We all hate spam. But we figure it must be worth it to someone since there’s so damn much of it. But… apparently not. A new paper from the Journal of Economic Perspectives estimates it brings in a total of $200 million in revenue worldwide per year. And then the rest of us spend $20 billion cleaning it up. Ugh. More »
Dropbox has admitted that spam reported by its users over the last few weeks was the direct result of a security breach. Both login names and passwords were stolen from an unstated number of users, including a Dropbox employee. That account contained a list of clients’ email addresses, which is what the company believes led to the spam in the first place. In response, it has contacted those affected to protect their accounts and outlined several new security features. These include a two-factor authentication option coming in several weeks and a new automated feature that will check for suspicious activity. A new landing page will also show you any logins to your account, while Dropbox reheated that always-helpful advise to avoid reusing passwords on multiple websites — noting that a breach on one site can cause an entire cascade of grief.
Filed under: Internet, Software
Dropbox confirms user info was stolen, adds new security measures originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Aug 2012 04:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Salutations, My Dearest One: I am writing to you this blog post with joy and happy feelings in my heart, bringing news that will be of great interest and benefit to you. Oh, beloved, there is indeed a special reason for why I have chosen to contact you in this moment of your day, I write to you now because of the urgency of our situation: the world’s third-largest spam botnet was knocked offline, today—for good. More »
Dropbox has received a bunch of reports from users claiming that their accounts had been attacked by spam yesterday. The biggest worry now is that an address leak on Dropbox’s part may be to blame, considering many of the targeted users had only set up unique and private email addresses only to be used with a Dropbox account. Dropbox has since announced that it had hired a group of outside experts to investigate the possible security breach.
It looks like the majority of the spam reports came from European countries, those including Germany, the UK and the Netherlands. For some, the spam run hit them pretty quickly, with one user claiming that they received five spam messages within a span of 11 minutes. You can have a look at what people are experiencing at this point on the Dropbox forums.
There was a 20-minute outage yesterday afternoon, which Dropbox says was not connected to the spam. So far, the outside team of experts has found no evidence of unauthorized activity on Dropbox accounts.
[via PC World]
Dropbox hires outside experts to investigate reports of spam is written by Elise Moreau & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Cory Doctorow, co-editor of BoingBoing, hit the motherload of all spam motherloads this morning, when he woke up to find some nitwit had visited his personal WordPress site and dumped a giant, rambling post of every SEO spam comments in their database. Oops! More »
It has been reported that some Yahoo Mail account users are seeing a surge in email SPAM. This is a relatively new development because although GMail remains the best player in town for SPAM filtering, Yahoo Mail wasn’t so bad – especially when compared to Hotmail. This is even more suprising if you take into account that Yahoo has been recently DMARC-certified (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance), which is a protocol/policy that helps all DMARC members communicate among themselves in order to fight spam. Facebook, Google and Microsoft are also members – so you would expect Yahoo Mail to be less SPAM-prone, if anything.
Yet, according to select users, their surge of SPAM started recently, and from the surface it looks like spammers are able to somehow send emails while being logged into the user’s account. When a user is logged-in, the email is deemed secure and many SPAM filters/checks are disabled.
If that’s true, and there is no proof that it is, this would be very bad. The idea that someone can send stuff like that means that the account has been compromised.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Hotmail to roll out new features to combat spam and account hacking, Sony Pictures France hacked,
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