Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. A time to gather with family and friends, eat way too much turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, etc., watch the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers toss the pig skin around, and nap. We’ve got plenty to be thankful for: our customers, our business partners and colleagues, and spam! Without spam we may not have all of these other things to be thankful for! Ironic.
Have a great Thanksgiving!
Mailprotector services provide Hosted Exchange 2007 service, SaaS messaging and collaboration tools, and email security to protect against spam, viruses, Trojans, phishing attacks and other email borne malware. Give us a try free for 30 days.
A Detroit judge passed sentencing convicting “Godfather of Spam” Alan Ralsky of multiple prison-worthy crimes.
John Leyden from The Register reports: “Notorious spammer Alan Ralsky has been jailed for more than four years over his role in a masterminding a stock fraud spam campaign that made him an estimated $2.7m.
Ralsky, 64, from West Bloomfield, near Detroit, Michigan, was sentenced to 51 months while his son-in-law, Scott Bradley, 48, was imprisoned for 40 months over the same pump and dump stock fraud conspiracy involving thinly-traded stocks.”
Each man plead guilty to the CAN-SPAM Act, wire fraud, and money laundering. They were sentenced on Monday. Five other co-conspirators will face sentencing hearings today.
The conspirators used a botnet in their “pump and dump” stock fraud. They purchased thinly traded equities at rock bottom prices. Next they spammed unsuspecting “investment” victims about potential huge returns these stocks would provide. Once the stock price spiked the conspirators would dump their cheap stocks at greatly inflated prices to the “investment” victims.
“With today’s sentence of the self-proclaimed ‘Godfather of Spam,’ Alan Ralsky, and three others who played central roles in a complicated stock spam pump and dump scheme, the Court has made it clear that advancing fraud through abuse of the Internet will lead to several years in prison,” said US Attorney Terrence Berg for the Eastern District of Michigan.
Ralsky has a history of other spam frauds that have been documented by Spamhaus.
Mailprotector’s service helps to mitigate email threats perpetrated by fraudsters and other evil-doers. Mailprotector prevents spam, viruses, Trojans, phishing attacks and other email borne malware from reaching your Exchange server, or any mail server, and flooding your users inbox with junk mail. Try us free for 30 days.
The FAA computer systems had a major glitch on Thursday. It lasted about 5 hours and impacted all flyers causing cancellation and massive delays.
Multiple Failures
Christopher Hinton of MarketWatch.com reported, “The National Airspace Data Interchange Network failed at both its locations — Atlanta and Salt Lake City, just after 5:15 a.m. Eastern Time, according to the FAA and the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.”
NATCA Statement
“A ‘ripple effect’ is expected to impact the region’s flights throughout the day, NATCA said. Airports in the Northeast were heavily impacted, with Washington Dulles, Ronald Reagan National, Newark International, and New York’s JFK, reporting significant delays. Atlanta International, the world’s busiest airport, was also impacted.”
Delta Statement
“As a result of this morning’s FAA flight plan system outage, Delta is continuing to experience some delays and cancellations,” the world’s largest airline and Atlanta-based carrier said in a statement. “Operations are slowly returning to normal and we are working with impacted passengers.”
The obvious question: how do both systems fail at the same time?
That question actually raises another question: could this failure be the result of cyberwarriors? There’s been lots of recent discussion about other nation states ability and willingness to wage cyberwar against the US infrastructure. It’s hard to believe that both systems would fail at the same time. These are critical systems to our National infrastructure. Mobility and business suffered greatly during this 5 hour disruption. Just think how badly a multi-day outage would impact the US.
About Mailprotector
At Mailprotector we have redundant data centers and systems in place. If something happens to a cluster of servers then another cluster picks up the traffic. If a data center fails then traffic will automatically roll to other data centers. Mailprotector’s services prevent spam, viruses, Trojans, phishing attacks and other email born malware from getting to your Exchange server, or any mail server. Your users won’t be flooded with needless junk mail delaying them from getting to important email communications. We’re all about keeping you and your users productive. Give us a try free for 30 days.
A couple of 20 year olds were arrested by the Metropolitan Police Service of Manchester for violating the 1990 Computer Misuse Act and the 2006 Fraud Act. They had configured the Zeus Trojan, a.k.a. Zbot, to steal victims bank account information, passwords, credit card numbers and other information.
