It’s thought the passwords and email addresses of more than 6,000 users of YP Chat were put at risk.

In a statement, YouPorn said YP Chat is “operated by a third party and is in no way associated with YouPorn”.

The company say the chat site has been temporarily disabled and will remain offline until an investigation has been carried out.

Brad Black, the vice-president of operations at YouPorn, put the leak down to “poor security practices” at YP Chat.

‘Disheartening’

Writing on YouPorn’s official blog, Black said: “As soon as we became aware of the issue we took immediate steps to block access to YP Chat entirely and a thorough investigation was launched.”

He added: “The security of our users’ information has always been of paramount importance to us.

“The fact that a third-party service provider’s poor security practices could have such a negative impact on YouPorn users is disheartening to say the least.”

A spokesperson for YouPorn’s parent company, Manwin Holding SARL, said: “YouPorn continues to ensure that all appropriate measures and tools are in place to safeguard the privacy of its users.”

Manwin Holding run some of the world’s most popular online pornography sites.

YouPorn is one of the 100 most popular websites in the world, according to web analysis company Alexa.

The United States received the highest amount of malicious emails by cybercriminals in the month of August, it has been revealed.

According to Russian security software maker Kaspersky, a whopping 10.1 percent of malicious emails were sent to web users in the United States during the month of August.

The company said hackers were sending malicious emails masquerading as business emails to web users all over the world.

Russia received the maximum amount of malware-ridden emails after the United States, with 8.96 percent of the malicious emails targeted at the country. Russia was followed by the UK, Germany and India, which received 7.36 percent, 5.45 percent and 5.1 percent respectively.

“Erotic photos of girls ‘waiting to meet you’ can be found all over the Internet, while a company’s internal documents are more likely to pique an Internet user’s interest,” said Kaspersky Lab Senior Spam Analyst, Maria Namestnikova.

“After all, how many people are going to sleep soundly after they delete an email that appears to have come from the police asking the recipient to print out details of a driving offence and send it to a municipal court,” she added.

As if that weren’t enough, believe it or not, Valentine’s Day themed spam has already been spotted as well! The spams are in the form of love letters and hawk male enhancement products and shady internet pharmacies claiming to offer cheap Viagra and Cialis. In addition, spam exploiting the 2010 World Cup, which is over 6 months away. Those spams are thinly veiled 419 or Nigerian scam messages. The Cutwail and Rustock botnets are responsible. It appears spammers are getting a very early jump on upcoming holidays and events and are trying a variety of different scams. This is only the beginning. Expect more holiday themed spam and malware attacks to be unleashed as the season unfolds.

Source: Sue Walsh November 2009

This scam has two sets of victims, the companies that are being stolen from and the innocent people being used to do the dirty work. Most are recruited via phony “Work from Home” ads. Scammers prey on the unemployed and underemployed, often flooding sites like Craigslist and Monster with fake job openings and also scanning the site for job seekers who have posted contact info and spamming them. What makes this part of the spear phishing scam so sinister is that the mules aren’t just being scammed, they are money laundering, which is a serious criminal offense.

The FBI advises companies to confine their banking activities to a dedicated, locked down computer that is not used for any other purpose and isn’t allowed access email or everyday web browsing. A strong and constantly updated firewall is also a must.

Source: Sue Walsh November 2009

Experts say the spike can be attributed to efforts by hackers to reseed their botnets, which have suffered some in the wake of the McColo and 3FN shutdowns. When 3FN was shut down, spam levels dropped 30% but quickly rebounded.

Even though only a miniscule amount of virus laden spam ever makes it to inboxes and still fewer actually deliver their payloads, it’s enough to add thousands of computers to botnets each day.

The report also found that thanks to a resurgence in image spam, the overall size of spam messages has increased by 123%. Overall spam levels however have remained steady with an average of 90% of all emails sent being spam.

Source: Sue Walsh October 2009

“Nowhere is quite like Hong Kong. Location, history and inherent character combine to give it a special identity that sets it apart from anywhere else in the world,” says Internet data analyst Dan Bleaken. Bleaken believes the city’s status as a financial and commercial hub makes it a lucrative target for spammers. “According to some estimates, spam-related activities cost Hong Kong 770 million dollars (5.5 billion HK dollars) in 2001, for example,” he said.

The Hong Kong government is trying to fight back. The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Ordinance, passed in 2007, requires companies to provide a way to unsubscribe that requires no further correspondence, and also requires that they provide their name, phone number, email address, and postal address in all messages. Fines of up to $128,000 U.S will be handed out to those who don’t comply.

