Blog

Numerous reports have been circulating about the sudden demise of the Rustock botnet. The question is whether this has had an effect on global spam levels.  Some observations: There are clear “humps” on Saturday, Monday and Tuesday – but less activity on Friday, Sunday and today. These patterns and levels

I have always been amused at people talking about the death of the antivirus industry. It has supposedly been dying for decades and it is still around and growing. What amuses me even more is how people can sound so knowledgeable about how antivirus works and why it is doomed

Commtouch Labs has detected large volumes of phony “unread twitter message” emails. All links route via intermediate sites to the same pharmacy site. Most of the links are being flagged in browsers as malware or (incorrectly) phishing. Our advice – mouse over any email links if you aren’t sure about

Spammers are an enterprising lot – registering domains that will be useful if there is ever a natural disaster such an earthquake or tsunami. Consider the domain “oceanictsunamialerts.info” registered on the 13th of December 2010.  Following the Japanese earthquake and tsunami on Friday, the domain is now being used in

Consider for a moment the stages involved in a traditional phishing attack:  Create the phishing page – either buried within a legitimate site or hosted on some temporary server Send out carefully socially engineered phishing emails requiring login for some reason – including the link to the phishing page Collect

Almost a year ago Commtouch released its Outbound Spam Protection (OSP) for Service Providers. Since then, I have been involved in numerous installations of the system and I would like to share my experience so far. If you asked me to describe it in just 2 words, I would say

Like any good scammer, spammers are always looking for ways around the system, knowing that their spam will be blocked if it contains the real URL they are trying to promote (in this case “russian-babes.ru”).  In this example, they are using a workaround to fight both real-time anti-spam protection and

In January we reported about the sudden increase in spam after a very quiet Christmas New year period. The Christmas lull followed a sustained decrease over the last few months of 2010 leading some to speculate about the future of spam and having “won the war”.  Having watched the trends

While our solutions filter out spam before they ever reach mailboxes, we are always on the lookout for how social engineering inspires innocent victims to take action. We were actually intrigued by this slick combination of spam and scam.  As you can see from this image, the spam itself is