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89-515: Signing NDEF records prevents malicious use of NFC tags (containing a protected NDEF record). For example, smartphone users tapping NFC tags containing URLs. Without some level of integrity protection an adversary could launch a phishing attack . Signing the NDEF record protects the integrity of the contents and allows the user to identify the signer if they wish. Signing certificates are obtained from third party Certificate Authorities and are governed by

178-484: A legal remedy , e.g. on the basis of trespass to chattels . A number of large civil settlements have been won in this way, although others have been mostly unsuccessful in collecting damages. Criminal prosecution of spammers under fraud or computer crime statutes is also common, particularly if they illegally accessed other computers to create botnets , or the emails were phishing or other forms of criminal fraud. Finally, in most countries specific legislation

267-546: A code containing an embedded malicious web site link. Unlike traditional phishing, which relies on deceptive emails or websites, quishing uses QR codes to bypass email filters and increase the likelihood that victims will fall for the scam, as people tend to trust QR codes and may not scrutinize them as carefully as a URL or email link. The bogus codes may be sent by email, social media, or in some cases hard copy stickers are placed over legitimate QR codes on such things as advertising posters and car park notices. When victims scan

356-496: A dynamic grid of images that is different for each login attempt. The user must identify the pictures that fit their pre-chosen categories (such as dogs, cars and flowers). Only after they have correctly identified the pictures that fit their categories are they allowed to enter their alphanumeric password to complete the login. Unlike the static images used on the Bank of America website, a dynamic image-based authentication method creates

445-409: A form of attention theft , but also dangerous because they may contain links that lead to phishing web sites or sites that are hosting malware or include malware as file attachments . Spammers collect email addresses from chat rooms, websites, customer lists, newsgroups, and viruses that harvest users' address books. These collected email addresses are sometimes also sold to other spammers. At

534-547: A link or opening an attachment, or revealing sensitive information. It often involves pretending to be a trusted entity and creating a sense of urgency, like threatening to close or seize a victim's bank or insurance account. An alternative technique to impersonation-based phishing is the use of fake news articles to trick victims into clicking on a malicious link. These links often lead to fake websites that appear legitimate, but are actually run by attackers who may try to install malware or present fake "virus" notifications to

623-497: A one-time passcode for the login, requires active participation from the user, and is very difficult for a phishing website to correctly replicate because it would need to display a different grid of randomly generated images that includes the user's secret categories. Several companies offer banks and other organizations likely to suffer from phishing scams round-the-clock services to monitor, analyze and assist in shutting down phishing websites. Automated detection of phishing content

712-666: A person other than a body corporate. In the United States, many states enacted anti-spam laws during the late 1990s and early 2000s. All of these were subsequently superseded by the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 , which was in many cases less restrictive. CAN-SPAM also preempted any further state legislation, but it left related laws not specific to e-mail intact. Courts have ruled that spam can constitute, for example, trespass to chattels. Bulk commercial email does not violate CAN-SPAM, provided that it meets certain criteria, such as

801-630: A phishing scam, in a case connected to the U.S. Secret Service Operation Firewall, which targeted notorious "carder" websites. In 2006, Japanese police arrested eight people for creating fake Yahoo Japan websites, netting themselves ¥100 million ( US$ 870,000 ) and the FBI detained a gang of sixteen in the U.S. and Europe in Operation Cardkeeper. Senator Patrick Leahy introduced the Anti-Phishing Act of 2005 to Congress in

890-724: A planned further 100 lawsuits outside the U.S. in March 2006, followed by the commencement, as of November 2006, of 129 lawsuits mixing criminal and civil actions. AOL reinforced its efforts against phishing in early 2006 with three lawsuits seeking a total of US$ 18 million under the 2005 amendments to the Virginia Computer Crimes Act, and Earthlink has joined in by helping to identify six men subsequently charged with phishing fraud in Connecticut . In January 2007, Jeffrey Brett Goodin of California became

979-497: A spear-phishing attack, and in November 2013, 110 million customer and credit card records were stolen from Target customers through a phished subcontractor account. CEO and IT security staff subsequently fired. In August 2014, iCloud leaks of celebrity photos were based on phishing e-mails sent to victims that looked like they came from Apple or Google. In November 2014, phishing attacks on ICANN gained administrative access to