Arrests “a breakthrough”
“The Zeus Trojan is a piece of malware used increasingly by criminals to obtain huge quantities of sensitive information from thousands of compromised computers around the world,” said Detective Inspector Colin Wetherill of the Metropolitan Police’s Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU), in a statement. “The arrests represent a considerable breakthrough in our increasing efforts to combat online criminality.”
Zeus widely available
The Zeus crimeware toolkit is widely available in the cyber-underworld for free or for purchase. It’s delivered to unsuspecting users via spam. It’s been reported that it’s easy to use and a powerful tool for stealing personal data from remote systems. It was initially linked to a group of online criminals known as “Rock Phish” that targeted financial institutions all over the globe. It has been reported that Facebook and MySpace users have been targeted in a recent spam campaign.
About Mailprotector
Mailprotector’s services protect your personal information from these types of Trojans. Our systems protect your Exchange server, or any mail server, from spam, viruses, Trojans, phishing attacks, and other email borne malware.
You’ve seen the spam for Viagra, Cialis and other modern-day wonder drugs. Well, there’s a new kid on the block. Spammers have now figured out they may be able to scam you out of your hard earned cash by scaring you about the Swine Flu pandemic, or H1N1.
Linked to Russia
John Leyden recently reported: “Russian cybercrooks have laid the groundwork needed to build a business cashing in on swine flu panic-buying. Tamiflu sales from dodgy unlicensed pharmaceutical websites are being promoted through spam email, search engine manipulation and a variety of other underhand techniques. Web affiliates, commonly based in Russia where they are called Partnerka, are driving traffic to dodgy pharmaceutical sites using a variety of spam and adware-related marketing tactics.”
Spam prevention the best cure
I’m not really sure who would fall for these email scams. Who in the world self-inoculates against the flu? At any rate, Mailprotector protects users from exactly this kind of junk mail. We block spam, viruses, Trojans, phishing attacks and other email borne malware for reaching your Exchange server, or any mail server, so users won’t be tempted to purchase their own swine flu vaccine.
The Mega-D botnet was disabled last week by a team of white hat hackers. It may have had up to a quarter million infected machines under it’s control before it was disrupted. The botnet was estimated to be responsible for a third of the world’s spam output. It was knocked out of commission last week by employees of security firm FireEye.
How they did it
Dan Goodin reported: “After unplugging the Mega-D master control channels, the researchers set up a benign ’sinkhole’ channel for the bots to report to and waited to see what would happen.
Over five days, 487,340 unique IP addresses reported to the ad-hoc server. Using findings derived from last year’s take-down of the separate Srizbi botnet, FireEye estimates that the figure translates to 248,590 unique machines. Unlike Mega-D, Srizbi included an accounting mechanism that identified each infected machine. They then analyzed the number of IP addresses and noted that after five days, it was about double the number of individual Srizbi victims.”
Size hard to judge
FireEye’s Todd Rosenberry said “Any botnet size estimate should be taken with a grain of salt as they are notoriously hard to calculate and there is a lot of conflicting data out there.”
Effects felt worldwide
The researchers estimated that Brazil was the most infected country (11.5 percent of the victims), followed closely by India and Viet Nam. 214 countries were represented.
Still under watchful eye
Mega-D is still being monitored. There are plans to turn over maintenance of the sinkhole server to Shadowserver. These volunteers have established infrastructure and relationships with ISPs and Computer Emergency Response Teams, or CERTS, globally.
About Mailprotector
Mailprotector’s services are ideal for protecting your Exchange server, or any mail server, against spammers attempts to flood your inbox with their junk: spam, viruses, trojans, phishing attacks and other email borne malware and threats.
The UK is going all out against state-sponsored hackers and are in the process of recruiting a cyber army. Baroness Crawley says the Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC) will be located at GCHQ in Cheltenham and will have an initial staff of 19. Sounds like a jolly good start and us yanks are glad to have you in the fight with us. I can envision the CSOC now: it will be a bunch of computer geeks sitting at their terminals and they will look just like Bond, James Bond or Austin Powers. Yea, baby, yea!
About Mailprotector
Mailprotector offers SaaS email security and Hosted Exchange 2007. We’re in this battle for you to fight against spam, viruses, Trojans, phishing attacks and other email borne malware. It’s simple to use, highly effective and extremely affordable.
