| Anti-spam software: Not a plug-and-play solution By Jay Dougherty
By Jay Dougherty, Washington- Soon after installing anti-spam software, Maryland-based marital therapist Laurie Thorner saw a welcome reduction in the amount of spam she received. Unfortunately, after a few weeks she also noticed an unwelcome reduction in the number of Internet-based referrals she was getting for her business. Only after she spoke directly with one of her colleagues who claimed to have e-mailed her multiple times did she link the installation of the anti-spam software with the reduction in business. "It turned out that the anti-spam software was identifying a lot of legitimate personal mail as spam, and I never saw it," Thorner told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa. "That software definitely cost me money in lost business and lost time." Like many adopters of this still developing software category, Thorner learned the hard way that anti-spam solutions virtually never provide the "install it and forget it" solution that marketers promise.
Norton Internet Security 2007
With so many companies now offering free protection against internet-based security threats, there are only a couple of reasons why you might want to fork out for software: complete security and a simple-to-manage package. Can the latest version of Norton Internet Security make the grade? Features We're well used to seeing security suites combine firewalls and anti-virus software to protect us, and Norton adds some more recent problems to its books, such as phishing, pharming and rootkits. However, it's what it leaves out that's most telling: no anti-spam, no internet filtering and no built-in back-up software. These can be purchased from Symantec separately, but to our minds that defeats the object of a security suite. Performance Symantec's record speaks for itself, and the company continues to have a virtually unblemished history of picking up viruses and other internet problems, and dealing with them before they have a chance to cause problems to the general public.
ASK THE EXPERT: Spam is a formidable enemy
QUESTION: What can be done to stop (unsolicited e-mails about) stock tips and discount drugs .... that have no remove instructions. Or those that, when I reply to them, I find that their e-mail address is not recognized? -- David Griffith ANSWER: My answer isn't going to cheer you up. Spammers are getting more skillful. Even my commercial anti-spam software is doing a poor job stopping some of these e-mails, especially the stock tips you mention. Most spam-blocking programs either use the Internet address of the mailer or a set of rules that help the program identify spam. The stock tip e-mails change addresses for almost every mailing. So you may get one from john@thisaddress.com and the next will come from jake@thataddress.com. Many of them use an electronic image of text -- basically a photograph of the text message -- rather than text itself.
US Court Order Could Boost Spam By 50 Billion Daily
A U.S. District Court judge ordered anti-spam organization Spamhaus to pay $11.7 million in damages to an e-mail marketing company. The U.K.-based Spamhaus said the U.S. court had no jurisdiction and ignored it. Now anti-spam advocates worry that the judge might order ICANN to eliminate the Spamhaus domain.
By Gregg Keizer
TechWeb News
Oct 11, 2006 02:17 PM A September decision by a federal court may mean more spam hitting inboxes, an analyst said Wednesday. Last month, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois ruled in favor of e-mail marketing company e360insight, and ordered U.K.-based Spamhaus, a non-profit anti-spam organization, to pay $11.7 million in damages. e360insight had argued that the Spamhaus blacklist -- a database of spammers and suspected spammers that is widely used by spam filtering services and software -- erroneously included its domain.
Spammers dodging OCR with .gif 'cut-and-paste'
Spammers have begun slipping their junk past optical character recognition (OCR) software through a variety of animated .gif "cut-and-paste" techniques, says John Graham-Cumming, an anti-spam activist who maintains The Spammers' Compendium and also founded Electric Cloud. On blog posts this week -- here and here -- Graham-Cumming explains two of the OCR-evading methods that were brought to his attention by Nick FitzGerald, a New Zealand anti-spam consultant and regular contributor to The Spammers' Compendium. (It being 3 a.m. in New Zealand, I'm relying on Graham-Cumming's account here.) ... (Update: FitzGerald explains his advantage.) "I don't know how widespread it is," Graham-Cumming told me this afternoon. "(The second spam message) was targeted for this Wednesday, so I think it's probably pretty new." The second of the two techniques takes animated .gif spam "to a new level," he said on his blog. From the blog post: "The first image is the .gifs background and is displayed for 10ms then the second image is layered on top with a transparent background so that the two images merge together and the image the spammer wants you to see appears.
New Bug Installs Legit Anti-Virus Program
Are you using a Microsoft Windows machine to cruise the Web but don't have up-to-date anti-virus software installed? No worries: A sophisticated new breed of malware identified this week will silently download and install a legitimate anti-virus program on your computer if it manages to sneak its way onto your machine. But this isn't a good thing, as the malware is really intended to make it easier for spammers to do their business. For several years now, the top method for sending spam has been to infect Microsoft Windows machines with malware that turns the PCs into "zombies" (or "bots") that bad guys can use to anonymously relay junk e-mail. Tons of malware in circulation today will actively search for and remove other hacking programs that may have already set up shop on infected computers.
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