MessageLabs, who track this sort of thing, say that spam and viruses hit all time highs in 2003. Not surprising, but the figures are pretty shocking, revealing the symbiotic relationship between spam and viruses — what I called in a recent WSJ/FEER column The Spiral Of Evil (no, it doesn’t seem to have caught on).… Read More »
If anyone has been hit by the recent wave of ‘brand-spoofing’ spam or viruses — particularly those that appear to be from a bank, or from Paypal or eBay — could they please drop me a line? I’m very interested in following up on some of these cases for a future column. Reach me here.… Read More »
Microsoft is a mite upset, and is offering $500,000 reward to inform on the virus writers responsible for the Blaster and Sobig worms. (In August, if you recall, the Blaster-A worm infected many unprotected home and business computers, attempted to launch a denial of service attack against a critical Microsoft security update website, and, most… Read More »
Further to my posting about SpamCop, it seems that a new virus, actually a worm, is aiming at bringing down SpamCop and some other anti-spam sites. Is it more evidence of collusion between sleazy spammers and spotty virus writers? Sophos reports that W32/Mimail-E is a worm which spreads via email using addresses harvested from… Read More »
I’m sure this is true in other part of Asia: The majority of Chinese computers are infected by viruses, according to a survey conducted by the public information network security supervision bureau of the Ministry of Public Security. CyberAtlas says 85 percent of computers in China were affected by viruses in 2003 – 1.59 percentage… Read More »