Today’s Washington Post shows how aggressive the Chinese have been in probing US systems and interests. There have been reports in the past that the Chinese have trained North Koreans in advanced hacking techniques. South Korea and the US experienced DDoS attacks last summer that originated in North Korea. There have also been numerous reports about repeated hacks and probes into US government networks with many of them being successful in extracting sensitive information.
Attempting to even the playing field
These state run hackers are fighting on a new front to try to level the “playing field” in the event that a shooting war breaks out. The US has the most technologically advanced military in the world. The thought is that if China, North Korea or another enemy can disrupt US military networks and critical infrastructure systems then it may give them a better chance of fighting against the US.
A flurry of preparation
Last month there were reports that NASA’s IT systems lacked thorough security systems. There is a report from yesterday that the Department of Interior failed a recent cybersecurity audit. Rod Beckstrom quit the US cybersecurity post he had been in for a few months due to political infighting. Obama has yet to name a replacement even though he has promised it is a priority of his. Department of Homeland Security and the NSA are spending huge sums of money to increase their staff and datacenters.
About Mailprotector
Mailprotector provides protection from the Chinese, North Koreans and other hackers that want to access your email systems. We block spam, viruses, Trojans, phishing attacks and other email borne malware from getting to your users and disrupting their vital communications. It’s easy to get started (and affordable too).
Today marks the 26th birthday of the computer virus. On November 10th 1983 Fred Cohen, a University of Southern California graduate student, provided a proof-of-concept during a security seminar at Lehigh University. 26 years later the computer virus is still going strong.
My first virus
I recall my first computer virus experience, “Melissa“, back in 1999. I was working for another company in London at the time and we started getting lots of email with the same subject line from multiple European and far eastern affiliates. Before long, many of our users were sending loads of email out that they never initiated. Our network admin “pulled the plug” on our local Exchange server until he could resolve the issue. I called our US headquarters to give them a heads-up but they still had numerous users opening and infecting their mail systems. That was a wake up call and dealing with email-borne malware provided an experience that I’ll never forget.
My how you’ve grown!
Email malware has gotten a lot nastier since then. It presents huge problems for users and admins. Computers can be hijacked and used for nefarious purposes. Information can be stolen and bank accounts drained. The FBI has released a warning about the threat to online cyber fraud. Some figures estimate cyber fraud losses to be upwards of $100 million year-to-date.
About Mailprotector
Mailprotector’s services have been squashing spam, viruses, Trojans, phishing attacks and other email-borne malware for nearly 10 years. It’s affordable, easy to set up and simple to use.
Vivek Kundra, federal CIO, outlined plans for new cybersecurity metrics and a dashboard for tracking progress in testimony to Congress. “Historically, the federal government has not been as effective as necessary in its cyber defense,” Kundra said to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services, and International Security.
“An inadequate cybersecurity workforce, a focus on compliance rather than outcomes, and a cumbersome and time-consuming process for collecting information hindered our cybersecurity management capabilities.”
A Different Focus
Kundra hopes new initiatives will focus more on performance rather than on paperwork. “The metrics will be focused on game changing ways to address real security,” he said. “It is not necessarily asking the question, do you have patch management program, but how long does it take for you to patch those systems? We are in early phases in terms of deploying a government-wide approach.”
CyberScope
The Office of Management and Budget released a new tool called CyberScope a few weeks ago. It lets federal agencies report FISMA compliance via an authenticated Web-based reporting tool rather than sending spreadsheets via e-mail.
Annual report required
This year agencies are required to report detailed spending information on cybersecurity. That information will make its way to a federal cybersecurity dashboard similar to the IT Dashboard launched earlier this year, a public Web site that tracks federal IT spending and project performance. “Just as the IT dashboard took us from a static, paper based environment to a dynamic digital environment, the new cybersecurity dashboard will provide the government with a real-time view of threats facing us and our vulnerabilities,” Kundra said.
About Mailprotector
Mailprotector’s service provides a web console so you can view your email security whenever you want. You’ll be able to monitor things such as what is being blocked: spam, viruses, Trojans, phishing attacks and other email borne malware. You can get granular reporting down to the user by specific date ranges. You can implement your own specific email compliance policy within the console. You don’t have to wait on our dashboard to be developed – it’s ready and we’re able to get you going now.
