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The investigation reveals a disturbing rise in the level of email spam travelling across the internet between April-June 2008, and how some spammers are now using Facebook and mobile phones to spread their messages.
By June 2008, research reveals that the level of spam had risen to 96.5 per cent of all business email. Having risen from a figure of 92.3 per cent in the first three months of the year, corporations are now facing the fact that only one in 28 emails is legitimate.
“If your company is on the internet, it’s going to be hard for it to do business unless it has an effective anti-spam defence in place. Otherwise the amount of junk mail will be swamping legitimate correspondence from your customers and suppliers,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. “It should be remembered also that some spam is not just a nuisance, but malicious in its intent – trying to get you to click on an attached Trojan horse or lead you to a dangerous website.
Organisations need a consolidated anti-spam and anti-malware solution at their gateway, updated around the clock to neutralise the latest internet attacks.”
Top 12 Spam Countries From April to June 2008
1. United States 14.9%
2. Russia 7.5%
3. Turkey 6.8%
4. China (incl HK) 5.6%
5. Brazil 4.5%
6= Poland 3.6%
6= Italy 3.6%
8. South Korea 3.5%
9= United Kingdom 3.2%
9= Spain 3.2%
11. Germany 3.0%
12. Argentina 2.9%
Rest of World 37.7%
Australia continues to remains firmly out of the top twelve ranking only 32nd (0.5 per cent), with New Zealand coming further below that in 70th place (0.1 per cent).
“Between April and June 2008, the computer users of US and Russia retained their shameful first and second places as the top relayers of spam,” continued Cluley. “Much more needs to be done to raise awareness about computer security. These computers are under the remote control of hackers which means they can be used not only for sending a tidalwave of spam, but also potentially steal banking details and credit card information for the purposes of identity theft.”
Also retaining a place on the leader’s podium of shame was Turkey, with a marked increase in spam since the same period last year – rising from ninth place and 2.9 per cent in the second quarter of 2007, to third place and 6.8 per cent this year.
A new addition to the chart this quarter is Argentina, which has knocked France out of the chart to take 12th place, and which is now responsible for relaying 2.9 per cent of the world’s spam email.
Sophos says that spammers are increasingly using networking websites such as Facebook and LinkedIn to send their unwanted links to online stores and bogus lottery and financial scams.
However Sophos says the level of Facebook, Bebo and LinkedIn spam is still dwarfed by email spam, but there is a growing trend for spammers to use other techniques to spread their messages.
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According to the article, as the heads of the G8 governments meet this week, they are also about to ratify the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta), which “could let customs agents search your laptop or music player for illegally obtained content”.
The article also notes that “the European Parliament is considering a law that would lead to people who illicitly download copyrighted music or video content being thrown off the internet” and Virgin Media is now writing to hundreds of its customers at the request of the UK record industry to “warn them that their connections seem to have been used for illegal downloading.
Viacom gets access to all of the usernames and IP addresses of anyone who has ever used YouTube as part of its billion-dollar lawsuit in which it claims the site has been party to “massive intentional copyright infringement”.
According to the report, a draft copy of the EU legislation contains the paragraph: “Members shall provide for the provisions related to criminal enforcement and border measures to be applied at least in cases of trademark counterfeiting and copyright piracy.” -which can clearly be interpreted as meaning that you could be stopped at Customs and quizzed about the contents on your iPod or laptop.
And as for ISPs, the next step could be that they could dob in downloaders with the backing of the law.
And the implications for privacy?, asks the Guardian — well unsurprising, as the signatories would include the “US, UK and China -which have widely diverging ideas on the topic”.
Internet freedom, it seems, is all in the eyes of the observer.
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CQR Consulting Information Security Consultant Jody Melbourne said the “explosive viral growth” of social networking and media sites had attracted the interest of many business-minded people.
“These new, unregulated platforms are attracting interest from people ranging from entrepreneurs to unscrupulous scammers, spammers and snake-oil salesmen,” he said. “As with any medium of electronic communication or data-sharing, these social networks are being regularly poked and prodded by hackers and identity thieves.”
Although many such sites are simply for social networking, personal profile, chat and sending messages and sharing photos and videos with friends, LinkedIn for example is currently the most popular social site for business networking and recruitment.
Melbourne said the social features being added to major services like Google and Microsoft Live would soon bring social networking capabilities to millions of new users. “For many users, the larger social networks are fast becoming an all-in-one service for communicating,” he said.
“The problem is this rapid, widespread adoption of social networking sites has a number of dangers.”
He said people often failed to consider that many employers researched potential applicants online. “Job seekers are being turned down for employment because of inappropriate or incriminating information and pictures on their social network profiles,” he said.
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The most recent world first is a joint trial by Telstra and Ericsson of Enhanced High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) technology using the 850MHz spectrum to deliver peak network downlink speeds of 21 Megabits per second (Mbps) in 2008 and onwards to 42 Mbps in 2009.
Enhanced HSPA uses software advancements that will maximise the potential of existing infrastructure ahead of the introduction of Long Term Evolution (LTE).
Bill Zikou, CEO of Ericsson Australia/NZ said, “Mainstream mobile network technology continues to advance with the successful trial of Enhanced HSPA, paving the way for the even faster speeds of LTE. Consumers will benefit from a greater range of richer multimedia services on a growing choice of phones and laptops.”