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1068-599: A standard NFC tag with sufficient memory (typically on the order of 300 to 500 bytes). The NDEF record remains in the clear (not encrypted) so any NFC tag reader will be able to read the signed data even if they cannot verify it. Referring to the diagram. Upon reading the Signed NDEF Message, the Signature on the Data Record is first cryptographically verified using the author's public key (extracted from

1157-415: A trusted source, such as a bank or government agency. These messages typically redirect to a fake login page where users are prompted to enter their credentials. Spear phishing is a targeted phishing attack that uses personalized messaging, especially e‑mails, to trick a specific individual or organization into believing they are legitimate. It often utilizes personal information about the target to increase

1246-515: A truthful subject line, no forged information in the headers. If it fails to comply with any of these requirements it is illegal. Those opposing spam greeted the new law with dismay and disappointment, almost immediately dubbing it the "You Can Spam" Act. In practice, it had a little positive impact. In 2004, less than one percent of spam complied with CAN-SPAM, although a 2005 review by the Federal Trade Commission claimed that

1335-455: A user to use at least 2 factors when logging in. (For example, a user must both present a smart card and a password ). This mitigates some risk, in the event of a successful phishing attack, the stolen password on its own cannot be reused to further breach the protected system. However, there are several attack methods which can defeat many of the typical systems. MFA schemes such as WebAuthn address this issue by design. On January 26, 2004,

1424-501: A wide audience. The goal of the attacker can vary, with common targets including financial institutions, email and cloud productivity providers, and streaming services. The stolen information or access may be used to steal money, install malware , or spear phish others within the target organization. Compromised streaming service accounts may also be sold on darknet markets . This type of social engineering attack can involve sending fraudulent emails or messages that appear to be from

1513-453: Is "abusive email", as of the second half of 2007. The sample size for the MAAWG's study was over 100 million mailboxes. In 2018 with growing affiliation networks & email frauds worldwide about 90% of global email traffic is spam as per IPwarmup.com study, which also effects legitimate email senders to achieve inbox delivery. A 2010 survey of US and European email users showed that 46% of

1602-831: Is a side-effect of email spam, viruses , and worms . It happens when email servers are misconfigured to send a bogus bounce message to the envelope sender when rejecting or quarantining email (rather than simply rejecting the attempt to send the message). If the sender's address was forged, then the bounce may go to an innocent party. Since these messages were not solicited by the recipients, are substantially similar to each other, and are delivered in bulk quantities, they qualify as unsolicited bulk email or spam. As such, systems that generate email backscatter can end up being listed on various DNSBLs and be in violation of internet service providers ' Terms of Service . If an individual or organisation can identify harm done to them by spam, and identify who sent it; then they may be able to sue for

1691-601: Is a study by the National Library of Medicine, in which an organization received 858,200 emails during a 1-month testing period, with 139,400 (16%) being marketing and 18,871 (2%) being identified as potential threats. These campaigns are often used in the healthcare industry, as healthcare data is a valuable target for hackers. These campaigns are just one of the ways that organizations are working to combat phishing. Nearly all legitimate e-mail messages from companies to their customers contain an item of information that

1780-475: Is a subset of X.509 designed for limited memory typically found on NFC tags. The author's certificate can optionally be replaced with a URI reference to that certificate or Certificate Chain so that messages can be cryptographically verified. The URI certificate reference designed to save memory for NFC tags. The Signature RTD 2.0 uses industry standard digital signature algorithms. The following algorithms are supported: The Signature RTD 2.0's primary purpose

1869-575: Is also a medium for fraudsters to scam users into entering personal information on fake Web sites using emails forged to look like they are from banks or other organizations, such as PayPal . This is known as phishing . Targeted phishing, where known information about the recipient is used to create forged emails, is known as spear-phishing . If a marketer has one database containing names, addresses, and telephone numbers of customers, they can pay to have their database matched against an external database containing email addresses. The company then has

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1958-404: Is an important part of any organization's anti-phishing strategy. While there is limited data on the effectiveness of education in reducing susceptibility to phishing, much information on the threat is available online. Simulated phishing campaigns, in which organizations test their employees' training by sending fake phishing emails, are commonly used to assess their effectiveness. One example

2047-608: Is in place to make certain forms of spamming a criminal offence, as outlined below: Article 13 of the European Union Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications (2002/58/EC) provides that the EU member states shall take appropriate measures to ensure that unsolicited communications for the purposes of direct marketing are not allowed either without the consent of the subscribers concerned or in respect of subscribers who do not wish to receive these communications,

