Internet Defense Technologies

Every year or two, Ferris Research updates its estimates for the total cost of spam, earlier this year they did the 2009 estimates .

Their estimates: "Worldwide, spam will cost us all $130 billion; in the U.S. alone, $42 billion. That’s a 30% increase over our 2007 estimates, which themselves were a 100% increase over our 2005 figures."

They further explain the breakdown of where this is costing money:

• User productivity cost (deleting spam, looking for false positives, etc.): 85%
• Help desk cost (IT helping end users deal with spam): 10%
• Spam control software/hardware/service (licensing fees, amortized capital costs, etc.): 5%

Well with Total Mail Defense making it so you have don’t have to delete spam or look for false positives that reduces that amount by 85%.

I am feeling pretty good about our assistance in helping the economy by reducing the money wasted.

The Nigerian email scam is a spam based scam that is targeting people all over the world. The first thing you need to know about any scam is ANYONE asking for investments over email is not someone to be trusted. EVER.

The name "Nigerien Scam" came from one of the original documents which were mailed rather than emailed with postage markings from Nigeria and other African states. When it hit the email scene the name at the end of the email was often African, thus the name "Nigerien Scam" stuck.

This scam has cost people anywhere from thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Should you receive an email about the Nigerian email or 4-1-9 report it to the Better Business Bureau http://www.bbb.org/ and you can also fax a letter to your local representatives office (go on the net and look at the state in which you live dot gov dot org, eg., http://www.ca.gov/ and look up your local representative) informing them that you are a target of such Spam and that you would like legislation enacted prohibiting such offenses.

Even if this email comes from an address that you think you know it is dangerous and should be deleted.

Just one of our systems blocked 13.1 million messages in one week.

That equaled 99% of all traffic sent through it!  Meaning that our customers servers never had to bear that load and this barrage never slowed down their systems.

With 1% of email making it past our first level of filtering, another 27% were blocked at the next stage.

Through all of this, not one legitimate email was blocked.

This is WAY more than usual amounts of traffic, email spam is definitely not slowing down.

Firstly you do not need to install yet another piece of Software on your computers, and if you have a company of any size this can for sure be cumbersome, even if it is a server side push install to the whole base.

Spam and AV Software is known to slow windows systems down drastically, which is another good reason to migrate these things to a service where you can.  The less software you have on a windows system that needs to use the windows registry the better off that system will be.  Also, another great reason to move to a service is you can increase bandwidth on your LAN (Local Area Network).  The reason for this is obvious, resources are not being hung up by too much Spam.

The SAAS Market is new and exciting, from my viewpoint its the best thing to happen to the whole industry.  Take away system resource hogs and put them somewhere else, and managed by others that are professionals in their own area.

This saves TIME AND MONEY for any company, and in this Economy, we need to do just that.

Spam levels have surged to the highest in about a year and a half. Image spam, a technique not seen for some years has resurfaced and at extremely heavy volume.

Image spam can be difficult to detect due to it’s lack of easily identifiable content.

Images are used commonly on many on-line systems today to validate user logins to websites such as ebay, financial institutions and many others. The purpose of these is to ensure that a real person (and not a computer program) is logging in to a given system.

Many of you have undoubtedly had to decipher hazy characters, letters and numbers in order to change a password, sign up for an account or bid for an item. This is precisely why image spam is difficult to detect - using the same rationale, spammers reason that since email systems are automated and individual messages are not monitored individually by people, sending spam that simply contains an image is a great way to defeat many spam filtering systems.

This may account for the increase in spam you are seeing and we have recently published an article on some safe computing habits you should implement.

Our CTO and founder, Ron Edison, recently wrote an article for Business Solutions Magazine called Philosophies of Spam Solutions.  It is now being featured on their website and I wanted to give you an excerpt here:

While spam by the billions reaches out to users around the globe, they are scanned, blocked, deleted, sorted, filtered, rejected, quarantined, moved, dropped, replied to, and bounced by a panorama of spam solutions and email systems as varied as they are many. Accompanying the ubiquity of spam is a mixed bag of strategies and applications to deal with it.

