Computer Security & Technology

Mark Sunner, Chief Security Analyst at MessageLabs was among the many security analysts watching one Trojan called “Spam Thru”, a piece of malware designed to send spam from an infected computer, at the turn of last year. Spam Thru represented an expontential jump in the level of sophistication and complexity of these botnets, harnessing a 70,000 strong peer to peer botnet seeded with the Spam Thru Trojan. Spam Thru is also known by the Aliases Backdoor.Win32.Agent.uu, Spam-DComServ and Troj_Agent.Bor.

Spam Thru was unique because it had its own antivirus engine designed to remove any other malicious programs residing in the same infected host machine so that it can get unlimited access to the machine’s processing power as well as bandwidth. It also had the potential to be 10 times more productive than most other botnets while evading detection because of in-built defences.

The thing that worries Mark Sunner the most is that he suspects the major traffic spike towards the end of 2006 was merely a test run for more if not similarly sophisticated botnets to follow. Sunner adds

” With new levels of sophistication this has reached a real milestone. Botnets are getting smaller, more stealthy and more discreet and yet the volumes of spam are going up. Without a hint of scaremongering, will this get a lot worse throughout 2007 in terms of botnet sending? Absolutely, yes.”

The British IT-Sicherheitsfirma Message Lab registered a dramatic increase in Spam Mail traffic from 64.4% to 72.9% late last year, all attributed to Spam Thru.

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Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, spam in blogs is becomming huge these days along with search engine spam and mobile phone messaging spam.

Spamming is economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge.

Blog Spam or “blam” for short is spamming on webblogs. This type of spam takes advantage of the open nature of comments in the blogging sftware by placing comments to various blog posts that provided nothing more than a link to the spammer’s commerical web site.

Blogs such as TechCrunch have caught over 1 million spam comments. For most blogs such as this one and AskStudent, the protection from such Blog Spam like TechCrunch is Akismet.

Today, I saw a new method of Blog Spam by these spammers. They are using TinyURL, a very popular web service which provides short aliases to long URLs. TinyURL inspite of its benefits has had to face the criticism that they are opaque, hiding the ultimate destination from a web user. This opaqueness is now being leveraged by spammers, who can use such link in spam and thus bypassing URL blacklists.

UPDATE:

TinyURL has blocked the above site stating that they abused their policy. How does one deal with such spam? Post in comments area.

Related Articles:

1. How to hide your email address from spammers, a thorough guide

2. How a PayPal phishing email looks like and how to detect it

3. Top phishing targets are Ebay and PayPal followed by Banks

4. References: Wikipedia article on spammer

In computing, phishing is a criminal activity using social engineering techniques. Phishers attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy person or business in an electronic communication. Phishing is typically carried out using email or an instant message, although phone contact has been used as well. Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, and technical measures.

The first recorded mention of phishing is on the alt.online-service.america-online Usenet newsgroup on January 2, 1996, although the term may have appeared even earlier in the print edition of the hacker magazine 2600. The term phishing is a variant of fishing, probably influenced by phreaking,  and alludes to the use of increasingly sophisticated lures to “fish” for users’ financial information and passwords. The word may also be linked to leetspeak, in which ph is a common substitution for f.

Shown below is a sample email message I received from PayPal

If you dissect this email digging into its header and the content code, you will see two things jump out

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Every IT professional worth his/her salt has their own webpage/blog these days. While you may have people from all over the globe dropping a line at your site, Email harvesters are the most unwanted visitors on any website. These email spambots crawl the web via search engines to find and extract email addresses from webpages. E-mail addresses in your blog or webpage are no secret to spam robots. Here’s a guide that should help you protect your email addresses from these spam spiders. Techniques mentioned use text manipulation, Masking, HTML, Flash, CSS, and JS to hide email addresses.
How email spammers operate? Email addresses always contain an @ symbol. Most spambots do a pattern-search for likely combinations of letters (abc@xyz.com) like billgates@microsoft.com or larrypage@google.org in the HTML source of webpages. Often they just search for the @ character and grab all the letters on each side on the assumption that it’s a valid email address.
How to keep your email address available to humans but invisible to email spiders? There are tons of Email Address Protector software that claim to protect your email address in web pages and get rid of junk mail - Don’t waste your money, they only encode your email or generate a javascript snippet. We will discuss manual email encoding techniques here. If a visitor clicks an encryped email link on your website, it will work as normal, but spam robots will not be able to extract the address from the link. Read more »

All of us have experienced the tremendous pains of spam. Who can remember the glory days of Hotmail 2MB storage where 85% of the inbox was filled with spam. While this plague is going to exist for some more time, here are a few tips we can take to overcome this issue and prevent spam from hitting your inbox.

» Don’t post your email address on message boards or mailing list.

» Maintain two separate email aliases - one for business and important email and other one for subscribing to mailing lists and web forums (called throw away email)

» Don’t publish your email addres directly on the homepage - use Email Obfuscators.

» Provide a fake email address to websites that require mandatory registration before you download software or read their archives.