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Not quite worried enough that identity thieves might empty your bank account or ruin your credit rating with a shopping spree in your name? The FBI says those concerns are small spuds compared to what might happen when crooks parlay identity theft and mortgage fraud into “a totally new kind of crime: house stealing.”

Nigerian scammers have launched a new spam campaign sending fake Google Calendar meeting invitations in an attack targeted towards corporate users, security vendor BitDefender warned today. As the hook to dupe users into opening the message, the emails are personalised and bypass URL filtering with a different link sent to each recipient.

Online advertiser ValueClick has agreed to pay a record S$2.9 million to settle a U.S. Federal Trade Commission complaint that it sent deceptive advertising claims in spam e-mail and failed to secure consumers’ sensitive financial information.

In the last two months, several Internet security firms have suggested that spammers had devised a way to bust the “captcha” that is protecting Gmail. This would allow them to use the popular e-mail service to drown the rest of the Internet with e-mails containing links to malware and clumsy Viagra propositions.

Six botnets are responsible for 85 per cent of all spam, according to an analysis by net security firm Marshal. The Srizbi botnet is reckoned to be the largest single source of spam - accounting for 39 per cent of junk mail messages – followed by the Rustock botnet, responsible for 21 per cent of […]

A four-month investigation into the inner workings of the phishing scourge that drives identity theft attacks has uncovered an underground ecosystem of compromised Web servers, do-it-yourself phishing kits, brazen credit card thieves and lazy code copycats.

For the first time since 2004, the three complaints indicators are increasing. In 2007, the FTC received over 810,000 Consumer Sentinel complaints when they had never taken over 700,000 in any previous year. As ever, Identity Theft is the main complaint category.

It is surely of no surprise, especially to regular readers of our Weblog, that not only banks are targeted by phishing attacks, but nearly anything that can be scammed. We already commented on the rise in attacks targeting virtual worlds and especially massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) in earlier posts.

Identity fraud is running rampant. Between corporate breaches and online exploits against individuals, hackers are stealing identities in record numbers and posting it to the Web from all over the country, right? Wrong on all counts, according to new studies of the ID fraud space.

Europe is now the "king of spam," and is responsible for 44 percent of all spam sent worldwide, according to Symantec. The company discussed the findings in its monthly State of Spam (PDF) report, pointing out that Europe has been producing significantly more spam than the US for three months now, and suggesting that the […]

T security and control firm Sophos has identified a trend of Storm spam e-mail traffic peaking in accordance with time zones across the world. According to their study, the spam e-mail traffic peaked thrice in any 24-hour cycle while computers in Beijing, London and New York come online.

E-mail was invented at the MIT in the mid 1960s as a communications tool for the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), several years before ARPANET (which later became the Internet) was started. It was used on several operating systems during the 1960s, including MIT’s CTSS and SDC’s Q32, and it was also a basic feature in […]

Over time, spammers have changed their spamming tactics in their bid to gain access to people’s mailboxes. The latest tactic is to use the common PDF file format to send image spam. Brian Azzopardi from GFI Software reports. By using PDF attachments to send images instead of embedding them in the body of the email […]

Security researcher Aaron Weaver claims visiting a random Web site could send unwanted print requests to your nearest office printer.In a paper published in November (PDF), and cited on Wednesday in a blog by Jeremiah Grossman of White Hat Security, Weaver demonstrates the code necessary for sending a formatted page to a remote network printer, […]

The January State of Spam report shows that as 2007 ended, spam surged and accounted for 75 percent of all email, increasing to 83 percent in the last few days leading up to the holiday season. The December State of Spam report had showed that 72% of email traffic was spam.