spam

Be sure to double check that Groupon you received in your e-mail -- spammers are using the popularity of e-mailed advertisements for group discount deals to send more malware.

The rise of malware through fake e-mail advertisements and notifications are on the rise, according to a study released today by security firm Kaspersky Lab.

"They are primarily doing so by sending out malicious e-mails designed to look like official notifications. Kaspersky Lab is seeing more and more malicious spam designed to look like coupon service notifications," the report said.

The firm said it also noted these coupon spam … Read more

If you get a direct message on Twitter telling you to click a link to watch a video of President Barack Obama punching a guy, don't do it.

Spammers are using the idea of the president retaliating against someone for calling him the n-word to steal Twitter passwords and deliver malware to computers, security company PandaLabs noted today.

It's a scheme that uses the names of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for nefarious purposes, with spammers creating fake pages to dupe unsuspecting Twitter users.

The scam involves sending a Twitter direct message that reads "Check out Obama punch … Read more

First there was e-mail spam clogging up your in-box. Now there's social malware making its way into your Facebook newsfeed.

If you've ever seen a spammy message from a friend promising a "Free iPad" or "Free" airline tickets, chances are it's socware (pronounced "sock ware") -- a phrase coined by engineering professors and graduate students at the University of California, Riverside, in a new study.

Their study analyzed 12,000 users of MyPageKeeper, a free app they developed to identify suspicious posts and help protect Facebook users from them. Of that … Read more

Facebook is reminding developers that a spammy app is an ignored app. The social network announced a change in its developer guidelines today to make sure the number of notifications app developers send to app users stay at a minimum.

The two new guidelines -- not sending notifications to inactive users and maintaining a 17 percent click-to-impression ratio -- go into effect on November 9.

This means apps can only send notifications to users who have visited their apps within 28 days and apps sending a lot of notifications need to make sure that users are clicking the notifications they … Read more

Twitter has added several new e-mail alert options, and these new settings are creating more e-mail traffic for you. Some of these notifications are useful, like an update about new followers or a direct message, while others are just an annoyance.

All of these new options are enabled by default and if you normally access Twitter from a mobile device, you may have missed the opportunity to disable them before the e-mail started coming. Thankfully, reducing the amount of unnecessary e-mail from Twitter is fairly simple through its Web interface.

To access Twitter's e-mail notifications, just log in to … Read more

Google launched a new tool today that allows Webmasters to eliminate links to their site that they believe might be hurting its search rankings.

Announced at the Pubcon conference in Las Vegas today, the "disavow links" tool is designed to help sites that have already been warned by Google of manual spam actions based on "unnatural links." The tool is recommended as a last-resort solution to link spam -- disreputable or irrelevant links that may hurt a site's search engine results ranking.

"By removing the bad links directly, you're helping to prevent Google (… Read more

India has surpassed the U.S. and taken the lead as the greatest spam-sending country in the world. One out of every six junk messages that litter users' e-mail inboxes are coming from India, according to a new report from SophosLabs.

The security vendor's third-quarter "Dirty Dozen" report of spam-relaying countries found that India upped its percentage of global spam for the third quarter in a row and now accounts for more than 16 percent of all junk e-mails.

What is important to note, however, is that this spam doesn't necessarily come directly from India's … Read more

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and that's especially true when it comes to spyware; wouldn't you rather protect your system than spend hours trying to rid it of malicious visitors? SpywareBlaster is a simple program that provides protection from ActiveX-based software and unwanted cookies for both Firefox and Internet Explorer users.

SpywareBlaster has a simple interface that will be easy for even novices to navigate. The main screen shows the protection status for Internet Explorer, restricted Web sites, and Firefox. By default, protection is disabled for each of these, but you can easily … Read more