Tag Archives: spam

Why Phishers Love New TLDs Like .shop, .top and .xyz

December 3, 2024

Phishing attacks increased nearly 40 percent in the year ending August 2024, with much of that growth concentrated at a small number of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) — such as .shop, .top, .xyz — that attract scammers with rock-bottom prices and no meaningful registration requirements, new research finds. Meanwhile, the nonprofit entity that oversees the domain name industry is moving forward with plans to introduce a slew of new gTLDs.

Service Rents Email Addresses for Account Signups

June 6, 2023

5 Comments

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.

Massive Email Bombs Target .Gov Addresses

August 18, 2016

35 Comments

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.

Buying Battles in the War on Twitter Spam

August 14, 2013

25 Comments

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.

Dropbox: Password Breach Led to Spam

July 31, 2012

19 Comments

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 »

Spammers Target Dropbox Users

July 17, 2012

16 Comments

“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.

Spammers Sell More Non-Lifestyle Drugs in U.S.

July 11, 2011

10 Comments

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 »

Where Have All the Spambots Gone?

July 1, 2011

32 Comments

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 »

After Epsilon: Avoiding Phishing Scams & Malware

April 6, 2011

70 Comments

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 »

Spam King Leo Kuvayev Jailed on Child Sex Charges

August 11, 2010

32 Comments

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.