LISNews: Librarian News

Blake writes "The Top 10 Ways to Eliminate Spam from Your Inbo is from over at itsecurity.com. Spam emails are estimated to cost anywhere between US$10 to $87 billion per year in direct costs and lost productivity. What's more, 90% of computer viruses are spread by email attachments. Spam has become so insidious that every company has to consider the cost and means of reducing its impact. Sometimes it's as simple as implementing a basic spam filter and applying best practices-- i.e., following a few rules for recognizing and eliminating spam. On the other end of the spectrum are the most aggressive tactics, which involve turning the tables on spammers. This article provides ten tips to help eliminate spam email from your inbox."

State Sen. Mike Friend of Omaha must've been reading our boobies discussion. "The Internet is a cesspool," said Mike Friend of Omaha, who introduced the bill (LB142) at the attorney general's request. E-mailing someone a pornographic picture would be a misdemeanor, and sending it to a child would be a felony (in Nebraska) under legislation proposed Monday. More.

Slashdot pointed the way to an interesting article at eWeekM on the recent surge in e-mail spam hawking penny stocks and penis enlargement pills. I've seen a huge spike on LISHost recently, and they says it's due is the handiwork of Russian hackers running a botnet powered by tens of thousands of hijacked computers.
Internet security researchers and law enforcement authorities have traced the operation to a well-organized hacking gang controlling a 70,000+-strong peer-to-peer botnet seeded with the SpamThru Trojan. Think about that number for a second, 73,000.... In all, computers in 166 countries are part of the botnet, with the United States accounting for more than half of the infections.
They say With a botnet of this size, the group is theoretically capable of sending a billion spam e-mails in a single day.

The NYTimes Taks A Long look at the fight against spam. Advances in spam-catching techniques mean that most computer users no longer face the paralyzing crush of junk messages that began threatening the very utility of e-mail communications just a few years ago.But spammers have hardly given up, and as they improve and adapt their techniques, network managers must still face down the pill-pushers, get-rich-quick artists and others who use billions of unwanted e-mail messages to troll for income. "For the end user, spam isn't that much of a problem anymore," said Matt Sergeant, MessageLabs' senior antispam technologist. "But for the network, and for people like us, it definitely is."