Facebook has won $711 million in damages against Sanford Wallace, a spammer, the InformationWeek website recently reported. The court documents according to the InformationWeek report indicate that Wallace and an associate spammed Facebook users with phishing messages. Those who responded by clicking on the links and submitted login information to phishing sites allowed Wallace and [...]
Million dollar penalties issued in Australia’s first SMS spam case
October 27, 2009 By 4 Comments
In a landmark decision last 23 October, the Federal Court in Brisbane imposed $15.75 million in penalties for contraventions of the Spam Act 2003. The decision was made against Mobilegate Ltd and Winning Bid Pty Ltd following the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s first court action taken against unsolicited SMS messages. ‘This is a significant [...]
Mixed trends in spamming for August
September 11, 2009 By 1 Comment
Symantec reported in its August 2009 MessageLabs Intelligence Report that the spam activity levels of Cutwail, one of the largest botnets globally, reduced by 90 percent following a shutdown of an ISP in Latvia but Donbot, another large botnet, continued to use shortened URLs in its spam runs, with ten billion emails being distributed in [...]
Australia and New Zealand join forces to combat spam
June 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment
In a media release today, the Australian Communications and Media Authority announced that it has joined forces with the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs in the fight against spam. ACMA and the NZ government agency signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to establish channels of communication that will allow both agencies to move quickly [...]
Spammers use images to flood emails with online ads
April 6, 2009 By 1 Comment
The number of websites blocked for hosting malicious content rose to 2,797 websites per day in March, according to a MessageLabs report, a 197.2% increase over the previous month and the highest level since October 2008. Photo: An email with images found by MessageLabs containing scripts The report attributed the increase to a sharp increase [...]
World’s 10 worst spammers
March 24, 2009 By 1 Comment
About this time last year when we launched this site, we ran a report on the world’s 10 worst spammers. This year we looked at the same roll-call at Spamhaus and the top 10 worst spammers in relation to their ranking last year. Here is a comparison: 1. Canadian Pharmacy (United States) “A long time [...]
World’s worst spam-originating countries
March 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment
The United States according to the Spamhaus Project is currently number 1 on the list of the Top 10 worst spam originating countries followed by China and Russian Federation. The Spamhaus Project is an international non-profit organization whose mission is “to track the Internet’s spam operations, to provide dependable realtime anti-spam protection for Internet networks, [...]
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