Six Apart is launching a new free open source product into beta called TypePad AntiSpam. While the product is new, the technology behind it has been used by Six Apart since May 2007 on millions of hosted TypePad blogs.

What’s TypePad AntiSpam?

• A free, open source system powered by TypePad for blocking comment spam on any site, free no matter how many comments you get.
• A service for all bloggers, built into TypePad blogs already and implemented as a free plugin for users of platforms like Movable Type and WordPress.
• An open source engine which developers can use to create new antispam services, with customizable rules and logic.
• In beta! We’re hearing great results from testers so far, but wanted to open up TypePad AntiSpam to a larger audience so we can make sure the system is getting as smart as possible.

Like Akismet, TypePad AntiSpam takes a multi-headed heuristic approach to detecting and blocking comment spam on blogs. If you are a blogger, you’ll want to use Akismet or TypePad AntiSpam.

source: www.sixapart.com/blog/2008/05/typepad-antispam-whats-good-fo.html

Spam king Sanford Wallace and phishing buddy Walter Rines hijacked some 300,000 MySpace accounts and sent hundreds of thousands of spam messages and comments across the service. They got their punishment: a whopping $225 million judgment in favor of MySpace, Information Week reports.

MySpace decided to sue when it discovered the duo had lured MySpace users into revealing their login information through phishing sites. After obtaining user IDs and passwords, the pair distributed messages to the users’ friends list with links to various Web sites involving gambling, pornography and ringtones. According to court documents, Wallace and Rines distributed 735,925 messages during the scam and earned over $500,000 in the process.

A blog purporting to be from Sanford Wallace (The site registration address matches the address on the court docuuments.) Says:

I am amazed whenever I read an article written about the latest crimes I’ve committed and the latest court orders I’ve broken.

I don’t even learn about most of these claims until I read about them somewhere on the Internet. I live a low profile life. In the meantime, the world around me apparently still blames me for every spam and phish page on the Internet.

Please, move on to the real spammers.

..I am still waiting to be served. And I haven’t been hiding either. The whole case was one big PR move..

source:

www.crn.com/security/207800154

government.zdnet.com/?p=3813

blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/006956.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_Wallace

A new type of spam focuses on consumers’ frustrations with high gas prices, according to McAfee Avert Labs.

The emails begin by complaining about the rising cost of gas and then direct the reader to a website, with the promise the “product” will save the user 70 cents per gallon. The spam also mentions this gas saver was highlighted on news channels and online videos.

Gasoline-related spam is still relatively new, however. McAfee stated that so far it makes up only 0.2 percent of all spam being circulated.

How many e-mails do you get every day that offers to sell you medicine without prescription, and at a fraction of their real cost? How many offers do you get to buy pirate software at one-tenth of their catalog prices? Do you find your inbox so full of unwanted, unsolicited e-mail that you can’t find the useful mail? Do you spend several minutes or hours everyday downloading mail that ultimately turns out to be useless? If you answer ‘yes’ to any of the above, then you are the victim of e-mail abuse, commonly known as ‘spam’.

Spam mail is a booming business on the internet, and it is growing every day. Thousand of millions of unwanted e-mail are released every day, though only a fraction of that ever reaches actual addresses. Who does it, and why? And what can you do about it?

Spammers are clever technicians who have found out a way of sending mail in great bulks to thousand of addresses at once. They sometimes set up their own mail servers, but they can also use the service of other people’s servers without their knowledge. The dominant method of sending e-mail is known as SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), and by default this service doesn’t have a way to authenticate the sender of an e-mail. So free mail servers on the internet often accept mail from anyone, and relay it to other servers. This type of freely accessible SMTP server is known as an ‘open relay’ an is one of the greatest nuisances on the internet. They are a free ball for spammers.

But that’s only how they send mail. But how did they get your address in the first place? You sure didn’t write to any of them!
There are two answers to that. First, they own certain software that acts like scavengers, scouring the web looking for anything that looks like an e-mail address. Whatever they can gather, they save in a central database. Then these are auctioned off to bidders, who want to send you unwanted advertisements. Sending e-mail barely entails any recurring cost, so if even 1% of all victims of spam click on the links provided, the spammers stand to make huge profits.
The second answer is, they don’t have any idea that you exist. They are just using a random string-generating program that churns out billions of possible e-mail addresses. Only a fraction of that number actually represents valid e-mails, but as has been said above, sending e-mail is cheap. They can afford to send ten thousand e-mails even if only one of them is real.
What can you do to avoid spam? First, get a really good e-mail program, for instance the freely downloadable Thunderbird. Good e-mail programs have an inherent ability to recognize spam and delete them before they ever reach your inbox. Secondly, report spams to your Internet Service Provider, so that they can set up appropriate filters to differentiate the good from the bad.
These simple steps can go a long way to help you tackle e-mail abuse.

While theater goers are flocking to performances of Monty Python’s musical comedy “Spamalot” as it tours across America, “a lot of spam” within e-mail inboxes is proving to be no laughing matter for Air Force and government employees. Spam is unsolicited and generally undesired bulk e-mail messages. Senders use spam for reasons ranging from advertising new products or services, to scams that bilk people of their finances. Increasingly, spam is used to download software to personal computers for malicious reasons.

At Air Force Materiel Command bases, the number of spam e-mails has been increasing for months. Currently, 90 percent of all inbound e-mail messages are spam. For AFMC that means more than 100 million spam messages a month, a 400 percent increase over the past six months. Within AFMC, special filtering software deletes more than 98 percent of all spam. In some cases only suspicious attachments are removed.

According to Lt. Col. Robert Henning, with Headquarters AFMC’s Communications, Installations, and Mission Support Directorate, most spam reaching AFMC recipients is addressed to AFMC Distribution Lists.

“This helps explain the recent widespread delivery, so we are exploring ways to tighten the use of distribution lists to help reduce external spam,” Colonel Henning said.

The potential damage from spam e-mails is the introduction of harmful attachments and Denial of Service Attacks. Colonel Henning said that a common tactic of recent spam e-mails is to get users to click on a Web link of a non-threatening Web site that has already been compromised.

“From there, the spammer attempts to install malicious code and gain access to our desktops and laptops, bypassing our network boundary defenses,” he said. “This is now a serious security threat.”

The colonel added that it’s important for workers to know what to do with spam e-mails when they appear.

“Recipients should send spam, as an attachment in a new e-mail, to their base/site network control center spam mailbox for analysis,” Colonel Henning said. “Users at each AFMC base can obtain that e-mail address by contacting their client support administrator.”

source:www.afmc.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123097246

There are many programs out there that can help you with Spy ware and Mal ware protection.

Some of the best programs to us are as follows;

The Cleaner Trojan checker For Trojan checker.
Male-ware Protection – http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php
AVG – Offers free virus protection for your pc without causing vulnerabilities

Many other are available but be sure you get them from reputable services. All information secured on hard drives makes some people thing they are secure. They are NOT if they do not follow the simple instructions to avoid opening up our computer to malicious attacks.