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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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.
In a move to halt the illegal selling of contact and other personal information to spammers and telemarketers, the United Kingdom will begin jailing people/organizations that sell or otherwise misuse personal data, such as email addressses. Offenders found guilty of selling contact information to spammers or cold call marketers will face up to two years in jail.
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The Distributed Denial of Service Attack launched on Tuesday against the 13 internet root servers utlized millions of zombie Botnet PCs. The attack briefly overwhelmed two of the servers, but was more or less successfully thwarted. The attack does, however, highlight the strength of the criminal distributed computing network which hackers have built over the years.
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Spammers, always adding to their bag of thug tools, have begun sending spam disguished as legitimate newsletters. To date, the fake newsletters have not accounted for large volumes of spam, but the practice is disturbing because:
1) Recipients might be more likely to open the messages, and,
2) spoofed newsletters might be penalized in any number of ways.
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The Storm message has morphed into over 250 variants.
A wide variety of subject lines are being used in the spam campaign, including “You’re so Far Away”, “I Dream of you”, “Dream Date Coupon”, “Together You and I”, “A Bouquet of Love”, “So in Love” and “Cuddle Up”. Attached to the emails are files called ‘flash postcard.exe’ or ‘greetingcard.exe’. When opened, the worm attempts to send itself to other email addresses found on the recipient’s PC, while also attempting to download further malicious code from the internet, designed to take over the computer and use it to send spam on behalf of hacking gangs.
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Vint Cerf, “father of the internet,” warned attendees at the world economic forum that botnets could undermine the future of the internet. Cerf estimates that 25% of all PCs currently connected to the internet (about 150 Million) are infected with trojans.
We have been watching the growth of the Botnet closely over the past several years, and have seen it grow in size and sophistication. One particular Botnet, dubbed Spam Thru, is particulalry sophisticated. It clears other trojans off of computers it has infected and is designed to avoid detection and removal.
Cyber Thugs use Botnets to send spam, steal data and launch denial of service attacks. Essentially, the botnet is a free, illegal, criminal distributed computing network.
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An interesting thread in Slashdot examining Blue Tooth Spam.
Business Week reports that China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea are in the top 10 nations for hosting Malware. The United States is number one, at 32%. China is second and hosts 31% of the wordls malware.
According to web and im filtering firm Scan Safe, spyware increased 254% in 2006. However, web based viruses decreased 32% from 2005 levels.