come to know and rely on.  The company will be calling customers and sending letters with invoices to make sure customers understand the change. “The only discernable change that our eTools Group customers will see,” said Rachal, ” is the logo on their invoices will change from the eTools logo to the MxToolBox logo.”

MXToolbox.com is a popular website among IT professionals across the globe. The website has free tools that help users uncover, diagnose and fix messaging related problems. In an era when more and more companies are trying to charge users for access to content and tools, MxToolBox, Inc. is adamant about keeping its free tools separate from its paid services.

The company offers a suite of tools that allow users to test the health of their email systems and to diagnose email related problems. The tools include MX Records Lookup, Server Diagnostics, Blacklist Lookup, SPF Records Lookup, and Free Mail Server Monitoring.   

“We believe in providing value to the IT and business communities, whether to a client or someone at-large,” says Joel Harvey, Director of Marketing. “The free tools, or MX Widgets, are our way of doing that. Yes, we have paid services that thousands of IT professionals use to solve problems and keep them from reoccurring. Yes, we could charge for our widgets as well. But, in the end that would dilute the value that we provide, which is the last thing we want to do.”

April, 2007 was a busy month in the messaging security world. In just 30 days, we saw: Record set for

We first reported on bots inside Fortune 1000 companies in late March. Since then, the Support Intellegence Project has identified more large corporations with botnet infections. The list has grown to include AIG, AFLAC, Bank of America, Conseco, Thomsen Finacial and 3M. Most of the companies ideitifeid have repordtedly found anf removed the bot infections. They also claim that no data has been compromised. But, how can they be sure?

If a bot can infect and send spam from a network, what is to stop it from logging keystrokes or stealing corporate data? 

The House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security approved house bill HR 1525 by voice vote. The bill will now go before Congress for a vote. If voted into law, HR 1525 will make it a crime to install software to alter security settings, damage a computer or commit fraud. Violaters could face fines and/or prisson sentences of two to five years, depending on the offense.