Spam News

Are they human? No, they're spammers

Thursday, December 11, 2008

As spam levels continue to rise, a security blog points to this year's security-breaching trend of cybercriminals using legitimate email providers.

Providers such as Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo have been "systematically abused by spammers," a Zdnet.com blog reports.

According to a recent MessageLab Intelligence annual report, an average of 12 percent of the spam this year came from those seemingly legitimate emails with the highest reported instances occurring this past September, which was 25 percent.

Spammers are accomplishing this by defeating the security measure CAPTTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart).

Another problem may be the fact spammers are finding ways to exploit providers such as Gmail to work for them. A research paper released this year titled Exploiting the Trust Hierarchy among Email Systems highlighting vulnerabilities in Gmail that would allow someone to send as many as 4,000 messages through one account.

In November, spammers were dealt a blow when hosting firm McColo was shut down. Though spam dropped by 42 percent, the level has been rising ever since, almost making the closing of McColo irrelevant.