2136-489: Is known as a bot , short for robot ). In June 2006, an estimated 80 percent of email spam was sent by zombie PCs, an increase of 30 percent from the prior year. An estimated 55 billion email spam were sent each day in June 2006, an increase of 25 billion per day from June 2005. For the first quarter of 2010, an estimated 305,000 newly activated zombie PCs were brought online each day for malicious activity. This number

2225-465: Is not readily available to phishers. Some companies, for example PayPal , always address their customers by their username in emails, so if an email addresses the recipient in a generic fashion ("Dear PayPal customer") it is likely to be an attempt at phishing. Furthermore, PayPal offers various methods to determine spoof emails and advises users to forward suspicious emails to their spoof@PayPal.com domain to investigate and warn other customers. However it

2314-795: Is sent by otherwise reputable companies it is sometimes referred to as Mainsleaze . Mainsleaze makes up approximately 3% of the spam sent over the internet. Many spam emails contain URLs to a website or websites. According to a Cyberoam report in 2014, there are an average of 54 billion spam messages sent every day. "Pharmaceutical products (Viagra and the like) jumped up 45% from last quarter’s analysis, leading this quarter’s spam pack. Emails purporting to offer jobs with fast, easy cash come in at number two, accounting for approximately 15% of all spam email. And, rounding off at number three are spam emails about diet products (such as Garcinia gummi-gutta or Garcinia Cambogia), accounting for approximately 1%." Spam

2403-686: Is slightly lower than the 312,000 of the fourth quarter of 2009. Brazil produced the most zombies in the first quarter of 2010. Brazil was the source of 20 percent of all zombies, which is down from 14 percent from the fourth quarter of 2009. India had 10 percent, with Vietnam at 8 percent, and the Russian Federation at 7 percent. To combat the problems posed by botnets, open relays, and proxy servers, many email server administrators pre-emptively block dynamic IP ranges and impose stringent requirements on other servers wishing to deliver mail. Forward-confirmed reverse DNS must be correctly set for

2492-492: Is still below accepted levels for direct action, with content-based analysis reaching between 80% and 90% of success so most of the tools include manual steps to certify the detection and authorize the response. Individuals can contribute by reporting phishing to both volunteer and industry groups, such as cyscon or PhishTank . Phishing web pages and emails can be reported to Google. Organizations can implement two factor or multi-factor authentication (MFA), which requires

2581-420: Is susceptible to other attacks, such as those suffered by Scandinavian bank Nordea in late 2005, and Citibank in 2006. A similar system, in which an automatically generated "Identity Cue" consisting of a colored word within a colored box is displayed to each website user, is in use at other financial institutions. Security skins are a related technique that involves overlaying a user-selected image onto

2670-470: Is the Safe Browsing service. Web browsers such as Google Chrome , Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 2.0, Safari 3.2, and Opera all contain this type of anti-phishing measure. Firefox 2 used Google anti-phishing software. Opera 9.1 uses live blacklists from Phishtank , cyscon and GeoTrust , as well as live whitelists from GeoTrust. Some implementations of this approach send

2759-514: Is the protect the integrity and authenticity of NDEF records. Thus, NFC tag contents using the Signature RTD 2.0 is protected. The security of the system is tied to a certificate authority and the associated Certificate Chain . The NFC Forum Signature RTD Certificate Policy defines the policies under which certificate authorities can operate in the context of NFC . Root certificates are carried in verification devices and are not contained in

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2848-594: Is to use an animated GIF image that does not contain clear text in its initial frame, or to contort the shapes of letters in the image (as in CAPTCHA ) to avoid detection by optical character recognition tools. Blank spam is spam lacking a payload advertisement. Often the message body is missing altogether, as well as the subject line. Still, it fits the definition of spam because of its nature as bulk and unsolicited email. Blank spam may be originated in different ways, either intentional or unintentionally: Backscatter

2937-472: Is unsafe to assume that the presence of personal information alone guarantees that a message is legitimate, and some studies have shown that the presence of personal information does not significantly affect the success rate of phishing attacks; which suggests that most people do not pay attention to such details. Emails from banks and credit card companies often include partial account numbers, but research has shown that people tend to not differentiate between

