Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Fake news websites are those which intentionally, but not necessarily solely, publish hoaxes and disinformation for purposes other than news satire.Some of these sites use homograph spoofing attacks, typosquatting and other deceptive strategies similar to those used in phishing attacks to resemble genuine news outlets.
A spambot is a computer program designed to assist in the sending of spam.Spambots usually create accounts and send spam messages with them. [1] Web hosts and website operators have responded by banning spammers, leading to an ongoing struggle between them and spammers in which spammers find new ways to evade the bans and anti-spam programs, and hosts counteract these methods.
In June 2009 it was estimated that the Cutwail botnet was the largest botnet in terms of the amount of infected hosts. Security provider MessageLabs estimated that the total size of the botnet was around 1.5 to 2 million individual computers, capable of sending 74 billion spam messages a day, or 51 million every minute, equal to 46.5% of the worldwide spam volume.
A hacker purchases or builds a Trojan and/or exploit kit and uses it to start infecting users' computers, whose payload is a malicious application—the bot. The bot instructs the infected PC to connect to a particular command-and-control (C&C) server. (This allows the botmaster to keep logs of how many bots are active and online.)
Grum relies on two types of control servers for its operation. One type is used to push configuration updates to the infected computers, and the other is used to tell the botnet what spam emails to send. [6] In July 2010, the Grum botnet consisted of an estimated 560,000–840,000 computers infected with the Grum rootkit.
Spam still flows through open relays, but the volume is much smaller than in 2001-02. While most spam originates in the U.S., [16] spammers hop through open relays across political boundaries to mask their origin. Honeypot operators may use intercepted relay tests to recognize and thwart attempts to relay spam through their honeypots.
Nathan Blecharczyk, one of the founders of Airbnb, who paid his way through Harvard by providing spammers hosting services. [1] [2]Shane Atkinson, who was named in an interview by The New Zealand Herald as the man behind an operation sending out 100 million emails per day in 2003, who claimed (and appeared) to honor unsubscribe requests, and who claimed to be giving up spamming shortly after ...
The simplest method involves spammers purchasing or trading lists of email addresses from other spammers.. Another common method is the use of special software known as "harvesting bots" or "harvesters", which uses spider Web pages, postings on Usenet, mailing list archives, internet forums and other online sources to obtain email addresses from public data.