Commtouch Café

Scammers are always phishing for information – Protect yourself and your data

2010-03-15T14:21:02Z

Phishing is the easiest way for criminals to find out your username and password; they simply ask you for it. Many password thieves send emails pretending to be from your bank, Facebook or PayPal, among others. These messages explain that a problem exists with your account and include a request that you “verify” your username and [...]

Identity Theft, Fraud & You – Your Public Profiles Make it Simple

2010-03-07T12:34:01Z

You’re proud of your achievements and accomplishments. You’re also proud of all your family members have achieved. While you have decided to share this information with friends, family, and acquaintances, you may also be sharing it with cybercriminals looking to steal your identity. According to your family tree profile, Uncle Bob’s son, John, is your first cousin [...]

Spammers have given up!

2010-03-03T15:02:00Z

No, not really – but a recent outbreak seems to use no technique at all to get recipients to click on a link to a malware-hosting site. The emails (samples below) have no subject (other than RE: or FW:), no text telling you why you should click on the link, no hidden URLs behind on-screen [...]

Blogger phishing attack uses “improved” email template

2010-02-24T10:40:36Z

The Commtouch detection center has confirmed that an email I received yesterday on one of my private accounts was part of a mass phishing attack aimed at Blogger (and Google) users. In this case I suspected it was a phishing email before opening it since I received it via an email address that is not [...]

Stop Email Scammers During Scam Awareness Month

2010-02-17T16:57:58Z

According to Ultrascan, scammers’ income increased from $6.3 billion in 2008 to $9.3 billion in 2009. February is Scam Awareness Month – Scamnesty 2010 – under the auspices of the UK Office of Fair Trading. UK Consumers can forward their scam mail and SMSs, and even deliver old-fashioned paper letters to Scamnesty Bins located around the [...]

Meet Commtouch at These Upcoming Events

2010-02-16T09:36:46Z

Over the next several months, Commtouch will be visiting and taking part in a number of industry conferences and exhibitions. If you’re interested in learning about Commtouch’s advanced web and messaging security technologies for the first time, or want to catch up and find out what’s new with our solutions, we’d like to invite you [...]

Spammers: Looking to Save Money? Here’s how!

2010-02-02T11:55:44Z

Next time you have some Viagra to sell or malware to spread, forget those passé, brute-force directory attacks. You don’t have to generate email addresses with all those alphanumeric characters or “typical” names and email structures, such as jane.smith@FORTUNE500COMPANY.com. And you especially don’t have to take days to deliver them slooowly and methodically so corporate [...]

An academic approach to anti-spam

2010-01-28T16:14:04Z

A recent article in the New Scientist entitled “To beat spam, turn its own weapons against it”, describes the work done by a team of academics to find a more effective way to filter spam. The team, from ICSI Berkeley and UC San Diego, have come up with a way of analyzing the spam email messages sent by [...]

Q4 2009 Internet Threats Trend Report Released

2010-01-13T10:56:35Z

During the fourth quarter of 2009, the Mal-Bredo A virus continued to circulate the world for the second quarter in a row. Cybercriminals morphed its packaging from attachments that appeared to be from internationally known package delivery companies to attachments that appeared to be from Facebook, the popular social networking site. Throughout the quarter, the number [...]

SpamAssassin Y2K10 Bug Causes False Positives Worldwide

2010-01-05T12:05:40Z

Open source leverages the creativity of thousands while it relies upon the management of a limited number of contributors to maintain and debug the software. While open source creates true positive results such as Linux, a glitch in the most famous free Anti-Spam – SpamAssassin – resulted false positives and rejection of legitimate mail. SpamAssassin [...]