Commtouch bricht aus - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

[Professionality]

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CTCH

Der Grund:

http://biz.yahoo.com/seekingalpha/070710/40548_id.html?.v=1

Dürfte noch 'ne Weile weitergehen. Viel Erfolg!

[Professionality]

Wanted: Spam killer

Andrea Orr | Jul 12, 2007 4:01am EDT | User Rating N/A

Imagine shopping in a store where the majority of merchandise on display was complete junk, or subscribing to a cable television service where three-quarters of the programming was devoted to unwanted ads for sexual enhancers or stock picking schemes.

It sounds implausible and in most legitimate businesses it would be. But those hypothetical scenarios help put into perspective the severity of the email spam problem. By the most conservative estimates, some 75% of all email sent today is spam. Some analysts put the figure closer to 95%. Of course, anyone who regularly loses important emails in a sea of junk mail for low interest mortgages and Nigerian money making schemes needs no statistics to understand that spam is to email what kudzu is to the South.

We are so used to it, we have almost come to accept it. But it threatens the viability of one of our most cherished communications tools, and no one can seem to stop it.

That’s not for want of trying. Scores of young companies have cropped up in recent years offering ways to separate the legitimate mail from the spam, and some have won a lot of attention. Earlier this year, Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) acquired the security technology and anti-spam company IronPort Systems Inc. for $830 million. Just this month, Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) paid $625 million for Postini Inc., an email security company.

Both businesses have developed promising ways to block spam, but neither has managed to solve the problem.

So the search for a killer anti-spam technology continues. Two Israeli small caps working on a solution - Commtouch Software Ltd. (Nasdaq: CTCH) and IncrediMail Ltd. (Nasdaq: MAIL) - have seen strong sales growth and stock price gains this year.


---You can read the FULL article when you register (registration is free!) or sign-in to SmallCapInvestor.com---


http://smallcapinvestor.com/articles/investing_strategies/te…

[Professionality]

Cybercrime & Hacking management > security > news
July 12, 2007

Huge PDF spam spike reported
Spammers dump images, pump stocks with Adobe documents
By Jaikumar Vijayan, Computerworld


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There has been a huge surge in the volume of PDF spam this week.

Advert


About 10 percent to 15 percent of all spam in one day arrived with PDF attachments, according to the Israeli security company Commtouch Software 's estimates.

"Given the fact that these messages are nearly four times bigger than standard spam messages, this increases overall global spam traffic by 30 percent to 40 percent," said Rebecca Herson, senior director of marketing.

So far, the outbreak has involved 14 billion to 21 billion PDFs and shows no signs of slowing, Herson said.

An analysis of the outbreak over a six-hour period showed it to be a truly global zombie-distributed spam attack, Herson said. About 24 percent of the spams were from the US, 14 percent were from Taiwan, and China and Russia accounted for 10 percent and 4 percent, respectively, she said. In all, PDF spam emails are being distributed by computers in 167 countries, she said.

According to Herson, the technique of sending messages as PDF attachments is relatively new and was first detected only a few weeks ago. The current outbreak shows that spammers have widely adopted the technique, she said.

"The popularity of the PDF format for legitimate business communications makes it difficult for traditional anti-spam solutions to block effectively without causing massive false positives," she said.

Spammers seem to be aware of this fact and don't even appear to be trying to disguise their messages, she said. Unlike image spam messages, which were relatively easy to detect, "these look like standard business letters until you look at the contents and see they are about organ enhancers and stock tips," she said.

The spike in PDF spam comes even as there are reports of a steady decline in image spam, which in January constituted more than half of all spam. Symantec, which publishes a monthly spam report, noted a continuing drop in image spam to just over 16 percent of all unwanted messages in May, compared with 27 percent in April and 37 percent in March.

"The drop in image spam this year has been significant," Doug Bowers, senior director of anti-spam engineering at Symantec, said in a statement. "It's clear that spammers are focusing on other techniques such as using links to hosted images to try and get their messages through."

