The Monday HELO — July 18, 2011

This week: hackers in your voicemail, hackers in your email, hackers trying to get in, and keeping Google’s party private.

Welcome (after a brief hiatus) to the twelfth edition of The Monday HELO, in which Melinda Plemel synopsizes some of the most interesting recent happenings in email technology and messaging abuse.

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Major Telecommunications Providers Cooperate to Stop Spam in Europe

Using the Abuse Reporting Format (ARF) and Return Path’s feedback report processing technology, ETIS members help each other find the spammers lurking within each others’ networks — and their customers’ networks, and their customers’ networks.

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Categories: Explanation Return Path View Comments

33 Years of Spam? No, Not Really.

Scattered around the Internet today (and every May) you’ll find various articles heralding the 33rd anniversary of spam, counting the years from Gary Thuerk’s message. They’ll remark that spam has been with us a long time, maybe quote a few anti-spam vendor statistics, and say spam isn’t going anywhere. But that’s just bad research.

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At Work, or On Call? Thank You.

Return Path sincerely thanks all of the abuse and postmaster staff, system and network administrators, security staff, CERTs, fraud analysts and law enforcement personnel who are at work or on call during this holiday season.

What are you doing to keep from falling asleep between alerts?

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Security Alert: Phishing Attack Update

Yesterday, we updated on our report around the targeted ESP phishing attack that has been ongoing for almost a year now and has led to multiple known ESP system breaches. Our original post is here, and yesterday’s post is here. …

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Security Alert: Update on ESP Phishing Attack

As you saw from our blog post yesterday, we have become aware of a serious phishing attack aimed in part specifically at ESPs, some direct mailers, and other sites. Since the time of our posting and into late evening yesterday …

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Security Alert: Phishing Attack Aimed at ESPs

Below is a note we sent to our Email Service Provider (ESP) partners this morning alerting them to a spear phishing campaign targeting ESPs. Spear phishing attacks are targeted and effective, with tremendous potential to damage corporate security.

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Catch More Spam with Zombies

Zombie email addresses are once-valid addresses which have been literally abandoned by their users, yet remain on marketers’ subscriber lists more or less forever. Spam trap operators we spoke to all agreed that it’s best if the address or domain reject all mail for a period of months or (preferably) years before being recycled as a spam trap.

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How to Evaluate & Compare Anti-Spam Products

Hey, you! Yeah, you with the ethernet cable. Get in here and look at all this spam. What do you mean you can’t do anything?! Didn’t we buy one of those anti-spam thingers in 2002? Oh fine, I’ll approve an upgrade, but you can only choose one thing — make sure it’s the best. Otherwise, you’re fired. What was your name again?

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New MAAWG Consumer Survey: Half of Global Email Users Willingly Click on Spam

Have you ever wondered who in the world clicks on a spam email? Someone must be clicking, the thinking goes, or else spammers would have no economic incentive to keep blasting.

Turns out that we have seen the clickers, and they are us. Well, maybe not readers of this blog or employees of Return Path, but they are people like the consumers and business professionals on our marketing files and subscribed to our online services.

Nearly half (43%) of email users in North America and Western Europe say they have knowingly opened or accessed spam – including …

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