A survey has revealed that half of all spam mail is sent from just 20 ISPs, with these so called ‘bad neighbourhoods’ being spread across the world.

The study, by a Dutch researcher, surveyed 42,201 ISPs in a bid to track where junk mail is sent from. Often having terribly constructed text or content stolen from other sites, spam and phishing is still a leading annoyance to (more…)

An illegal botnet, estimated to be taking over £1m (£635,000) a year through the exploitation of SEO practices, has been closed down by security teams in the US.

The Bamital-botnet, which is said to have up to one million computers, including many in the UK, was shut down by a team made up of Microsoft and Symantec. Several data centres in the US were raided.

The system worked by placing fraudulent links on SERPS, having analysed the search terms people were using. When the links were clicked on, Bamital would passively collect ID data when entered on the computer.

The scam went further too, through using already infected machines to “recruit” other computers.

Writing about the operation, Richard Boscovich of Microsoft said:

“In the last two years, more than eight million computers have been attacked by Bamital.

“The botnet’s search hijacking and click fraud schemes affected many major search engines and browsers, including those offered by Microsoft, Yahoo and Google.

“Because this threat exploited the search and online advertising platform to harm innocent people, Microsoft and Symantec chose to take action against the Bamital botnet to help protect people and advance cloud security for everyone.”

Boscovich said he was confident the team had taking out all threats of this particular scam, though there are many others out there. Not all use search engine optimisation analysis to operate though, with many more complex devices used.

This particular botnet is thought to be responisble for infecting anywhere between 300,000 and 1m machines, whilst 18 ringleaders have so far been identified.

Emma Watson, she of Hermione Grainger fame in the Harry Potter series of films, has been revealed as the web’s most dangerous celebrity.

According to the 2012 McAfee Most Dangerous Celebrities list, the English actress is a popular choice for (more…)

A lawyer for a firm that is the bane of internet file sharers everywhere has dramatically announced his decision to quit after receiving death threats.

Andrew Crossley, a solicitor who was part of ACS Law’s campaign which accused internet users of illegally (more…)

Regular users of the Internet, people who are au fait with the registering of domain names, will be familiar with some of the more widespread scams that exist online – such as the ‘Domain  Registry of America’, who became the ‘Domain Renewal Group’. They send out fake invoices prompting people to renew their domains, when in fact they’re really transferring the domains to the company.

However, one online scam that is perhaps less well known (possibly because it’s less effective) is the scam where companies send out official looking ‘renewal’ notices for ‘Search Engine Registration’. We received one such renewal notice this week, from a company with the website address (more…)