Internet Security Online

The next generation of spam and phishing e-mails could fool both software filters and the most cautious people, Canadian researchers said Sunday, by mimicking the way friends and real companies write messages.

John Aycock, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Calgary, and his student, Nathan Friess, presented a paper Sunday at a security conference in Hamburg, Germany that outlined how junk mailers and phishers, even spyware criminals, could create slicker spam.

U.S. junk e-mailers sent more spam than those in any other country during the first quarter, a security company recently reported, although China is hot on America’s heels.

According to U.K.-based Sophos, U.S. senders accounted for 23.1 percent of the world’s spam in 2006’s first three months. Chinese spammers sent 21.9 percent of global junk mail during the same period.

Spammers get more response from smutty emails than any other form of junk email.

While penis pill offers and pharmacy drugs continue to bring in a small percentage of punters, as many as one in 20 recipients visit porno websites after receiving lewd come-ons by email. Response rates for pharmacy drugs (0.02 per cent) and “Rolex watch offers (0.0075 per cent) are miniscule by comparison, according to a study by email filtering firm CipherTrust. The sales to click-through ratio for pharmacy drugs is one to 150.

More spam is now relayed from Asia than any other continent, according to the latest research from security company Sophos.

Asia accounts for 42.8 percent of the spam received by Sophos’ global spam monitoring network, with North America in second place with 25.6 percent, the company said on Thursday.

Read more: Asia is public enemy No. 1 for spam, report says

I found the opening scene to the 1991 movie sequel, Terminator 2, to be one of the most powerful SciFi film openings ever. There’s a massive firestorm, chunky metal warriors waging war against humans, and then the camera zooms into a metal robot foot crushing a human skull. It’s very graphic. The world has been taken over by terminator robots, first created by man and now bent on destroying us. It’s Skynet. What interested me most about this SciFi classic was how real and plausible this future could be, understanding the dark side of human nature that creates evil and some people’s inherent need to cause harm.

BOSTON – At the fourth annual MIT Spam Conference held in Boston Tuesday, speakers said that while the volume of spam ebbs and flows, the nature of unwanted e-mail is steadily becoming more dangerous.

A work-at-home mom pleaded guilty this week in federal court to sending millions of spams hyping Internet porn sites, prosecutors said.

Jennifer Clason, 33, of Raymond, N.H., was part of a spam gang that sent mass quantities of messages containing pornographic images, said officials from the Department of Justice. She admitted conspiring with two others, Jeffrey Kilbride, 39, of Venice, Calif., and James Schaffer, 39, of Paradise Valley, Ariz., in sending the messages, which advertised various Internet porn sites.

America Online’s controversial plan to charge mass e-mailers a fee to bypass their anti-spam system highlights the other, lesser-known, horn of the junk-e-mail problem: Filters that allegedly work too well.

At issue is the problem of “false positives,” industry-speak for legitimate messages mistakenly filtered out by anti-spam software.

Spammers are testing other waters, such as instant messaging and mobile phone text messaging, as well.

Judge estimates that 10 percent of instant messaging traffic is spam. “It is where e-mail traffic was several years ago,” he says, adding that IM spam is likely to become even more ubiquitous as online messaging networks become interoperable (Microsoft and Yahoo, for example, have announced plans to allow their IM users to communicate with each other). The growing availability of IM services on cell phones will make instant messaging even more appealing to spammers–and vulnerable to viruses spread by spam, warns IMlogic, a messaging security firm.