Hong Kong’s Office of the Telecommunications Authority said they have received over 13,000 complaints and sent out 89 warnings. However they stress that for the problem to be truly addressed requires countries to work together to fight spammer and cybergangs as cybercrime is a worldwide epidemic. The country’s proximity to China, a known haven for spammers, is considered a direct cause of their increasing spam issues.

The spam flooded email systems for just a day. Several hundred thousand messages were sent. As soon as security experts detected it and it was added to blacklists and filters, the attack stopped.

“The bad guys use this approach to beat slow-moving, reactive spam filters,” says Cisco security researcher Henry Stern. “These hit-and-run bursts are so fast that the damage is done before word can get out.”

More spam bursts are expected and indeed one exploiting the recent death of popular actor Patrick Swayze is already out there. Swayze died of cancer on Monday, and within 48hrs there was a new spam campaign offering links to his funeral. Those links led to malicious sites that pushed rogue anti-virus programs or downloaded Trojans and keyloggers to visitors computers. In a related attack, malicious links have also turned up in search engine results thanks to black hat SEO.

Source: Sue Walsh September 2009

As email became a crucial business tool the spam problem rose rapidly to become the major problem it is today. Regular research is released that puts spam at over 90% of global email traffic. Despite this not every business takes it seriously enough to actually do something about preventing it. Those that do will implement a quality anti-spam solution for their email and continue about their business hopeful that it will protect them from those on the internet with malicious intent.

However as the web evolves new spam threats have emerged that also need to be considered by businesses.

Email Spam
Email spam is a continually shifting landscape of new threats as spammers develop new techniques. For example, spammers have gone from putting spam content in emails, to putting it in file attachments, to putting it in password-protected file attachments, to putting it in image files, to putting it on web pages that they link to, each technique intended to keep them a step ahead of anti-spam vendors and the protective measures built in to their products.

Spammers have used, and continue to use, home PCs on broadband connections that have been compromised by viruses. When these don’t work thanks to RBL providers such as Spamhaus, they turn to free webmail services and simply break through the CAPTCHAs that are in place by breaking their algorithm or simply paying people in developing countries to manually enter the CAPTCHAs for them.

This continually evolving threat highlights the need to deploy serious protection for email spam. A “bits and bobs” solution cobbled together from separate free components will not have the effectiveness of a comprehensive, integrated anti-spam product from a vendor committed to ongoing support and protection for new threats.

Social Networking
The emergence of social networking has changed business communication forever. Although email remains critical to businesses more and more we see interaction occurring outside of email using social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter. Staff may be using social networking only for personal use, but business use is also becoming common.

The threat posed by social networking is that messages will not be scanned or filtered by an email anti-spam solution. This leaves users open to phishing attempts and scams. Although web filter technology can be used to simply block these services entirely, that makes them unavailable for genuine business use.

A better solution is one of user education. Although social networking fosters close relationships with people around the world the same level of suspicion should be applied to social networking interactions as it is to email.

URL Shortening Services
The explosive popularity of Twitter has lead to an equal explosion in the use of URL shortening services. These services convert a very long URL into a much shorter one, making them perfect for the limited space available in a Twitter post. Because of this their use is spilling over to other social networking services, and also being used in emails.

The problem presented by these services is it disguises the true destination of the URL, which can thwart content filters that check for URLs for domains with a reputation for spam. I was recently working at a customer site where all such URL shortening services were outright banned, which is a short sighted approach to the problem. Given that the URL redirects the browser to the real destination, and that destination is still accessed via the same web proxy, the proxy could still apply URL filtering to the ultimate destination.

Rather than viewing URL shortening services as the problem, a better solution is to ensure that all web traffic is subject to URL filtering that will block known malicious websites. This makes web filtering part of an overall anti-spam solution, by protecting users from malicious short URLs sent via email or over social networks.

Free File Hosting
Terry Zink of Microsoft recently considered the problem of free file hosting services and who is responsible for scanning the content stored in them for viruses. The spam problem here is an email saying “Check out this important file…” which links to a malicious file at a free hosting service run by an otherwise trusted and reputable web company.

He makes a good point but businesses don’t need to wait for the problem to be sorted out by the providers, nor do they need to be blocked entirely which deprives users from making genuine use of them. Instead the same approach can be taken as for URL shortening services. By utilising web filtering that scans file downloads the threat can be greatly reduced.

Comprehensive Strategy
As new threats emerge it demonstrates a need to consider spam prevention not just in respect to email, but for all online interactions that our end users might engage in. With a combination of email protection, web filtering, and end user education a business can be protected from these threats as they evolve.