Prior to the HSPA+ or Enhanced HSPA trial, Telstra activated 3G Direct Tunnel technology on its live network, which will provide an increase in data capacity to meet the needs of increased broadband traffic such as data-rich services.
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“Social networking software holds enormous potential for improving the management of large enterprises,” said Nick Ingelbrecht, research director at Gartner. “However, work in this area is still immature, and in the meantime, enterprises should be aware of what is happening in the world of consumer social networking and implement appropriate usage policies for employees’ use of services such as Facebook and MySpace on company time.”
Gartner predicts that online social networking will come to be regarded as just the latest expression of a long-standing pattern of human behaviors that involves an increasing range of communications protocols and technologies.
In the US, some companies have been quick to realize the potential to drive sales on sites such as MySpace and Facebook.
According to analysts, The Aberdeen Group, companies are successfully using social media to improve customer satisfaction and retention, and derive actionable marketing insights.
The Aberdeen Group found that “These online communities let customers, prospects, employees and partners connect with each other and share content. At the core of the Awareness solution is an on-demand social media platform that combines the full range of Web 2.0 technologies — blogs, wikis, discussion groups, social networking, podcasts, RSS, tagging, photos, videos, mapping, etc. — with security, control, and content moderation”.
Some larger companies are also using social sites to make fast business decision. Hewlett-Packard, executives for example, log into their individual blogs each morning to join the ongoing online conversation about each of their product lines, immediately responding to customer problems and concerns.
Ernst & Young recruits many of the 3,500 college graduates it hires every year using a career group on Facebook, where it not only posts job information but also answers individual questions from prospective employees.
And according to Reuters, small-business social networking in the US is expected to increase between 20 to 33 per cent this year.
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The reports note that several “major software and hardware makers worked in secret for months to create a software patch released overnight to repair the problem, which is in the way computers are routed to web page addresses.
The flaw would be a boon for bank phishing cons that involve leading people to imitation web pages of businesses such as bank or credit card companies to trick them into disclosing account numbers, passwords and other information.
According to a recent Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) report survey released last week, 453,100 Australians lost on average AU$2,160 each as a result of personal fraud, which included online phishing.
Attackers could use the vulnerability to “route Internet users wherever they wanted no matter what website address was typed into a web browser”, the report notes.
DNS is used by every computer that links to the internet and works similar to a telephone system routing calls to proper numbers, in this case the online numerical addresses of websites.
Automated updating should protect most personal computers. Microsoft released the fix in a software update package overnight and most importantly, the patch can’t be reverse engineered by hackers.
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| courtesy: www.tech2.com |
Historically speaking, there have been a large number of bugs found in Microsoft’s Office software, including Word, over the past few years and in this case, the malicious code is a Trojan horse program, called Backdoor.Darkmoon, which logs the victim’s keystrokes in order to steal passwords, according to reports.
According to the anti-virus vendor, this is the second Microsoft attack reported this week, with only a few days ago cycbercriminals exploiting a bug in Microsoft’s database program, Access.
Symantec released very few other details of the new potential threat to Word.
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According to Paul Ducklin, head of Technology, Asia-Pacific, Sophos, globally malware attacks are down from 25,000 per day to some 16,000 per day- a 36 per cent decrease.
However notes Ducklin, the number of infected social and blog sites has risen to “about 2 per cent of the total and recently we saw the Google-owned blogger.com being the carrier of some nasty spybot”.
Furthermore, earlier this year Sophos as a company said that 2008 has seen an explosion in malicious software, three times more than in 2007 and that Google-owned Blogger is the most common host for malicious software.
The company also found that Hackers and spammers use social sites like Facebook and MySpace with increasing frequency to spread spyware and viruses.
But says Ducklin, computer users should not be complacent about older forms of PC infection which are still as dangerous today as when they were invented.
“Last year we saw a PC that was being sold by supermarket chain Aldi, which had a pre-loaded virus dating from 1994”.
And it is SMB’s that are bearing the brunt of these attacks as SMBs have fewer resources and many don’t have an employee dedicated full-time to IT security.
And according to another security vendor, McAfee, SMBs could face critical shutdowns in business as a result of weak security.
The company notes that, “every business is hit with spam, which often is laden with malicious data-stealing programs”.
McAfee also said it expects hackers to increasingly go after VoIP phone systems, virtual systems as well as mobile devices.
However Sophos’s Ducklin thinks that the threat to mobile devices is “pretty damn small”.
Although another security vendor Symantec seems to think that potential attacks on things like the iPhone are basically “a hammer looking for a nail”.
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This includes fake UPS messages claiming that a package couldn’t be delivered and was returned, the user should print out the attached invoice – which in fact is the actual piece malware.
Just yesterday two different spoofs were on the loose, containing both the very same malware.
One in German language claiming to be an invoice from PayPal Europe and the other pretending to be from the US Custom Services.
And just today says Secure Computing, the next spam run brings in an invoice for a flight ticket. Victims are told they’ve bought an airplane ticket and their credit card was charged. The details and the flight ticket are attached – again this is malware.
Secure Computing says that users who fall prey to these common social-engineering tricks and install one of these nasties on their computer, actually install a ZBot spyware (aka ‘Wsnpoem’, aka ‘ntos.exe’). ZBot, depending on the actual variant, downloads an encrypted configuration file with further instructions from a Russian location and posts collected data back.
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