Spanish authorities have arrested a 35-year-old Dutchman they say is “suspected of unprecedented heavy attacks” on Spamhaus, the international group that helps network owners around the world block spam.

A press release issued by the Dutch Public Prosecutor Service identified the suspect only by the initials SK and said he was living in Barcelona. A variety of circumstantial evidence, mostly taken from this Facebook profile, strongly suggests the suspect is one Sven Olaf Kamphuis. He’s the man quoted in a March 26 New York Times article saying a Dutch hosting company called CyberBunker, which Kamphuis is affiliated with, was behind distributed denial-of-service attacks aimed at Spamhaus. Kamphuis later denied he or CyberBunker had anything to do with the attacks.

» via ars technica

The internet around the world has been slowed down in what security experts are describing as the biggest cyber-attack in history.

A row between a spam-fighting group and hosting firm has sparked retaliation attacks flooding core infrastructure.

It is having an impact on widely used services like Netflix - and experts worry it could escalate to affect banking and email services.

Five national cyber-police-forces are investigating the attacks.

» via BBC

About 50% of all junk mail on the net emerges from just 20 internet service providers (ISPs), a study has found.

The survey of more than 42,000 ISPs tried to map the net’s “bad neighbourhoods” to help pinpoint sources of malicious mail.

The survey by Dutch researchers found that, in many cases, ISPs specialise in particular threats such as spam and phishing.

Methods to thwart attacks and predict targets also emerged from the study.

» via BBC

Security researchers said they dismantled the world’s No. 3 spam botnet after convincing the companies that hosted its command and control servers to pull the plug on the operation.

Atif Mushtaq, senior staff scientist at security firm FireEye, said in a blog post that the botnet known as Grum drew its last dying breath on Wednesday, after six servers in Ukraine and one in Russia were shut down. In a tense faceoff with whitehats, the botnet operators had deployed those servers following the disconnection earlier this week of separate servers in the Netherlands and Panama. Faced with the threat of losing a 100,000-computer network that generated an estimated 18 billion spam messages a day, the Grum operators were desperately trying to transition to those machines when they stopped working.

» via ars technica

Spammers have taken over several parts of a UK government’s website that lays out its open data policy.

Data.gov.uk was created to let people know what the government was doing to open up and share official statistics.

The site solicited ideas about how to use the data and invited debate on official policy.

However, the discussion forum and suggestions section have been closed after being filled with messages peddling fake designer goods.

» via BBC

Michelle Espinoza thought a single photo was going to ruin her business. It was an image of one of the pearl cuff bracelets she designs that showed up on Pinterest, a site where users create virtual bulletin boards, grouping images in categories—whether it be chocolate desserts or bohemian jewelry. For 10 days in April, anybody who clicked on the photo ended up watching pornography or unwittingly downloading a virus. “I can’t gauge how many customers I lost,” says Espinoza, a resident of Santa Rosa Beach, Fla. “But I did have people messaging me asking, ‘Are you linked to spam?’ I was just distraught.”

When Pinterest debuted two years ago, e-mail was the format of choice for spam peddling diets, sexual enhancement, and get-rich scams. Better filters have since banished many of the unwanted missives from in-boxes. Instead, scammers are turning to social media sites that are often poorly equipped to deal with the influx. “Social spam can be a lot more effective than e-mail spam,” says Mark Risher, chief executive officer of Impermium, which sells anti-spam software. “The bad guys are taking to this with great abandon.”

» via BusinessWeek

Text message spam has started waking Bob Dunnell in the middle of the night, promising cheap mortgages, credit cards and drugs. Some messages offer gift cards to, say, Walmart, if he clicks on a Web site and enters his Social Security number.

Once the scourge of e-mail providers and the Postal Service, spammers have infiltrated the last refuge of spam-free communication: cellphones. In the United States, consumers received roughly 4.5 billion spam texts last year, more than double the 2.2 billion received in 2009, according to Ferris Research, a market research firm that tracks spam.

Spread over 250 million text message-enabled phones, the problem is not as commonplace as e-mail spam. But it is a growing menace, with the potential for significant damage.

» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)