Project Honey Pot traps its 1 Billionth Spam Message

Project Honey Pot – a distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape email addresses from the Web – received its billionth email spam message on Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 06:20 (GMT). It was a United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) phishing scam.
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Botnet continues massive malware campaign

"A massive spam campaign that poses as a message from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) asking people to register for H1N1 vaccinations remains a big problem today, a security researcher said. The messages lead unwary users to a convincing-looking CDC site where they’re asked to create a profile in order to receive a vaccination for the swine flu, which has made headlines for both its aggressive spread and a lack of vaccine.
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Zeus/Zbot spreading through drive-by download

"Zeus, or Zbot, recently began circulating spam claiming to come from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), requesting users submit a “tax refund request form” by clicking on a link that is provided. Clicking takes victims to a website that attempts to perform a drive-by download, meaning users do not need to take any further action to be infected, Don Debolt, director of threat research at CA, told SCMagazineUS.com on Monday.
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Spam’s Hidden Victims: Mobile Users

"Spam costs organizations $712 per employee/per year, according to Nucleus Research. However, these staggering numbers don’t even take into consideration one of spam’s latest victims: enterprise mobile users. Spam targeted at smart phones is on the rise and becoming a growing security and productivity concern.
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Spam: What to expect in 2009

"Spam, oh spam — can we ever get rid of you? 2008 saw a promising blow to the endless sea of junk mail, but the relief didn’t last for long. Now, spam experts say new forms of annoyances are on the way for the new year. "Some battles have been won in 2008, but the war is far from over," says Martin Thorborg, co-founder of SPAMfighter, a software development and spam research company.
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Spam Drops After Internet Providers Disconnect a California Hosting Firm

"The servers are operated by McColo Corp., which these experts say has emerged as a major U.S. hosting service for international firms and syndicates that are involved in everything from the remote management of millions of compromised computers to the sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and designer goods, fake security products and child pornography via email.
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SURBL anti-spam blacklist to be a paid service

"The operator team of the SURBL anti-spam blacklist have announced a far-reaching change to the usage policy. While the use of the project’s DNS server has been free so far, the list’s operators are now demanding a usage fee from service providers that offer spam filter services for more than 1,000 mailboxes or 250,000 emails per day.
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EstDomains Inc: A Superlative Scam and Spam Site Registrar

"According to RegistrarStats.com, EstDomains is the 49th largest domain name registrar, with more than 270,000 domains. Security Fix is still working on cataloging all of those domains, but for the purposes of this analysis we’ll examine some 10,000 Web site names that are both registered through EstDomains and using the company’s various domain name servers to route traffic to them.
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Spam: Fake CNN spam continues after mutating

"According to MX Logic, spam posing as CNN.com Top 10 lists peaked at close to 11 million messages per hour early Thursday, but remained at high volumes throughout the day Friday. The Colorado security vendor said it had been tracking an average of 8 million messages per hour since midnight.
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Spam: Spam king pleads guilty to federal wire fraud

"A man once described as one of the world’s top e-mail spammers pleaded guilty Friday to federal charges of mail fraud, wire fraud and failure to file a tax return.
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