Another one bites the dust

NASK (the Polish domain registry) has taken over a number of domain names used in spreading viruses and infections.

The domain names were used to spread and control dangerous malware known as “Virut” . NASK’s actions are aimed at protecting Internet users from threats that involved the botnet built with Virut-infected machines, such as DDoS attacks, spam and data theft. The scale of the phenomenon was massive: in 2012 for Poland alone, over 890 thousand unique IP addresses were reported to be infected by Virut.
[…] Name servers for those domains were changed to sinkhole.cert.pl, controlled by CERT Polska – an incident response team operated by NASK. NASK’s actions were supported by threat intelligence data from CERT Polska, VirusTotal and Spamhaus. CERT Polska

Does CAN SPAM require multiple opt-outs on emails?
Email verification – what are we verifying

Related Posts

Confirming addresses for transactional mail

A colleague was asking about confirming transactional mail today. It seems a couple of big retailers got SBLed today for sending receipts to spamtraps. I talked a few weeks ago about why it’s important to let people unsubscribe from transactional email, and many of those same things apply to confirming receipts.

Read More

Spamhaus dDOS

I got mail late last night from one of the Spamhaus peeps telling me that they were under a distributed Denial of Service (dDOS) attack. This is affecting email. Incoming email is delayed and they’re having difficulty sending outgoing email. This is affecting their responses to delisting queries.
They are working on mitigation and hopefully will be fully up and running soon.
Updates when I get them.
Update (8/29/2012): mail to Spamhaus should be back.

Read More

Phones part of SMS botnet

Spammers have been moving into the phone market for a long time. Just recently security firms have discovered an Android  botnet. This botnet sends viruses over SMS, and when a link in the SMS is clicked, the phone is infected with the virus which then sends more SMS.
The technology for blocking and reporting SMS spam is comparable to email blocking technology 10 or 12 years ago. There just aren’t many tools for people to use to control this spam. M3AAWG is addressing mobile spam, but it still seems that the volumes are increasing without much recourse. Even the 7726 reporting number doesn’t seem to stop the spam (nor remove per-text charges).
At least in the beginning of the email spam problem, we didn’t have botnets. Now, at the beginning of the curve for SMS spam, we already have self replicating botnets. I’m afraid the good guys might be behind on this issue.
Then again I might just be cranky because SMS spammers woke us up at 4:30 am.
Infoworld article
TNW article
PCWorld article

Read More