By Mincom, on December 28th, 2009
Sydney – A New Zealander was fined by an Australian court on Tuesday after a guilty plea over his part in a syndicate capable of sending 10 billion spam emails a day.
Lance Atkinson, was fined 210 000 Australian dollars (about R1,3-million) for breaching the Spam Act 2003 in a case brought by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
Atkinson, 26, sent more than 100 000 unsolicited emails to Australians advertising penis enlargement treatments, weight loss pills and prescription drugs.
“The Parliament has made its intention plain that unsolicited distribution of electronic emails is to be discouraged,” the authority said in a release, quoting Justice Andrew Greenwood.
Atkinson has also been ordered not to send unsolicited emails for seven years.
Atkinson’s assets are currently frozen by US authorities, who earlier this month fined him $15,5-million over an operation he ran with his New Zealand-based brother, Shane Atkinson, and a US accomplice.
The Australian agency said it [...]
By Mincom, on May 9th, 2009
San Francisco – Hackers appear to be beefing up armies of “zombie” computers to recover from a major hit scored in the battle against spam email, according to software security firm McAfee.
A McAfee report said that during the first three months of this year, nearly 12 million new computers were added to the ranks of machines infected with “malware” that lets cybercriminals use them to spew spam.
The ominous news came with word that the amount of spam dropped 20 percent during the same period, evidently as a result of the elimination of a “McColo” spam-generating operation late last year.
The rate of spam email dropped from an average 153 billion daily last year to 100 billion a day in March, according to the McAfee report released Tuesday.
“Seems the bad guys are attempting to recover from last November’s takedown of a central spam-hosting ISP by rebuilding their army,” researchers said in a [...]
By Mincom, on May 9th, 2009
When NetSafe and IBM set up an experiment last month to highlight the escalating issue of internet security it took 20 seconds to prove their point.
That was the time between connecting a fresh PC in Auckland to the Internet and receiving the first probe down the DSL line from another machine checking for potential security vulnerabilities.
That first suspicious probe was followed over the next month by a barrage of further malicious connection attempts: 4500 hit the PC’s firewall in 27 days.
When the firewall was turned off in the final few days of the experiment, the flood of dubious traffic more than doubled to more than 500 attacks a day as the internet’s automated underbelly sniffed around.
The aim of much of the relentless probing documented during the experiment was to identify any vulnerabilities on the new computer that would allow it to be hijacked as part of a zombie network used [...]
