Last month MySpace won the largest anti-spam payout ever made totalling US$234 million. Now the social network can add another US$6 million to their haul.This latest judgement is against Scott Ritcher based on spam he sent to users on MySpace back in August 2006. The lawsuit was started in January 2007 and went into arbitration in August 2007. Now a ruling has been made against the defendant who will pay MySpace US$4.8 million in damages and a further US$1.2 million in legal fees.

Mr Ritcher has accepted the judgement and will pay the stated amount pointing out it is 95% less than what had originally been asked for. Steven Ritcher, Scott’s father and business colleague in their company Media Breakaway said:

We respect the decision of the arbitrator, and we’re not going to appeal it … We’re going to pay the money he awarded.

Scott Ritcher has already paid US$7 million to Microsoft in a previous ruling over spam and the use of website OptInRealBig.com. With the MySpace spamming, Ritcher had used MySpace accounts acquired by phishing and directed users to the website ConsumerPromotionCenter.com.

MySpace released the following statement regarding the ruling:

This award reflects MySpace’s continued momentum and holistic approach to ridding the site of spammers and phishers … We will continue to do our part in cleansing the Internet of this invasive onslaught of spam.

Read more at Computerworld.com

Matthew’s Opinion
Unlike the huge payout last month it looks like MySpace are going to get this money; and US$6 million is not to be scoffed at. They would do well to re-invest the money back into the site, improving their infrastructure and increasing their security measures just to make sure they are well prepared for the future.

The ongoing action taken against spamming is an important one alongside better spam controls and more user knowledge on what spam is and what to do with it. If court cases keep being won against spammers then there is more risk in doing it in the first place and hopefully less people attempting it.

Popularity – the elusive Holy Grail sought by many a geek during the school years. In that social setting, you paid a price for not being popular. The irony is that in today’s technology setting the reverse is true: being popular often paints a target on your back – just ask Microsoft and the thousands of customers who have to update their Windows security settings every month.The miscreants who develop computer viruses and other malware follow the popular crowd. They go where the action is and, according to Eset, a leader in proactive digital threat protection, the action is in mobile devices, which is why the company has announced a free beta version of Eset Mobile Antivirus.

The time is right for mobile antivirus. At least, that’s what Dan Clark, vice president of marketing at Eset thinks. “It has to do with the number of phones in the market – 35 million of them shipped in the fourth quarter of 2007, which is up 72 percent from the same time period in 2006,” he said.

Clark claims the market for smartphones is close to150 million. “It’s increased to the point that malware developers will target Smartphones more heavily to generate financial gain,” he said. “Attacks follow volume, and we wanted to get our product out a bit before it’s really needed.”

The Eset products designed for computer desktops are known for having very little impact on system performance, and Clark says this holds true with Eset Mobile Antivirus. “The mobile product uses a very small client and has minimal memory, minimal bandwidth and minimal CPU requirements,” said Clark. “It’s been optimized especially for the mobile phone platform.”

The Eset Mobile Antivirus features include:

* Heuristic Threat Detection – Based on ESET’s heuristic engine, ThreatSense, which identifies threats based on their behavior.
* On-demand Scanning – Scans and cleans both integrated and removable memory media (i.e., smart cards), performs a full memory/running processes scan; specific folder scanning capability with results displayed on screen.
* Advanced On-access Scanning – Scans created/used files. Scans incoming files via wireless connections (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Infrared).
* Activity Log – Stores scan statistics and database status in a user-friendly format. Includes scan results-history.
* Variable In-depth Scanning of Cab Files – Lets you set cab file scanning to the level you want.
* Automatic/On-demand Updates – Providesup-to-date protection against all threat types. Schedule updates on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
* Intuitive User Interface – Easy-to-set dialogs and intuitive menu.
* Compact Updates – ESET’s update files consume less bandwidth to the mobile device.

ESET Mobile Antivirus currently supports PDAs and smartphones running Microsoft Windows Mobile 5 and Windows Mobile 6.

