PST, cyber scammers sent out a barrage of spam emails posing as LinkedIn message notifications, according to Cisco security systems officials.
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The preeminent cloud-company is checking to see whether its security has been breached, leading to a rash of spam emails sent to users.
The group hosted as many as 40 fake pages on each of those botnet-hosted sites, and lured users to the sites with spam emails.
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Botnets are often used to mount distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks - forcing websites offline - to run spyware or to send out spam emails.
From the first time that spam emails from Groupon (I must have checked off a box somewhere) started to clog my in-box, I wondered: How do they stay in business?
Traditional spam emails will end up in Junk.
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Using another intermediary, the crime group would get access to a compromised computer and rent a botnet to distribute the spam emails for a period of agreed upon time, such as 12 or 24 hours.
It is easy to imagine how this information could be abused -- for instance, the hackers could send out spam emails to those users claiming to come from Evernote, and trick them into visiting a malicious website.
MessageLabs, the email-filtering company that Symantec acquired in 2008, posted a set of word maps today measuring the frequency of terms in spam emails from a random one-week sampling of junk mail pulled from the most prolific spam-spewing botnets.
As a result, today we live with an absolute mountain of spam and fraudulent emails plugging the Internet.
Indeed, it seems counterintuitive to grant greater protection to new, unopened email spam than to purposefully archived emails.
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Whereas most emails from companies are seen as spam, these are more seen as rewards for loyal customers, he says.
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By deploying anti-spam measures at the server level most of the bad emails have been captured.
Google says this will enable users to retrieve vast amounts of old emails, and that it will back this up with superior spam filtering.
The attack, which Stern claimed accounted for almost 25% of all spam sent worldwide in the period it was sent, launched a massive amount of emails that looked like legit LinkedIn contact requests (see an example on the left).
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