Want a place to check the legitimacy of a charity? “Founded in 2001, Charity Navigator has become the nation’s largest and most-utilized evaluator of charities. In our quest to help donors, our team of professional analysts has examined tens of thousands of non-profit financial documents. As a result, we know as much about the true…
According to latest State of Spam and Phishing report, scam and phishing messages accounted for 21 percent of all spam, which is the highest level recorded since the inception of the report. For comparison, these types of spam represented only 10 percent of total spam a year ago. Historically, the primary vector for spam attacks…
A new KOOBFACE variant is again making the rounds in the social-networking scene. According to Trend Micro researcher, Norman Ingal, the malware employs Facebook’s Private Message feature to proliferate. The threat arrives as a Facebook private message that does not bear a subject but contains a supposed link to a YouTube video. Taking a closer…
It’s been ten years already; can you believe it? I’m talking about the U.S. Census. It’s been ten years since the last one. Time to do it again. No, it wasn’t on my calendar either. To remind all of us and to encourage us to participate, the U.S. Census Bureau is spending $340 million to…
VirusTotal has been well known to most readers of the blog. It’s a free virus and malware online scan service which allows submitters to test a particular file against a multitude of malware scanners. So, it’s not highly surprising that malware authors would try to use that name to further their gain. Today we came across…
Since January we publish monthly reports about the categories of the spam messages which got sent around the last month. These categories are detected by Avira’s AntiSpam engine. Between January and February 2010 there didn’t change much in the spam landscape. The top 3 is still occupied by Pharmacy, Other (spams which don’t fit any…
A few days ago, I blogged saying that Old websites don’t die they just get infected the other scenario is that they become part of a spammers SEO campaign. Working today, I went to check to see if the local police authority had cleaned up their old web page. So I wgetted the file and…
I have received a message this morning from an ICQ account with the following text written in UTF-8 and plain text: The message from ICQ.com ****** Hello. ICQ.com: we Remind you that all ICQ numbers which have not passed activation, 1.1.2010 will be removed from a server without restoration possibility. The status of yours ICQ…
Imagine that you’re sitting at home catching up on your email backlog. In comes an email from your ISP, FooBarBazCo (some creativity required here, I know). The email seems to be from Technical Support – ‘From: FooBarBazCo.com Team’ – and states that you need to update your email settings as a result of a recent…
In the month of January, we reported a drop in .cn spam. This was due to changes in the domain registration process introduced by CNNIC. In the first week of February, the .cn spam volume fell further and fluctuated between 0 and 4 percent of total URL spam. Another interesting trend was observed during this period….