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…and some of it masquerades as “marketing” and “newsletter” emails. In March 2010, spam continued to account for a high percentage of all email traffic, peaking at 93.6% of all messages. The majority of this spam email was sent using certain tactics that were deployed to hijack unsecured computers and hide the senders’ identity. Recently, however, there has been an uptick in spam “marketing” and “newsletter” emails. These spam marketing and newsletter emails share one significant commonality with “regular” spam emails, which is that they are unwanted email messages sent to individuals who have no formal relationship with the message sender. ...

Aiming for one billion Twitterers by 2013? Twitter’s International Team Lead Engineer Matt Sanford has blogged on the company’s site that Twitter is seeing growth of over 60 percent in registrations outside the U.S. After setting up a Spanish language capability in November, the microblogging service saw a huge surge in registrations in Latin America, Sanford said. Sign-ups in India also spiked early in the year after several politicians and Bollywood movie stars began Tweeting. ...

Well, well… looks like someone has been singing along to one of Jay Chow’s songs while coding an exploit that corresponds to a vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which was addressed in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10-018. The exploit that targets on the Peer Object component (iepeers.dll) in IE has been found in the wild, and today it was detected while attempting to exploit on the client browser. After decoding from a shellcode, it will download the payload and will be detected as Trojan:W32/KillAV.LD. ...

We have received reports of a malicious Windows Mobile game that creates significant phone bills to affected users. The game in question is called 3D Anti-terrorist action, and it’s manufactured by Beijing Huike Technology in China. The game itself is a 3D first-person shooter. Apparently some Russian malware author took the game and trojanized it. Then he uploaded the trojanized version to several Windows Mobile freeware download sites. ...

Northwestern Bank Online – Orange City is compromised and should not be visited until it’s clean. Embedded in the side is a malicious iframe, as you can see in this screen shot: (Testing the site with Wapawet doesn’t work, since it chokes on the javascript emulation. However, the iframe is malicious.)

There could be a denial-of-availability risk to the enterprise in the new anti-piracy law passed by the British Parliament yesterday. Employees using company machines to swap pirated files could trigger a suspension of Internet service. The law is aimed at repeat offenders, however, employee misuse of company resources or botnet takeovers of machines for use as file-trading servers are a significant threat. At minimum, unintentionally offenders will have some paperwork to deal with when their ISP lets them know they’re in violation. ...

Steve Jobs has just taken the stage at Apple’s iPhone OS 4.0 press event. Before getting to the anticipated product announcements, Jobs took the opportunity to highlight the immediate success of the iPad, which launched on Saturday. As of today, Apple has sold 450,000 iPads — 150,000 more than total sales on the first day. That’s a phenomenal figure on the hardware sales side, but Jobs wasted no time celebrating some the iPad’s software accomplishments as well. ...

Apparently, Facebook isn’t the only online sphere where ninjas are becoming a problem — The LinkedIn Blog reports that the job title “Ninja” has become more and more popular since 2002. According to LinkedIn, those who deem themselves “ninjas” tend to work with computers, social media, design, customer service, advertising and finance, and — as you can see from the chart below — their ranks have been steadily growing since the dawn of the century. ...

The National Bureau of Economic Research has previously indicated that the United States has been in a recession since December 2007. What is interesting to note here is that Symantec first reported that spammers were showing an interest in the slowdown of the economy in October and November of 2007, so this begs the question, “Can the focus of spam email be used as an economic indicator or barometer?” Let’s take a brief look at the recession (thus far) by looking through Symantec’s spam folder (a.k.a. the Symantec Global Intelligence Network). ...

I don’t believe it!! This morning I’ve received an email sent by Google notifying me that I´ve won $950,000, so I think this will be the last post I’m going to write 😉 Well, I haven’t taken part in any promotion of this kind and I’ve never heard that Google gives prizes just like that, but I can consider it as if I won the lottery. Here you have the content of the message: ...