This title of this email caught our eye – “privacy” – certainly an amusing way to introduce spam. Closer inspection revealed two interesting tricks, no doubt intended to fool content-based spam filters.  The first is the use of almost invisible, random text to break up words which might be detected

The theoretical answer to that question is quite complex but involves a definition like this: “Protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information”. This is a nice definition that ends up conveying a significant amount of information without meaning much at all.  I am a pragmatist: I need to model

Since this is my second post on the Commtouch blog I have added a brief intro – I have been working in the antivirus industry since 2004. I’ve served as an Escalation Anti-Virus Engineer at Trend Micro, Inc., a Senior Anti-Malware Analyst at F-Secure, Inc., and currently work as a

We received this email from a friend and immediately suspected that his Yahoo account had been compromised. The subject was clearly not generated by a human and the email contained a single link with some garbled text.  Following the link brought us to some exciting special price meds just in

Yes – you should give thanks for anti-spam since it would have prevented you from receiving all sorts of unwanted emails. Like these horrid marketing scams. This group of spammers needs recipients to respond before Thanksgiving in order to claim government grants. The email titles take the email address names

November 13, 2011, Saturday – The world will once again witness two of world boxing’s greatest fighters trading punches in the ring to see who’s the toughest and who will be win the WBC Super Welterweight World Title. For those of you who are not boxing aficionados, more info about

Our partner Openfind Information Technology, Inc., providing message communication, security and assurance solutions and based in Taiwan, have detected increased use of a new technique used to trick users into opening malware executables. The files are distributed via email (compressed). The emails includes standard “you have received an important document

Commtouch recently acquired Command, the antivirus division of Authentium. We had a quick chat with Amir Lev, Commtouch CTO and president, to discuss the current state of global virus activity and the Command AV SDK. What are current malware trends?  The latest trends involve combined threats – emails with an

First there was Sillyspam (search Twitter for #sillyspam) – where we tweet about amusing spam topics and content that we have seen. Then we added “Silly 419” – describing some of the more outlandish attempted fraud emails that we pick up in our labs. And now we add “Sillyspam Websites”.

Spamit is the organization allegedly behind a fair percentage of the worlds pharmacy spam. The closure of Spamit was reported to have taken place around the 27th of September. According to more recent reports the reasons for the sudden “voluntary” closure are related to charges brought against the individuals behind