Security News
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On Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 06:20 (GMT) Project Honey Pot received its billionth email spam message. The message, a picture of which is displayed below, was a United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) phishing scam. The spam email was sent by a bot running on a compromised machine in India ( 122.167.68.1 ). The spamtrap address to which the message was sent was originally harvested on November 4, 2007 by a particularly nasty harvester ( 74.53.249.34 ) that is responsible for 53,022,293 other spam messages that have been received by Project Honey Pot. Every time Project Honey Pot receives a message we estimate that another 125,000 are sent to real victims.
1 Billion Spammers Served | Deep Insights into Spam | Project Honey Pot
Microsoft dirty tricks that were never revealed - Technology Evangelist
Microsoft settled today its anti-trust case with the people of Iowa, which may well be the last anti-trust case against the world’s largest software company, at least in this cycle. Iowa was all that remained of the original 18 states and the District of Columbia that sued Redmond several years ago. Now that the case is settled I’d like to write a little bit about something that happened in an earlier case – Burst v. Microsoft – but was never revealed.
Undercover Researchers Expose Chinese Internet Water Army - Technology Review
In China, paid posters are known as the Internet Water Army because they are ready and willing to 'flood' the internet for whoever is willing to pay. The flood can consist of comments, gossip and information (or disinformation) and there seems to be plenty of demand for this army's services. This is an insidious tide. Positive recommendations can make a huge difference to a product's sales but can equally drive a competitor out of the market.[1111.4297] Battling the Internet Water Army: Detection of Hidden Paid Posters
(Submitted on 18 Nov 2011) Abstract: We initiate a systematic study to help distinguish a special group of online users, called hidden paid posters, or termed "Internet water army" in China, from the legitimate ones. On the Internet, the paid posters represent a new type of online job opportunity. They get paid for posting comments and new threads or articles on different online communities and websites for some hidden purposes, e.g., to influence the opinion of other people towards certain social events or business markets.
Hidden Industry Dupes Social Media Users - Technology Review
A trawl of Chinese crowdsourcing websites—where people can earn a few pennies for small jobs such as labeling images—has uncovered a multimillion-dollar industry that pays hundreds of thousands of people to distort interactions in social networks and to post spam. The report's authors, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, also found evidence that crowdsourcing sites in the U.S. are similarly dominated by ethically questionable jobs. They conclude that the rapid growth of this way of making money will make paid shills a serious security problem for websites and those who use them around the world. A paper describing their results is available on the Arxiv pre-print server .Hollywood studios want a federal judge to preserve data on all the 66.6 million users of Megaupload, the file-sharing service that was shuttered in January due to federal indictments targeting its operators. The Motion Picture Association of America is requesting Carpathia, Megaupload’s Virginia-based server host, to retain the 25 petabytes of Megaupload data on its servers, which includes account information for Megaupload’s millions of users. That’s according to a newly surfaced court filing in the Megaupload prosecution in connection to charges of racketeering and criminal copyright infringement. The MPAA said it wanted to have that data because it might sue Megaupload and others for contributing to copyright infringement. Howard Gantman, a MPAA vice president, said in a telephone interview that the studios are not intending on suing individual users, but are considering suing Megaupload or other “entities involved.”