3026-499: Is used in vishing or voice phishing attacks, where attackers make automated phone calls to large numbers of people, often using text-to-speech synthesizers, claiming fraudulent activity on their accounts. The attackers spoof the calling phone number to appear as if it is coming from a legitimate bank or institution. The victim is then prompted to enter sensitive information or connected to a live person who uses social engineering tactics to obtain information. Vishing takes advantage of

3115-447: The accounts-google.com  domain to threaten targeted users. A study on spear phishing susceptibility among different age groups found that 43% of youth aged 18–25 years and 58% of older users clicked on simulated phishing links in daily e‑mails over 21 days. Older women had the highest susceptibility, while susceptibility in young users declined during the study, but remained stable among older users. Voice over IP (VoIP)

3204-609: The United States on March 1, 2005. This bill aimed to impose fines of up to $ 250,000 and prison sentences of up to five years on criminals who used fake websites and emails to defraud consumers. In the UK, the Fraud Act 2006 introduced a general offense of fraud punishable by up to ten years in prison and prohibited the development or possession of phishing kits with the intention of committing fraud. Companies have also joined

3293-760: The cracking toolkit AOHell , but may have been used earlier in the hacker magazine 2600 . It is a variation of fishing and refers to the use of lures to "fish" for sensitive information. Measures to prevent or reduce the impact of phishing attacks include legislation , user education, public awareness, and technical security measures. The importance of phishing awareness has increased in both personal and professional settings, with phishing attacks among businesses rising from 72% in 2017 to 86% in 2020. Phishing attacks, often delivered via email spam , attempt to trick individuals into giving away sensitive information or login credentials. Most attacks are "bulk attacks" that are not targeted and are instead sent in bulk to

3382-568: The warez scene on their platform. In the 2000s, phishing attacks became more organized and targeted. The first known direct attempt against a payment system, E-gold , occurred in June 2001, and shortly after the September 11 attacks , a "post-9/11 id check" phishing attack followed. The first known phishing attack against a retail bank was reported in September 2003. Between May 2004 and May 2005, approximately 1.2 million computer users in

3471-475: The "deals", the transaction would not be completed, prompting the retailer's customers to input data that could be compromised and stolen. In 2018, the company block.one, which developed the EOS.IO blockchain, was attacked by a phishing group who sent phishing emails to all customers aimed at intercepting the user's cryptocurrency wallet key, and a later attack targeted airdrop tokens. Phishing attacks have evolved in

3560-452: The 2020s to include elements of social engineering, as demonstrated by the July 15, 2020, Twitter breach. In this case, a 17-year-old hacker and accomplices set up a fake website resembling Twitter's internal VPN provider used by remote working employees. Posing as helpdesk staff, they called multiple Twitter employees, directing them to submit their credentials to the fake VPN website. Using

3649-582: The Author's Certificate). Once verified, the Author's Certificate can be verified using the NFC Root Certificate. If both verifications are valid then one can trust the NDEF record and perform the desired operation. The Signature RTD 2.0 supports two certificate formats. One being X.509 certificate format and the other the Machine to Machine (M2M) Certificate format . The M2M Certificate format

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3738-724: The Centralized Zone Data System; also gained was data about users in the system - and access to ICANN's public Governmental Advisory Committee wiki, blog, and whois information portal. Fancy Bear was linked to spear-phishing attacks against the Pentagon email system in August 2015, and the group used a zero-day exploit of Java in a spear-phishing attack on the White House and NATO. Fancy Bear carried out spear phishing attacks on email addresses associated with

3827-740: The Democratic National Committee in the first quarter of 2016. In August 2016, members of the Bundestag and political parties such as Linken -faction leader Sahra Wagenknecht , Junge Union , and the CDU of Saarland were targeted by spear-phishing attacks suspected to be carried out by Fancy Bear. In August 2016, the World Anti-Doping Agency reported the receipt of phishing emails sent to users of its database claiming to be official WADA, but consistent with

3916-591: The ISP, for example) a naïve ISP may terminate their service for spamming. Spammers frequently seek out and make use of vulnerable third-party systems such as open mail relays and open proxy servers . SMTP forwards mail from one server to another—mail servers that ISPs run commonly require some form of authentication to ensure that the user is a customer of that ISP. Increasingly, spammers use networks of malware-infected PCs ( zombies ) to send their spam. Zombie networks are also known as botnets (such zombifying malware