And, while users rail at spam, they typically complain far louder about “false positives” (legitimate messages treated, blocked, etc., incorrectly by spam filtering systems) — and for good reason. If there’s anything worse than getting drowned in spam, many users agree, it is missing “that all important message”, which at least seemingly is often subject to collateral damage as servers wage their constant battle with spam. Here there is opportunity for an effective solution as long as it can deliver accuracy.

While spam and its effects have been the topic of endless discourse, rarely mentioned in much detail is the underlying philosophy or even exact goal of one solution or another. Certainly, one could say that — of course — the goal is to block all spam and deliver all “ham” (the colloquial for “legitimate email”), but there is more to this than meets the eye.

Enter “reputation.” (read more)

News about the swine flu is definitely everywhere.  Can’t turn on the TV or read your news feed without seeing something about it.

Of course, this means all those spammers who use current events (of which many of them do) are sending out lots of email with something about swine fu in he subject line.

In this case there have been warnings sent around that some of these emails actually contain malware.  Malware comes from the words MALicious and softWARE, which is software designed to infiltrate or damage a computer system without the owner’s informed consent.

Malware includes computer viruses, worms, trojan horses, spyware, dishonest adware, crimeware and other malicious and unwanted software.

With all of wanting to know about the latest news about the swine flu you may open an email that looks like it has news.  DON’T.

If you think there is some new information, you should go to CNN, MSNBC or wherever you get your online news to find out the latest.

If you have already opened an email like that you should have your computer checked for possible malware.  Update and run your virus program (Kaspersky, Norton, Panda, McAfee, etc.) and then your spyware program (like Spybot).

If this spam is getting through your filter, you also need to set up a new filter that will stop the spam from even getting to you, like ours.

A rant from a friend of mine:

Getting spam from myfanbox.com? Yeah me too, its stupid and driving me crazy.  10 to 20 pieces of spam per day, and making it through the spam filter built into my email, SICK OF IT!

Who cares about myfanbox.com really. I went to the domain, and OMG does it look bad, a crazy website.

Spammers need to burn in the you know what, really, can’t we all get productive doing something else with our time, time is valuable is it not?

I have no time to find open ports on the internet and then lock into them and generate millions of email message about some new “enlargement” process. How does anyone else have this much free time?

Maybe this is why America is in the financial position it is in today.  Too many idiots on the internet creating messages about god knows what, and then us American’s being so bored with our meager life that we click “opt in” and then get SPAM up the rear.

It never said I was “opting in” to have my name and email address sold over 10,000,000 times did it? Never click “opt in”, you are asking for SPAM!

Sorry I am so bitter, I am just sick and tired of the idea of Spam!!!

Been seeing a lot of complaints about this one, well not really complaints, more like amusement.

Just another example of trying to use buzz words to get you to open a spam email.  It is spam, no reason to open it, go ahead and delete it.

It generally just says this:

<three separate pics that say>

Honest Advice and Amazing Cures from America’s Most Trusted Pharmacist!
Best Price on Net
Worldwide Shipping
Free Pills with every order
<pic> Cialis
<pic>  Levitra
<pic> Viagra
<pic> Cialis Soft
Discover 1,097 drugstore secrets that help you keep more money in your pocket and put more health in your tank!
Click here
<end of pics>

To your health,
<pic of sig>
David Zinczenko
Editor-in-Chief

<pictures of:>
Unsubscribe | Your Privacy Settings

Reports are floating around that Verizon has sent out a “notice” to all of its customers.  The notice sets up a sort of backwards “opt-in” mechanism for sharing your private data.

It isn’ really an “opt-in” rather it’s a “negative opt-in”.  A negative opt-in is when you have to tell someone not to add you to the list and if you don’t tell them not to, you are agreeing to let them (and in this case Verizon) share your personal data.

Even, if like most people, you didn’t read the fine print and didn’t even realize that you were opting in to begin with, and had no idea that opting out was a possibility. Customers who get their bills online instead of in the mail don’t even get the notice.

Information Verizon may share includes what services you have purchased, your billing, technical, and location information. Information can be shared with “affiliates, agents and parent companies.” That’s not very reassuring. “Affiliate” in particular is a very fuzzy term, and usually means any marketer who has signed up with a program and paid a fee.

So, most likely you are about to get spammed by Verizon’s affiliates if you haven’t already.