July 7, 2008
Spammed persistently all month
Anti-virus software company, McAfee, offered free PCs to 50 volunteers across 10 countries who agreed to answer all the spam messages they received in a sort of electronic masochistic exercise.
(Link)
Using the pseudonym Penelope Retch (yeah, make you sick wouldn’t it?), Tracy Mooney replied to all the spam she got. She said:
"I was horrified. It's all snake oil. I'm amazed at what true junk is out there when you're clicking through on e-mail."
The point of the exercise was for McAfee to show that spam is more than just a nuisance – it’s a continuously-growing threat. (Link)
They reported that many messages were phishing emails and that many others carried malware and viruses.
Jeff Green, senior VP of McAfee Avert Labs said:
"In just 30 days there was quite a noticeable change in the system performance of their computers. Notably showing just how much malware was being installed without their knowledge. Spam is much more than a nuisance; it's a very real threat."
The global nature of spam was also revealed when French and German volunteers received 11% and 14% respectively of foreign language spam. Guy Roberts from Avert Labs said:
"If we'd have done this experiment two years ago, I would have expected a much smaller percentage of the spam to be written in a foreign language. Although this is a small percentage of the overall spam, it's something we expect to grow."
There’s plenty more information in the above link so go check it out.
The Spam Olympics
You know who is to blame for spam? You! Yes, you! With your capitalist outlook, your desire to be entertained, your obsession with always finding a bargain and willingness to purchase “performance enhancing” drugs, your readiness to give the spammers an audience is part of the problem.
Perhaps if you weren’t so into events like the World Cup and the Olympics then spam would decrease - Symantec kind of said on the day they announced that spam has plateaued off at a level of 80%.
(Link)
Symantec Regional director Patrick Evans said:
“Plateaus like this are always short-lived and we have a big sporting event that's about to come up, the Beijing Olympics. The one thing we saw at the time of the FIFA 2006 World Cup was a 40% increase in phishing attacks. I fully expect there to be plenty of phishing and spam activity around the Olympics.”
After the Beijing Olympics and the Nantucket Garden Club and American Daffodil Society Flower Club, the next big event is the 2010 football World Cup in South Africa. Although spam rates are relatively low in South Africa, organisations have already been targeted by spammers. It stands to reason that we will see an increase in spam as we build up to the summer soccer festival in 2010.
Patrick continued:
“During a recent denial-of-service attack against a local organisation, they were receiving between one and two million messages an hour, versus the normal million e-mails a day. Ninety-seven percent of this was spam and 100% of those were infected either with a Trojan or a virus.”
Maybe it’s time we saw how good these spammers are. How about a Spam Olympics? We could have disciplines like Equestrian Spamming (spammers try to send as many spam messages as possible from a laptop while show-jumping), Spam Vault (spammers must launch a spam attack from a strategically placed computer as they vault over a six-meter high bar) or Phishing.
The last one is just sending spam while fishing to be honest.
Keep your enemies closer
Be careful who you fire. A fifty year-old IT manager, Danielle Duann, illegally accessed the Life Gift Organ Donation Center database where she used to work and deleted files that cost $70,000 in damages.
(Link)
A few weeks back an IT manager from California was sentenced to over five years in jail and ordered to pay $409,000 in restitution for deleting information on his former employer’s network. Even worse – like the case above – the organisation in question was in the health sector. (Link)
Jon Paul Oson logged in to the network, disabled the automated backup and six days later systematically deleted files. It’s one thing to delete a few spreadsheets or those endless Powerpoint presentations with pointless, precisely-prepared pie charts. It’s another thing to delete critical medical records for low-income patients.
Oson went to great lengths to cover his tracks by wiping his PCs clean but he left a few tell-tale clues behind such as names of printer drivers that were associated with the user accounts he logged on with.
Mitchell Dembin, a proud Assistant US Attorney said:
“The court said that Oson seemed to think that he was the smartest guy around but, as often happens, he ran into someone smarter - the FBI."
How wonderfully dramatic! This one is tailor-made for Joel Schumacher – starring Jim Carrey as the disgruntled admin in his greatest ever performance, Cuba Gooding Jnr as the Assistant US Attorney who wouldn’t give up and Bill Murray as “Frank”.
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