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Communications

Using Outlook From Orbit 268

Posted by timothy from the how-rms-uses-outlook dept.
Pigskin-Referee writes with this excerpt from Office Watch: "On the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station they use Microsoft Outlook 2003, but not quite in the same way that us earthbound Earthlings do. The space shuttle Atlantis is orbiting the earth right now and the crew exchange emails with the ground a few times each day. Bandwidth is a constraint and you don't want the busy crewmembers bothered with spam or unnecessary messages so NASA has a special system in place. The crew use fairly standard laptops running Microsoft Outlook (currently Outlook 2003) with Exchange Server as the email host, but they don't link to the server using any of the standard methods."
Image

The Beaver Magazine Changes Name Because of Filters Screenshot-sm 20

Posted by samzenpus from the hey-nice-magazine dept.
laejoh writes "As of the April-May 2010 issue, The Beaver magazine will be renamed Canada's History. The stated reasons are that the name has become so associated with the sexual euphemism that online material by the magazine using its name in the header is being blocked by spam filters. Use of the word 'beaver' on the Internet has taken on an identity that nobody could have anticipated in 1920."
Spam

Hotmailers Hawking Hoax Hunan Half-Offs 135

Posted by kdawson from the how-horrific dept.
Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "An estimated 200,000 Hotmail users currently have their auto-reply set to a message spamming an advertisement for Chinese scam websites, which sell "discounted" electronics. Presumably the spammers compromised a large number of Hotmail accounts to pull this off, but wouldn't it be pretty easy for Hotmail to query for which users have that set as their auto-reply, and turn the auto-reply off for them?" Read below for Bennett's thoughts.
Security

Fake "Bill Gates" Message Dupes Top Tools 117

Posted by timothy from the top-tools-are-working-on-it-top-tools dept.
yahoi writes with this excerpt from Dark Reading that might raise sysadmins' eyebrows about email security, in particular given the big names involved: "A researcher who conducted a successful spear-phishing experiment with a phony LinkedIn invitation from 'Bill Gates' is about to reveal the email products and services that failed to filter the spoofed message — and that list includes Microsoft Outlook 2007, Microsoft Exchange, Outlook Express, and Cisco IronPort. ... The experiment was aimed at measuring the effectiveness of email security controls in several major products and services. And the simplicity and success of the test demonstrated just how powerful social engineering can be and what little technology can actually do about it, security experts say."
Security

Y2.01K 269

Posted by kdawson from the wait-till-two-oh-thirty-eight dept.
After our recent discussion of decimal/hexadecimal confusion at the turn of 2010, alphadogg writes in with a Network World survey of wider problems caused by the date change. "A decade after the Y2K crisis, date changes still pose technology problems, making some security software upgrades difficult and locking millions of bank ATM users out of their accounts. Chips used in bank cards to identify account numbers could not read the year 2010 properly, making it impossible for ATMs and point of sale machines in Germany to read debit cards of 30 million people since New Year's Day, according to published reports. The workaround is to reprogram the machines so the chips don't have to deal with the number. In Australia, point-of-sales machines skipped ahead to 2016 rather than 2010 at midnight Dec. 31, rendering them unusable by retailers, some of whom reported thousands of dollars in lost sales. Meanwhile Symantec's network-access control software that is supposed to check whether spam and virus definitions have been updated recently enough fails because of this 2010 problem."
Idle

Honest $10,000 SPAM Screenshot-sm 16

Posted by samzenpus from the sheep-in-wolf's-clothing dept.
I knew these couldn't all be scams!
It's funny. Laugh.

Scambaiting Gets Comical; Internet Scammers All Dressed Up 178

Posted by timothy from the made-in-the-shadenfreude dept.
Nurse Nasty writes "Scambaiting is a fun and relaxing full-contact email sport. It's all about baiting Internet and email scammers into exposing themselves and sharing that humiliation with the entire world. Recently I baited four different groups of Internet scammers into being comic book action super-heroes, and then giving them their own 10-page graphic novel. It's a bit of fun and eduction through entertainment." (Warning: The comic contains a bit of naughty language.)
Security

Citibank Denies Reported Breach Linked To Russian Gang 53

Posted by kdawson from the no-russians-in-here-no-siree dept.
alphadogg writes "US authorities are investigating the theft of an estimated tens of millions of dollars from Citibank by criminals using Russian software tailored for the attack, according to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required to access that link — CNET's coverage here). The security breach at the major US bank was detected mid-year based on traffic from Internet addresses formerly used by the Russian Business Network gang, the WSJ reported today, citing unnamed government sources. The Russian Business Network is a well-known group linked to malicious software, hacking, child pornography, and spam. The FBI is probing the case, the report said. It was not known whether the money had been recovered and a Citibank representative said the company denied any system breach or losses, according to the report."
Security

Malware and Botnet Operators Going ISP 131

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the spam-is-big-business dept.
Trailrunner7 writes to mention that malware and botnet operators appear to be escalating to the next level by setting up their own virtual data centers. This elevates the criminals to the ISP level, making it much harder to stop them. "The criminals will buy servers and place them in a large data center and then submit an application for a large block of IP space. In some cases, the applicants are asked for nothing more than a letter explaining why they need the IP space, security researchers say. No further investigation is done, and once the criminals have the IP space, they've taken a layer of potential problems out of the equation. 'It's gotten completely out of hand. The bad guys are going to some local registries in Europe and getting massive amounts of IP space and then they just go to a hosting provider and set up their own data centers,' said Alex Lanstein, senior security researcher at FireEye, an anti-malware and anti-botnet vendor. 'It takes one more level out of it: You own your own IP space and you're your own ISP at that point.'"
Google

