A new crop of scam spam is going around, with subjects like “Copies of Policies” and “Changelog as Promised” and talking about things like the “Ocean, Warehouse or EPLI policy”. They are short – to the point – and spam scams. They contain links that go to malicious sites such as https://web.archive.org/web/20121118080105/http://abstract.nassassin.com:80/wp-content/plugins/counterize/mail.htm/, http://flexjobb.se/wp-content/plugins/mail.htm, and https://www.theinternetpatrol.com/brick-wall/, and come from sender names including Brock Buchanan, Darien Forbes, A. Simmons, and A. Blanton.

Well, Facebook has finally done it, they’ve found a way to allow unscrupulous marketers to spam your Facebook account. Facebook will allow advertisers to target users based on personal information such as phone numbers, user IDs, and email addresses. In a confirmation to PCMag.com, Facebook relayed their new marketing program which will begin next week, targeting ads to their “existing customers.”

Death by CAPTCHA is a company that has figured out a way to bypass security CAPTCHAs by offering their technology to solve CAPTCHA phrases. While this may sound like celebratory news for those who are tired of face-palming every time they try to read the twisted words provided by websites looking to make things secure for their users, in reality, it is a gateway to spam.

Grum, the world’s third-largest botnet, has been shutdown, according to one of the security researchers who helped take the botnet offline, Atif Mushtaq. Mushtaq, who works for the “malware intelligence lab” FireEye, announced the good news on the security company’s blog yesterday after two intense days battling Grum. You may see less spam related to cheap “Cilais,” “Vigara,” or “Levtira” (misspellings of Cialis, Viagra, and Levitra, respectively) and fewer unwanted messages advertising Rolex watches as a result of the Grum botnet shutdown. With a command and control server in the Netherlands, and additional servers in countries such as Panama and Russia, taking down Grum required international coordination and effort.

Isn’t it frustrating when you receive an SMS text message and it turns out to be SMS spam? Don’t you wish that you could report those spammers to your wireless carrier? Well, you can! Whether you want to report text spam to ATT, T-Mobile, Verizon, or Sprint – or any other North American carrier, it’s as simple as forwarding it right from your phone. Here’s how to do it.

If you were on the Internet in 2005 or 2006, you almost certainly also received spam for an herbal weight loss supplement called ‘Hoodia’, among others, and, if you received spam for Hoodia, then it’s also almost certain that Brian McDaid was behind it. In 2007, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) nabbed McDaid, a chiropractor from Thorndale, Pennsylvania, and charged him with false and deceptive business claims, and several violations of the Federal anti-spam law, CAN-SPAM.

A rash of fake Verizon Wireless account notifications hit the Internet this week, showing outrageous charges that are, supposely, hitting your bill. They have the subject line of either “Thank You for your Verizon Wireless Payment” or “Your Bill Is Now Available”. Of course, the links take you to all sorts of spam and scam sites, so don’t be taken in. Here are some examples of the fake notices, with links to places such as https://www.theinternetpatrol.com/brick-wall/, https://www.theinternetpatrol.com/brick-wall/ and http://www.mayphe.com.br/DyXEBK63/index.html.

In a move that is not unheard of, but completely reprehensible, defeated Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is selling off his campaign’s donor and activist email list as the campaign attempts to crawl out of their $4 million hole of debt. And perhaps “slithering” is a better word as Newt is slapping his donors right in the face by not just selling their email addresses to other political campaigns, but to any unscrupulous company with equally slippery ethics.

Frustrated about the amount of spam you receive in foreign languages? Be it Russian, Japanese or other Asian language; or Kanji, Hanzi, Hanja, logograms, pictograms, Cyrillic or other characters, foreign language spam is frustrating. And it’s all the more frustrating because if all foreign language email that you receive is usually spam, as is the case for many people, then your spam filter should have a way to tell it “All email not in English (or whichever your native language is) is spam.” Now, if you use Gmail, there is a way to do it (and even if you don’t use Gmail as your primary email program, you can use Gmail as a spam filter). Here it is.

Microsoft Hotmail, the world’s largest email provider, is better at blocking spam than Google Gmail and Yahoo Mail, according to a study released by the independent research firm Cascade Insights. The study only tested these companies – the so-called big three email providers – and was sponsored by Microsoft, which funded the research to combat their bad reputation for allowing loads of spam into users’ inboxes.

Several email providers that normally compete with one another, like Google Gmail and Microsoft Hotmail, have teamed up in an effort to better protect email users from spam and fraudulent messages. The new system is called DMARC, short for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance. With a united front, the war against spam may have a powerful new weapon.

VIPSafeToday.com is an outfit that claims to want to give you a loan – or even a payday loan – and they are letting people know by spamming their cell phones with a text message that reads “You qualify to get up to 1200 DOLLARS instantly at WWW.VIPSAFETODAY.COM – It takes only mins for approval. ‘NO’ to unsubscribe” This message is dastardly for several reasons – read on for the full information, and don’t text them “no” (or anything else) to ‘unsubscribe’!

You may not have heard of the Internet Water Army before, but you’ve probably seen their handiwork. The Internet Water Army is the monicker given to a group of underground people in China who are paid to post comments on blogs and other Internet forums, often either recommending – or dissing – a product or service, or posting links. Because they are an ‘army’ of people who are paid to ‘flood’ the Internet with their spam comments, they have earned the name The Internet Water Army.

If you get an email telling you that “your Facebook account has been disabled by an administrator”, don’t fall for it! It’s a scam, and the link in the email goes not to Facebook, but to yet another Canadian pharmacy site selling male enhancement drugs.

A whole lot of people are getting the latest spam scam that supposedly is sent from the “AOL Administration Center” (there is no such thing, folks). Coming from the spoofed email address “AOLCenter@message.aol.com”, the email tells you that “you have 1 notification”, and includes a link to click to see the “notification”. In fact, this is a classic example of Canadian pharmacy spam.