Source: Paul Cunningham June 2009

ISS reports a rebirth of image spam, with a spike in March of this year where it reached five to 10 percent of all spam; and in April, it hit 15 to 22 percent. So why are spammers revisiting an old tactic? Peculiar. The new image spams don’t use any new groundbreaking technology, and most spam filters will be able to block them easily. The only difference is that the older, first wave of image spam back in 2006 and 2007 focused on stock trading and pump-and-dump scams. Today, stock scams aren’t going to get a lot of traction because of the economic crisis, instead, most of today’s image spams are pharmaceutical.

One possible explanation is that the spammers realize that their URLs are already in most antispam databases, and they are obscuring those URLs in the image to avoid being picked up by filters. Many of today’s image spams do not contain clickable URLs. Or maybe, just maybe, spammers have just run out of new ideas!

Source: Dan Blacharski May 2009

The e-mails are dominated by spam adverts for drugs, and general product pitches and often have malicious attachments.

The report found that the global ratio of infected machines was 8.6 for every 1,000 uninfected machines.

It also found that Office document attachments and PDF files were increasingly being targeted by hackers.

Microsoft said people should not panic about the high levels of unwanted e-mail.

Cliff Evans, head of security and privacy for Microsoft in the UK, told BBC News: “The good news is that the majority of that never hits your inbox although some will get through.”

Ed Gibson, chief cyber security advisor at Microsoft, said the rise in spam was due to traditional organised crime figures moving away from exploiting software vulnerabilities and “targeting the weak link that is you and me”.

“With higher capacity broadband and better OS (operating systems), and higher power computers it is easier now to send out billions of spams. Three or four years ago the capacity wasn’t there.”

Malware ecosystem

See which countries are most infected

Paul Wood, senior analyst at e-mail security firm Message Labs, said he was surprised the Microsoft figure for unwanted e-mail was so high.

“Our own analysis shows that around 81% of e-mail traffic we were processing was identified as spam and unwanted,” he said.

MessageLabs said spam rates had fallen at the end of 2008 as an ISP which had been hijacked to send out spam mails to users had been taken offline.

“As a result of that, a number of developers in botnet technology at the end of last year were trying to regain botnet control and increase capacity and return to previous spam levels.

“It won’t be far off before we see return to those levels.”

The report, which looked at online activity during the second half of 2008, also pinpoints the countries that are suffering from the most infections of malicious software, or malware.

Russia and Brazil top the global chart of infections, followed by Turkey and Serbia and Montenegro.

It said that the type of malware varied from country to country.

“As the malware ecosystem becomes more reliant on social engineering, threats worldwide have become more dependent on language and cultural factors,” it reported.

In China, several malicious web browser modifiers are common, while in Brazil, malware that targets users of online banks is more widespread.

In Korea, viruses such as Win32/Virut and Win32/Parite are common.

Global average

The global average for infected machines is 8.6 for every 1,000 uninfected PCs.

The UK’s infection rate is 5.7, according to the Microsoft report.

The report highlighted the need to keep operating systems, web browsers and applications up to date with the latest versions.

Increasingly, hackers are using common file formats, such as Microsoft Office documents and Adobe’s PDF format as the carrier of malicious exploits or programs.

More than 91% of attacks exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office were using security holes that had been plugged by updates that had been available for more than two years.

Attacks using PDF files rose sharply in the second half of 2008, the report noted.

The vulnerabilities all of the attacks exploited had already been fixed by Adobe, and were not present in the most recent versions of the software.

Mr Gibson told BBC News people had to be aware that if they did not update their applications, such as Office and Adobe, they were not just putting themselves at risk, but others on the internet also.

“If you don’t update your software you are not just a hazard to yourself, you are hazard to others because you can be part of a botnet [if your computer is hijacked].”

Mr Evans said Microsoft was very happy with the approach consumers were taking to updating applications via automatic updates.

“For consumers it is happening but for business less so. We have encourage businesses to make more use of automatic updates.”

Scareware

Mr Wood said malicious hackers were exploiting Office document attachments and PDF files in order to make more targeted attacks.

“They tend to be used in selective attacks to named individuals in organisations.

“A lot of social engineering will be used to appear legitimate and convince a user to open the attachment

“Once opened, a vulnerability in the application used to open the document will be exploited and often a tiny piece of code will execute and then download a larger file from a rogue website.

“This program will then attempt to search the computer for a particular document or file and sent it to a remote PC.”

The report also highlighted the rise in the use of so-called scareware, fake security programs which falsely tell people they need to install software which does nothing other than attempt to steal personal details from a users’ PC.

“It’s criminals playing on people’s fears,” said Mr Evans.

“The advice remains the same – ensuring you have up to date software, whether that’s your applications, your browser or your OS.”