Spam Filtering And Antispam Appliance

By Author: Harish Chib
Total Articles: 18
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"I call them the 'Internet parasites' - constantly multiplying in numbers and infecting whoever and whatever crosses their paths. I am talking about the Internet zombies. Not 1 or 2 in number, there are 10 million zombies out there, sending spam and email based malware everyday!

In their latest exploits, zombies victimized new user groups. They targeted the ISPs to misuse their vast client base to send out spam on the Internet. For the ISPs, this brutality meant huge wastage of precious network resources, reduced network speeds and dissatisfied customers. More importantly, the ISPs faced blacklisting of their IP ranges, which would also block legitimate outbound emails along with the junk.

In the last quarter, phishing attempts increasingly targeted university students and faculty members. Text-based message spam, seemingly coming from IT department, collected their personal information and passwords.

Cyber miscreants were seen targeting the psychological behavior of users through media they trusted the most! In Q2 2008, phishing scams hit the Google Adwords account owners with legitimate-looking subject ...
... lines. The email contained genuine-looking Google links which redirected the user to a phishing site hosted on a Chinese domain.

That's the trend this quarter - Attacks that exploit the user's psychological behavior and through media that they trusted the most."