Sophos is urging Internet users to take the Sophos Spam Pledge and put an end to the significant problems that many businesses face on a daily basis, as spam marked its 30th anniversary this week.
To mark spam's 30th anniversary, Sophos has created a Facebook group, titled "The Sophos Spam Pledge - I won't buy goods advertised via spam". It also released a YouTube video of people taking the oath, promising never to click on links in unsolicited e-mails, says Brett Myroff, CEO of regional Sophos distributor, Sophos South Africa.
He says the first spam message was sent on 1 May 1978 by Gary Thuerk, a marketing representative at the Digital Equipment Corporation, to 393 users of Arpanet.
"Recent Sophos research showed that 95% of all e-mail is spam, indicating that the spam crisis has reached new levels - SophosLabs discovers one new spam-related Web page every three seconds," says Myroff.
With this in mind, Sophos experts are appealing to Internet users, he says, advising them to resist clicking on spam links, in the hope that spam will not reach its next landmark anniversary. "A recent survey conducted by the firm revealed a worrying 11% of people admit to having bought goods via spam," he says.
"Users are always just a click away from spam - from weight loss medications to drugs used to improve sexual performance, spam is a burden on all of us," says Myroff.
"What's worse is that a lot of spam is deliberately malicious today, aiming to steal your bank account information or install malware. People who buy goods sold via spam are merely perpetuating the problem of junk e-mail for all users and must be stopped.
"While Trojans and worms still abound, there is a generation of people today who have never worked in a world without spam clogging up their inboxes.
"The Internet community needs to do what it can to make sure that spam doesn't celebrate a 40th or 50th birthday. That means educating the public about never buying goods sold via spam," Myroff adds.
Weekly malware
This week's line-up of low to medium prevalence malware includes the Troj/Agent-GYI, Troj/BHODLL-F and Troj/DwnLdr-HDB Trojans, which are affecting Windows users.
The Troj/Badsrc-B Trojan has also been detected and is essentially a Web page that has been compromised to load a script from a malicious Web site, Myroff explains.
Troj/Dloadr-BLJ is a Trojan downloader for the Windows platform, and downloads further malware to <System>\imglog.exe.
Troj/FakeAle-BE, also affecting the Windows OS, includes functionality to access the Internet and communicate with a remote server via HTTP.
Another Trojan for the Windows platform is Troj/Kbot-A. When first run, it copies itself to <System>\Spcvls.exe. The file Spcvls.exe is registered as a new system service named "Spcvlsvs", with a display name of "Spcvl Srv" and a start-up type of automatic, so that it is started automatically during system start-up.
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