If you’re interested in testing the beta software for free, you can download it here. The company said it expects the final version of the software to be generally available later this year.

from the that-doesn’t-sound-good deptPoliticians have been pushing for an anti-spyware law for quite some time — mostly because it’s the sort of thing likely to draw headlines that make the politicians look good. However, it’s widely acknowledged that such laws aren’t at all necessary. Anti-fraud laws can mostly take care of the problem cases out there — and the market itself seems to have actually taken care of the worst offenders in the space. Plus, with such laws (witness CAN-SPAM’s failure), they tend to do little to actually stop the activity, but more to define the rules by which companies can continue to do bad things without breaking the law. Read the rest of this entry »

The Federal Trade Commission this week told the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation that it favors legislation granting it new powers to seek civil penalties in spyware cases.The federal agency said it wants authority to assess monetary penalties when other enforcement options–such as seeking consumer redress, or making the operators give up their ill-gotten gains–are not appropriate, or are insufficient to deter spyware distributors. A stiff civil penalty, said the FTC, may serve as a strong deterrent.

Barracuda Networks Inc., the worldwide leader in email and Web security appliances, today announced it has expanded authentication capabilities of its Barracuda Web Filter product line with Novell eDirectory, a popular identity management and policy control tool used by many Fortune 500 companies as well as educational organizations. This upgrade will enable the Barracuda Web Filter to perform transparent, single-sign-on authentication. Read the rest of this entry »

Re-install Windows every three months. Windows machines tend to develop major performance problems over time — so its probably a good idea to re-install the OS every couple of months. If you’ve got your own dedicated PC for gaming, then this shouldn’t be a big deal. Re-installs don’t take all that long, and they’ll give you a chance to cut down on the number of games installed on your hard drive. Read the rest of this entry »

Global security provider Symantec has launched Norton Smartphone Security, a product that, the company states, is the first consumer mobile security offering to provide a security solution for both Windows and Symbian OS run mobile phones. The solution is intended to give users a safeguard against the raft of threats and attacks aimed at mobiles.Con Mallon the director of product marketing EMEA for Symantec said: “Smartphones are allowing consumers the freedom to communicate and access important information anytime, anywhere, making them more attractive than ever. However, with a rising number of users comes an increase in potential threats from cyber criminals.”

The solution comes complete with firewall and anti-spam for SMS as well as Norton’s antivirus technology. The solution draws on the same core technologies that can be found within Norton’s PC products. These technologies are then applied in the context of the Windows or Symbian operating systems together with the smartphone’s specific usage.

Similar to Norton antivirus, it features auto-protect as well as scan after card insertion. According to the company, this functionality protects phones against viruses, worms and mobile spyware. The firewall provides real time intrusion prevention and controls both in and out bound network traffic on the mobile device. This blocks hackers, other intrusions and denial of service attacks. The product also blocks short text and multimedia messages from unwanted senders by automatically filtering these spam messages to a separate spam folder.

Source: itp.net

IDC has noted that surfing the Web remains a very dangerous endeavor as criminal hackers and bot herders increasingly corrupt websites, planting Web browser-based attacks used to steal personal information or plant malware on an unsuspecting public.And according to Andrew McKee from security vendor Check Point, browser security should be seen as an essential and front line part of a computer users protection arsenal. Read the rest of this entry »

Security Scanning with AVG Free
A full scan on my standard clean test system took 30 minutes when set to Fast priority and closer to 45 at Automatic. The fast mode runs at about the same speed as Webroot AntiVirus with AntiSpyware and Firewall (WAVASF) and noticeably faster than Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus 5.5. By contrast, avast! antivirus 4.8 Home Edition, AVG’s main free competitor, scanned the same system in under 10 minutes. Do keep in mind that these figures are intended for relative comparison only. The products will probably work faster on your own system than on the resource-limited virtual machine I use for testing. Read the rest of this entry »

Security researchers around the world are giving a tongue-in-cheek salute to the 30th anniversary of the first spam message.

Gary Theurk, an employee at Digital Equipment Company, sent a message on Arpanet to hundreds of fellow users on 1 May 1978. Read the rest of this entry »