4005-527: The NFC Forum Signature RTD Certificate Policy. Referring to the diagrams. An author obtains a signing certificate from a valid certificate authority. The author's private key is used to sign the Data Record (text, URI, or whatever you like). The signature and author's certificate comprise the signature record. The Data Record and Signature Record are concatenated to produce the Signed NDEF Message that can be written to

4094-505: The QR code with their phone or device, they are redirected to a fake website designed to steal personal information, login credentials, or financial details. As QR codes become more widely used for things like payments, event check-ins, and product information, quishing is emerging as a significant concern for digital security. Users are advised to exercise caution when scanning unfamiliar QR codes and ensure they are from trusted sources, although

4183-718: The Russian Business Network based in St. Petersburg. Email scams posing as the Internal Revenue Service were also used to steal sensitive data from U.S. taxpayers. Social networking sites are a prime target of phishing, since the personal details in such sites can be used in identity theft ; In 2007, 3.6 million adults lost US$ 3.2 billion due to phishing attacks. The Anti-Phishing Working Group reported receiving 115,370 phishing email reports from consumers with US and China hosting more than 25% of

4272-665: The Russian hacking group Fancy Bear. In 2017, 76% of organizations experienced phishing attacks, with nearly half of the information security professionals surveyed reporting an increase from 2016. In the first half of 2017, businesses and residents of Qatar were hit with over 93,570 phishing events in a three-month span. In August 2017, customers of Amazon faced the Amazon Prime Day phishing attack, when hackers sent out seemingly legitimate deals to customers of Amazon. When Amazon's customers attempted to make purchases using

4361-586: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed the first lawsuit against a Californian teenager suspected of phishing by creating a webpage mimicking America Online and stealing credit card information. Other countries have followed this lead by tracing and arresting phishers. A phishing kingpin, Valdir Paulo de Almeida, was arrested in Brazil for leading one of the largest phishing crime rings , which in two years stole between US$ 18 million and US$ 37 million . UK authorities jailed two men in June 2005 for their role in

4450-455: The UK's National Cyber Security Centre rates the risk as far lower than other types of lure. Phishing attacks often involve creating fake links that appear to be from a legitimate organization. These links may use misspelled URLs or subdomains to deceive the user. In the following example URL, http://www.yourbank.example.com/ , it can appear to the untrained eye as though the URL will take

4539-676: The United States $ 21.58 billion annually, while another reported the cost at $ 17 billion, up from $ 11 billion in 2003. In 2004, the worldwide productivity cost of spam has been estimated to be $ 50 billion in 2005. Because of the international nature of spam, the spammer, the hijacked spam-sending computer, the spamvertised server, and the user target of the spam are all often located in different countries. As much as 80% of spam received by Internet users in North America and Europe can be traced to fewer than 200 spammers. In terms of volume of spam: According to Sophos ,

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4628-570: The United States suffered losses caused by phishing, totaling approximately US$ 929 million . Phishing was recognized as a fully organized part of the black market, and specializations emerged on a global scale that provided phishing software for payment, which were assembled and implemented into phishing campaigns by organized gangs. The United Kingdom banking sector suffered from phishing attacks, with losses from web banking fraud almost doubling in 2005 compared to 2004. In 2006, almost half of phishing thefts were committed by groups operating through

4717-607: The amount of sexually explicit spam had significantly decreased since 2003 and the total volume had begun to level off. Many other observers viewed it as having failed, although there have been several high-profile prosecutions. Spammers may engage in deliberate fraud to send out their messages. Spammers often use false names, addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information to set up "disposable" accounts at various Internet service providers. They also often use falsified or stolen credit card numbers to pay for these accounts. This allows them to move quickly from one account to

4806-609: The beginning of the Internet (the ARPANET ), sending of commercial email was prohibited. Gary Thuerk sent the first email spam message in 1978 to 600 people. He was reprimanded and told not to do it again. Now the ban on spam is enforced by the Terms of Service / Acceptable Use Policy (ToS/AUP) of internet service providers (ISPs) and peer pressure. Spam is sent by both otherwise reputable organizations and lesser companies. When spam

4895-505: The chances of success. These attacks often target executives or those in financial departments with access to sensitive financial data and services. Accountancy and audit firms are particularly vulnerable to spear phishing due to the value of the information their employees have access to. The Russian government-run Threat Group-4127 (Fancy Bear) (GRU Unit 26165) targeted Hillary Clinton 's 2016 presidential campaign with spear phishing attacks on over 1,800  Google accounts, using

