General News at Investors Business Daily BY DONNA HOWELL INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted 5/29/2009 Our defenses are lacking and first-strike capability too, on a front once mainly depicted in science fiction. "Cyberspace is real. And so are the...

Email was created by Man. Spammers Evolved. And Rebelled. They clog and pollute the Internet. Some have convinced themselves they are legitimate. There are many spammers. And they have a plan. I've been working my way over the past few months through...

Way back when I was dealing with spam, I used to through the abuse submission inbox and look for submissions that were good quality.  The best were the ones that contained full headers; generally speaking, messages with the spam attached were good...

I'm currently working on a research paper on how to alleviate outbound spam.  As I was going through it in my head today, I started thinking about how difficult it can be to separate out real spam from false positives, that is, mail marked as spam...

I work for Microsoft.  That means I deal with a lot of Microsoft technology.  I know how to use some of the more esoteric features of our software, like Pivot Tables in Excel (which are fantastic), how to create custom blocks in Visio, and how...

If you're like me, you've probably noticed that you've had to update your copies of Abode \w+ very frequently over the past year.  I know that whenever I get a popup saying "A newer version with security updates is available.  Would you...

Here's a cartoon I stumbled across on Youtube that talks about connection filtering and its difference from content filtering.  Enjoy.

As I was saying in my previous post, I thought I'd examine a little bit between the differences and similarities between spam researchers and virus researchers. The two classes share some similarities.  Both are involved in stopping Internet abuse...

I haven't had the chance to work on virus analysis.  Spam analysis has a lot of heuristic tricks of the trade because language is so fluid.  While 90% of spam can be caught with IP reputation and another 5% with URL reputation, there's some...

The other day, we saw some spam that was a double-whammy of reputation hijacking.  First of all, we saw spam coming in from one of the four big web mail providers (Google).  Second, the payload was from a file-service-in-the-cloud with a link...

Originally posted on the Microsoft Malware Protection Center blog. The Spam Data The MMPC and the Forefront Online Service for Exchange (FOSE) conducted some research on Waledac related spam. In this study we included the following subset of Waledac owned...

This post was originally posted on the Microsoft Malware Protection Center blog. The Spambot Whilst Win32/Waledac is probably best known for the ability to send spam, it can also download and execute arbitrary files. In addition to using this downloading...