Mark Dalby

HITBSecNews – Keeping Knowledge Free for Over a Decade

HITBSecNews – Keeping Knowledge Free for Over a Decade

News ≈ Packet Storm

HITBSecNews – Keeping Knowledge Free for Over a Decade

Officials with Harvard University said they have cleared the pornographic images spread across its Web site by hackers and spammers.

Stephen Chapman, who writes the “SEO Whistleblower” tech blog for ZDNet.com, said he discovered pornographic images and links spread across unmoderated forums and publicly available pages on the school’s Web site, and officials with the school said they have been working to correct the problem, the Boston Herald reported Tuesday.

“We are aware that a number of Harvard servers were affected last week and we are addressing the issue,” Harvard spokesman Kevin Galvin said. Chapman said in his online article, “Harvard.edu: An Ivy League Pornographic Playground,” that he discovered pictures of naked women in addition to explicit language and links on a Harvard physics council Wiki site and a Harvard Law blog.
Hack In The Box

News ≈ Packet Storm

News ≈ Packet Storm

In wearily predictable fashion, security vendors have been quick to warn about increasing volumes of Royal Wedding-related spam, scams and malicious software.

Symantec outlined in a blog post various spam campaigns hoping to cash in on the big day by advertising items including a replica of Princess Diana’s engagement ring, a ‘limited edition Buckingham Mint Royal Wedding Commemorative Coin’ and limited edition customisable mugs and t-shirts.

Blackhat SEO attackers have also predictably used the event to attract news-hungry surfers to malicious sites. Symantec said it has seen over 500 compromised sites used in this campaign over the past few days. “Attackers create multiple fake pages on each site and use unethical SEO techniques – such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, and link farming – to ‘game’ the search engine algorithms to achieve high search engine rankings,” the firm said.
Hack In The Box

On the 16th of March Rustock, the largest of the spamming botnets, was taken down. As you would expect, global spam levels started to drop, as can be seen when you look at the number of mails being delivered to one of Symantec spamtraps.

However, on the 26th March we saw a large increase in the amount of data traffic hitting our spamtraps, despite the number of actual emails continuing to decline.

Investigation revealed that the reason for this was that the Cutwail botnet had started sending much more emails with zip file attachments than normal, meaning the average size of each mail was much higher than normal. The chart below shows that there have been a couple of spikes in early March, which may have been short test runs, but from the 26th March onwards there has been a sustained increase in spam traffic with a zip attachment.
Hack In The Box

We all get sick to death of Spam email, I personally tend to switch my personal email address once a year. thankfully though there are groups of people who dedicate their free time to helping us.

One of these groups is “Project Honeypot” and i mention this group specifically as they just stopped their BILLIONTH spam email. and have published quite an in depth report here…

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/1_billionth_spam_message_stats.php

Highlights include…

• Monday is the busiest day of the week for email spam, Saturday is the
  quietest.
• 12:00 (GMT) is the busiest hour of the day for spam, 23:00 (GMT) is the
  quietest
• Malicious bots have increased at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of
  378% since Project Honey Pot started
• Over the last five years, you’d have been 9 times more likely to get a
  phishing message for Chase Bank than Bank of America, however Facebook is
  rapidly becoming the most phished organization online
• Finland has some of the best computer security in the world, China some
  of the worst
• It takes the average spammer 2 and a half weeks from when they first
  harvest your email address to when they send you your first spam message,
  but that’s twice as fast as they were five years ago
• Every time your email address is harvested from a website, you can expect
  to receive more than 850 spam messages
• Spammers take holidays too: spam volumes drop nearly 21% on Christmas Day
  and 32% on New Year’s Day

So on behalf of the entire interweb..

Thanks Guys! Its people like you who make my day that little bit easier.