One of the most expensive aspects of any cybercriminal operation is the time and effort it takes to create large numbers of new throwaway email accounts. Now a new service offers to help dramatically cut costs associated with large-scale spam and account creation campaigns, by paying people to sell their email account credentials and letting customers temporarily rent access to a vast pool of established accounts at major providers.
Over the weekend, unknown assailants launched a massive cyber attack aimed at flooding .gov email inboxes with subscription requests to thousands of email lists. According to experts, the attack was successful largely thanks to the staggering number of email newsletters that don’t take the basic step of validating new signup requests.
The success of social networking community Twitter has given rise to an entire shadow economy that peddles dummy Twitter accounts by the thousands, primarily to spammers, scammers and malware purveyors. But new research on identifying bogus accounts has helped Twitter to drastically deplete the stockpile of existing accounts for sale, and holds the promise of driving up costs for both vendors of these shady services and their customers.
Two weeks ago, many Dropbox users began suspecting a data breach at the online file-sharing service after they started receiving spam at email addresses they’d created specifically for use at Dropbox. Today, the company confirmed that suspicion, blaming the incident… Read More »
“Always have your stuff when you need it with Dropbox.” That’s the marketing line for the online file storage service, but today users have had difficulty logging into the service. The outages came amid reports that many European Dropbox users were being blasted with spam for online casinos, suggesting some kind of leak of Dropbox user email addresses.
Spam may be synonymous with male enhancement drugs, but new research shows that Americans are far more likely than buyers in other countries to turn to spam-advertised pharmacies to obtain pills to treat serious ailments–a trend that reflects differences in… Read More »
First, the good news: The past year has witnessed the decimation of spam volume, the arrests of several key hackers, and the high-profile takedowns of some of the Web’s most notorious botnets. The bad news? The crooks behind these huge… Read More »
The recent massive data leak from email services provider Epsilon means that it is likely that many consumers will be exposed to an unusually high number of email-based scams in the coming weeks and months. So this is an excellent… Read More »
A man identified as one of the world’s top purveyors of junk e-mail has been imprisoned in Russia for allegedly having sex with underage girls, KrebsOnSecurity.com has learned.
According to multiple sources, Leonid “Leo” Aleksandorovich Kuvayev, 38, was sent to a prison in the Russian Federation roughly six months ago. It is not clear how long his sentence is or precisely where he is being held.
The message staring out at me from my Gmail inbox said I’d received an update on my previous conversation with a sender named “vaishali”. The “(3)” next to the sender’s name suggested that I had responded to this person before,… Read More »
