junk mail

The United States retained its top position in the "Dirty Dozen" list of spam relaying nations compiled by security firm Sophos.

"Traditional subject matter such as adverts for pharmaceuticals continue to be a concern, with some 36 million Americans reported to purchase drugs from unlicensed online sellers--but more and more messages are spreading malware and are attempting to phish user names, passwords and personal information," Sophos said in a statement.

After a ‘temporary peace’ given for the time of the festive days spam volumes returned to their normal levels doubling over just 24 hours globally. As reported by MessageLabs the Rustock botnet is now out of hibernation and working at its full capacity sending tons of useless junk mail messages from hundreds of thousands of compromised Windows machines.

In spite of many efforts applied to shut down infamous botnets that distribute tons of spam across the Internet they continue to thrive and live with Rustock still remaining the largest network in the industry, reports Symantec. This year Rustock sent over 44 billion spam e-mails per day and had more than one million bots under its control. Botnets Grum and Cutwail are the second and third largest respectively, the report said.

Asis Internet Services, a small Internet service provider, was awarded about $2.6 million in a lawsuit over spam messages. The company sued the principals of a business called Find a Quote for sending under 25,000 spam messages over an 18-month period.

Panda Labs reports that cyber criminals are distributing fake Microsoft Update notices to Outlook users tricking them into installing a Trojan horse. The email looks like being composed and sent by Microsoft with no spelling or grammatical errors.

The message advises users to keep their computer up-to-date but in fact it is well developed engineering attack. Users may recognize the scam considering several dubious features of the junk mail.

 On Thursday the social networking giant Facebook was granted by the court $711 million in damages in an anti-spam case against Internet marketer Sanford Wallace.

The social networking company sued Wallace for his illicit activity of accessing users’ profiles without their permission and sending fake posts and messages. Apart from the damages award the San Jose, Calif., court referred Wallace to the U.S. Attorney's office for prosecution for criminal contempt of court - meaning he could face imprisonment.

 A study by brand reputation firm MarkMonitor revealed that phishing attacks increased to a record high during the second quarter of 2009 with the number of unique attacks amounting 151,000.