Bulletin

Soloway reveals motivations

Convicted spammer gives interview before going behind bars.

Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo

Paul Baccas (Sophos)

Paul Baccas summarises the good, the bad and the ugly within Jakobsson and Ramzan's 'Crimeware: Understanding New Attacks and Defenses'.

The problem of backscatter – part 1

Terry Zink (Microsoft)

Backscatter is one of the hot issues in the world of spam filtering. So what exactly is backscatter? Why does it occur? How do we stop it? And why can’t we do a better job of filtering it? Terry Zink explains all.

Alphabetti spamgetti

Spam levels shown to depend (partly) on starting letter of email addresses.

Prison sentence for phisher

Phisher goes down for seven years; youngster involved in scam escapes jail.

The problem of backscatter – part 2

Terry Zink (Microsoft)

In the previous part of this series, Terry Zink introduced the problem of backscatter spam, describing what it is and why it is such a problem. He also looked at why it is so difficult to stop. Fortunately, the situation is not hopeless and this…

Lavasoft Ad-Aware 2008

Having started up focusing on unwanted tracking behaviour, Lavasoft's Ad-Aware has gradually branched out to cover adware, spyware and now with the integration of a full anti-malware engine, the gamut of trojans, viruses and worms, with a selection…

Does the punishment fit the crime?

'Once bitten does not, it seems, make twice shy for spammers.’ Helen Martin, Virus Bulletin.

Malware teaching considered harmful?

Richard Ford (Florida Institute of Technology)

Richard Ford and William Allen, both teachers of malware courses at Florida Institute of Technology, present their views on the teaching of virus writing as part of security courses.

All your MP3s are belong to us

Christoph Alme and his colleagues walk through the complete attack process of the Win32.ASF-Hijacker.A trojan, which has two different sets of victims: those affected by the trojan itself and those affected by media files altered by the trojan.