Category Archives: Malware

The Blue Frog Burps His Last?

Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent at The Guardian is reporting that Blue Security is killing off the Blue Frog, saying it “could no longer continue to operate in the face of an escalating threat to the internet from a malicious Russian spammer known only as PharmaMaster.” The Blug Frog had been under serious attack from PharmaMaster, knocking… Read More »

Spammers Get Authenticated

Until now, most spammers sent their stuff through open relays — Internet-connected computers that were either unprotected, or else had been compromised by viruses or trojans into sending the spam without the owner being aware. But that is changing, says AppRiver, and it has big implications for how spammers work and may render useless today’s… Read More »

The Red-faced Blue Frog

What’s intriguing about this Blue Security/Blue Frog episode, where angry spammers attack the anti-spam company with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which in turn directs traffic (unwittingly or wittingly, it’s not clear yet) and temporarily brings down blog hoster TypePad, is this: The guy behind Blue Security, Eran Reshef, is founder of Skybox,… Read More »

The Blue Frog vs PharmaMaster

I’ve been trying to make some sense of this recent drama involving Blue Security, an anti-spam registry that effectively tries to deter uncooperative spammers by overwhelming their servers, and recent outages at TypePad and LiveJournal apparently caused by a revenge attack by spammers on Blue Security. (Here’s some more information on Blue Security and the… Read More »