Yes, Google Does De-List Pages; But When? 133

Posted by kdawson from the how-offensive-is-too-offensive dept.
Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "Google finds itself inserting a disclaimer once again above some offensive search results. But the disclaimer still leads many to believe (incorrectly) that Google doesn't tamper with search results even in cases of 'harmful' or 'offensive' material. We know that Google has in fact de-listed some pages at the request of offended parties. What is their real policy on the issue?" Read on for Bennet's essay.
Communications

Are You Using SPF Records? 263

Posted by timothy from the spf-50-should-be-enough dept.
gravyface writes "I've been setting up proper Sender Policy Framework records for all my clients for past year or so, hoping to either maintain or improve their 'reputation' in the email universe. However, there's a lot of IT admins I speak with who either haven't heard of SPF records or haven't bothered setting them up. How many of you are using SPF records for your mail domains? Does it help? How many anti-spam vendors out there use SPF records as part of their 'scorecard'?"
Security

Autonomous Intelligent Botnets Bouncing Back 152

Posted by CmdrTaco from the duck-and-cover dept.
coomaria writes "Thought that 2009 was the year botnets died? Well, think again: compromised computers were responsible for distributing 83.4% of the 107 billion spam messages sent around the world every single day this year, and it's going to get worse if intelligent and autonomous botnets arrive in 2010 as predicted."
The Courts

22 Million Missing Bush White House Emails Found 326

Posted by kdawson from the back-from-the-shredders dept.
ctmurray writes "Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush, and the Obama administration is searching for dozens more days' worth of potentially lost e-mail from the Bush years, according to two groups that had filed a lawsuit — which has now been dropped — over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record-keeping system. Earlier we discussed the Obama White House's opposition to the lawsuit that led to this discovery." The related links reflect our discussions about the missing emails over two years.
Spam

Project Honey Pot Traps Billionth Spam 118

Posted by timothy from the spam-sequestration dept.
EastDakota writes "Project Honey Pot today announced that it had trapped its 1 billionth spammer. To celebrate, the team behind the largest community sourced project tracking online fraud and abuse released a full rundown of statistics on the last five years of spam. Findings include: spam drops 21% on Christmas Day and 32% of New Year's Day; the most spam is sent on Mondays, the least on Saturdays; spammers found at least 956 different ways to spell VIAGRA (e.g., VIAGRA, V1AGRA, V1@GR@, V!AGRA, VIA6RA, etc.) in mail received by the Project; and much more."
The Almighty Buck

Virtual Money For Real Lobbying 85

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the sheeple-happy-to-be-paid-shills dept.
ogaraf writes "Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that health-insurance industry group 'Get Health Reform Right' paid Facebook users with virtual currency to be used in Facebook games in exchange for lobbying their Congressional Rep. 'Instead of asking the gamers to try a product the way Netflix would, "Get Health Reform Right" requires gamers to take a survey, which, upon completion, automatically sends the following email to their Congressional Rep: "I am concerned a new government plan could cause me to lose the employer coverage I have today. More government bureaucracy will only create more problems, not solve the ones we have."'" Relatedly, Trailrunner7 illustrates growing concern over realistic spammer profiles in social networking sites and their potential to wreak havoc, especially if these two methods were combined. "Many spammers now have large staffs of people working on nothing but building out completely fake personas for non-existent users on social networking sites and blog networks. The spammers use these personas to create accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot and other sites that have high levels of user interaction."
Spam

US No Longer Leading the World In Spam 96

Posted by kdawson from the we're-number-two dept.
darthcamaro writes "America is no longer the spam king. According to Cisco, US-originated spam dropped by over two trillion messages — American-based IP addresses sent about 6.2 trillion spam messages. The new world leader is Brazil at 7.7 trillion messages. 'I'm not completely surprised to see US falling to number two in the spam stats, but I didn't expect it to happen yet,' said Cisco Fellow Patrick Peterson. 'I was really gratified to see the actual spam volume decrease, not just ranking, but we [also] decreased the amount of spam that is pouring out of the United States.'" The drop in US spam might have had something to do with the temporary shutdown of the McColo spam ISP.
Image

Zombie Pigs First, Hibernating Soldiers Next Screenshot-sm 193

Posted by samzenpus from the fattening-up-on-brains dept.
ColdWetDog writes "Wired is running a story on DARPA's effort to stave off battlefield casualties by turning injured soldiers into zombies by injecting them with a cocktail of one chemical or another (details to be announced). From the article, 'Dr. Fossum predicts that each soldier will carry a syringe into combat zones or remote areas, and medic teams will be equipped with several. A single injection will minimize metabolic needs, de-animating injured troops by shutting down brain and heart function. Once treatment can be carried out, they'll be "re-animated" and — hopefully — as good as new.' If it doesn't pan out we can at least get zombie bacon and spam."
Patents

Federal Appeals Court Tosses Spam Patent 76

Posted by CmdrTaco from the no-way-that-was-my-idea dept.
Zordak writes "US patent 6,631,400 claims a method of making sure enough people get your spam. A federal district court had overturned the patent as anticipated and obvious, and not drawn to patentable subject matter. The Federal Circuit, the appeals court which hears patent matters, upheld the finding of obviousness, thus invalidating the patent."

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