As a result, the spike in PDF spam reported by Commtouch is not surprising or unexpected, Bowers said. "One of the things we have noticed is that spammers are going to poke around one way or the other" to break through anti-spam efforts, he said. Although spammers have been using PDF messages for some time, it is only recently that the growing number of such messages has pointed to a trend, according to Bowers.

"Absolutely, there's been a jump," said Matt Sergeant, a senior anti-spam technologist at UK-based MessageLabs. "Spammers have definitely switched to PDF. Who knows whether it's temporary or permanent, but they're using them in ways once [reserved] for image spam."

Although Sergeant did not cite specifics, he said "a couple of major kingpins of spam" had recently moved to PDF-based messages. "They account for about 50 percent of the spam on the internet, so when they switched, it created a huge volume of PDF spam."

According to Sergeant, spammers are using PDF in two ways. "The first is a static PDF that they've generated from something like Microsoft Word," he said. The second is more dynamic and automated, and it involves dropping the images cranked out by spam generators into a PDF file, Sergeant said. "The first is used to make the emails look more legitimate," he said, especially when used in "pump-and-dump" stock-scam spam.

Parsing a PDF as possible spam, however, isn't any more difficult for a top-tier security vendor than figuring out whether an image is delivering a spammer's shill, said Sergeant. "One thing that helps [us] is that the PDF specification is widely available," he said.

"But that's also what probably makes it so attractive to spammers, who can use the spec to come up with [creation] engines," Sergeant noted.

Gregg Keizer contributed to this report.

http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/security/cybercrim…

[Professionality]

Email security vendors see PDF spam spike

Frank Washkuch Jr. Jul 13 2007 16:25
Email security vendors reported a spike in PDF spam this week that, because of the size of the messages, increased global spam traffic by as much as a third.


Researchers at Commtouch first reported on Wednesday that PDF spam spiked over a 24-hour period, accounting then for 10 to 15 percent of all spam messages.

Because PDF spam messages are as much as four times the size or traditional spam, the spike increased global spam traffic by 30 to 40 percent, according to researchers at the Commtouch Detection Center.

Spammers are quickly turning their attention to PDF spam because it easily bypasses many existing filters, according to the Israeli messaging security firm.

Menashe Eliezer, head of the spam detection lab at Commtouch, told SCMagazine.com today that his firm has seen different types of PDF spam, including one containing a virus.

"The first PDF attack was about two weeks ago, and right now, as we speak, we are seeing quite a big spike in PDF spam," he said. "The spam that we saw on Wednesday was a PDF that had clear text with a logo, however, the last one had a random image. We also saw an example, where inside the body of an email, you have a link to a virus and an attached PDF is a stock spam."

Researchers from Symantec said earlier this week that they’ve seen a decrease in image spam coinciding with the discovery of two PDF spam techniques used to push penny stocks.

According to researchers at MessageLabs, the spike indicates that some spammers have given up image spam in favor of PDF spam.

The messaging security company also reported that the storm worm, first seen early this year, is generating the PDF messages and performing DDoS attacks.

Matt Sergeant, senior anti-spam technologist at MessageLabs, told SCMagazine.com today that this week’s PDF spam spike is "the sort of thing that’s been going on in waves. The way the storm botnet works [is that] it gets repurposed depending on the time of the day."

"The type [of PDF spam] the storm botnet is mostly sending out is taking the images seen in the stock scams and putting them into the PDF. What happens with a lot of this stuff is that if you have a specific file type, a lot of companies will be blocking that file outright," he said.

Sergeant said he was unsure how long the PDF spam influx would last.

"I think time will tell, to be honest," he said. "It’s likely to be one of those things that remains for six months to a year and then will be re-evaluated."

"It’s surprising that image spam went on for so long. Obviously it’s something that works for [spammers]," he added. "And if PDF spam continues to work for them, then you’ll see it for a longer period of time."

Click here to email Online Editor Frank Washkuch.

http://scmagazine.com/us/news/article/671223/email-security-…

[Professionality]

+ 8 % allein gestern

[geritg1]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 32.131.421 von Professionality am 24.10.07 11:55:32

Die Jahresperformance finde ich allerdings noch viel beeindruckender