New Undersea cables feed African Botnets: Africa was not satisfied with hosting this years World Cup as the major news, they just had to get to the top of the spam generation heap. We will follow closely and our reputation systems are gearing up for the battle. Are we concerned? Not really from a blocking perspective. We have discussed spam economics elsewhere, lax laws in the host countries (laxer than even in Canada) will lead to an uptick in spam. Some cpu cycles will be burned and disk space used, but likely very little impact on your inbox.
ISP wins $2.6M judgment against spammers: that’s the good news. The bad news is that the offending outfit has vanished and no fine will ever be paid. Still, the judgments are starting to pile up. Impact on spam levels so far? Not noticeable.
Canadians Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act Introduced into the House of Commons: Glad to see the Canadian government stepping it up in the fight against spam. There has been much in the news recently about lax Canadian laws compared to the U.S.
Gmails New API – Email as Enterprise Platform: Email is definitely heating up. Google, Yahoo and Hotmail are releasing new versions of this “old” form of communication. Rumors of its demise seem to have been exaggerated. I really like the AwayFind feature of Gmail, where you can set to get special alerts in other forms (e.g. SMS) on certain types of messages (e.g. an interesting topic thread).
Judge Permanently Shuts Down ISP Catering to Spam, Porn: Knives are being sharpened on the justice side. Efforts definitely being stepped up in the North America and Europe. Will be pointless if the rest of the world fails to follow suit.
Is Google Buzz a Spammers Bonanza? It certainly was when it was first launched. Anyone with some hacker sophistication could easily gather a massive list of gmail users, and therefore email addresses. Also, it is simple enough to make the association between accounts, opening things up to phishing. Gmail gets it right most of the time on security and anti-spam, these issues with Buzz seem to be a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. Maybe its time the Wave, Buzz and Gmail people all sat down together?
Symantec inks $1.28 billion deal to buy part of VeriSign: the undeniable giants our industry are adding to their portfolio. The industry is extremely competitive and in a mature stage, so there is no surprise in seeing this level of consolidation starting among the big boys. What does this mean for customers? The giants will push all-in-one solutions and cover all aspects of security in their offerings, while smaller players will focus on their niches and continue to preach that security is better served by going with multiple vendors. There is still plenty of room for both.
The legal defensibility era is upon us – will IT security guys have to be come legal experts? The short answer is “no”. The longer one is that they will certainly have to be better informed and it is foreseeable that they will asked to justify security decisions. Some security decisions are forced with adherence to compliance standards (e.g. as simple as PCI requiring that an AV solution be installed on all servers) but such adherence may not prove to be enough. From a legal perspective this is uncharted territory. IT departments will have no choice but to be informed.
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