4984-633: The choice between these options to be determined by national legislation. In the United Kingdom, for example, unsolicited emails cannot be sent to an individual subscriber unless prior permission has been obtained or unless there is a pre-existing commercial relationship between the parties. The 2010 Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act (which took effect in 2014) is Canadian legislation meant to fight spam. The Spam Act 2003 , which covers some types of email and phone spam. Penalties are up to 10,000 penalty units , or 2,000 penalty units for

5073-509: The details supplied by the unsuspecting employees, they were able to seize control of several high-profile user accounts, including those of Barack Obama , Elon Musk , Joe Biden , and Apple Inc. 's company account. The hackers then sent messages to Twitter followers soliciting Bitcoin , promising to double the transaction value in return. The hackers collected 12.86 BTC (about $ 117,000 at the time). There are anti-phishing websites which publish exact messages that have been recently circulating

5162-582: The effort to crack down on phishing. On March 31, 2005, Microsoft filed 117 federal lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington . The lawsuits accuse " John Doe " defendants of obtaining passwords and confidential information. March 2005 also saw a partnership between Microsoft and the Australian government teaching law enforcement officials how to combat various cyber crimes, including phishing. Microsoft announced

5251-400: The email had previously traversed many legitimate servers. Spoofing can have serious consequences for legitimate email users. Not only can their email inboxes get clogged up with "undeliverable" emails in addition to volumes of spam, but they can mistakenly be identified as a spammer. Not only may they receive irate email from spam victims, but (if spam victims report the email address owner to

5340-601: The first and last digits. A study on phishing attacks in game environments found that educational games can effectively educate players against information disclosures and can increase awareness on phishing risk thus mitigating risks. The Anti-Phishing Working Group , one of the largest anti-phishing organizations in the world, produces regular report on trends in phishing attacks. A wide range of technical approaches are available to prevent phishing attacks reaching users or to prevent them from successfully capturing sensitive information. Specialized spam filters can reduce

5429-489: The first defendant convicted by a jury under the provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 . He was found guilty of sending thousands of emails to AOL users, while posing as the company's billing department, which prompted customers to submit personal and credit card information. Facing a possible 101 years in prison for the CAN-SPAM violation and ten other counts including wire fraud , the unauthorized use of credit cards, and

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5518-695: The internet, such as FraudWatch International and Millersmiles. Such sites often provide specific details about the particular messages. As recently as 2007, the adoption of anti-phishing strategies by businesses needing to protect personal and financial information was low. There are several different techniques to combat phishing, including legislation and technology created specifically to protect against phishing. These techniques include steps that can be taken by individuals, as well as by organizations. Phone, web site, and email phishing can now be reported to authorities, as described below . Effective phishing education, including conceptual knowledge and feedback,

5607-497: The limited display of URLs in mobile browsers. Smishing can be just as effective as email phishing, as many smartphones have fast internet connectivity. Smishing messages may also come from unusual phone numbers. Page hijacking involves redirecting users to malicious websites or exploit kits through the compromise of legitimate web pages, often using cross site scripting . Hackers may insert exploit kits such as MPack into compromised websites to exploit legitimate users visiting

5696-402: The login form as a visual cue that the form is legitimate. Unlike the website-based image schemes, however, the image itself is shared only between the user and the browser, and not between the user and the website. The scheme also relies on a mutual authentication protocol, which makes it less vulnerable to attacks that affect user-only authentication schemes. Still another technique relies on

5785-471: The major sources of spam in the fourth quarter of 2008 (October to December) were: When grouped by continents, spam comes mostly from: In terms of number of IP addresses: the Spamhaus Project ranks the top three as the United States, China, and Russia, followed by Japan, Canada, and South Korea. In terms of networks: As of 13 December 2021 , the three networks hosting

5874-414: The means to send email to people who have not requested email, which may include people who have deliberately withheld their email address. Image spam , or image-based spam, is an obfuscation method by which text of the message is stored as a GIF or JPEG image and displayed in the email. This prevents text-based spam filters from detecting and blocking spam messages. Image spam was reportedly used in

5963-419: The mid-2000s to advertise " pump and dump " stocks. Often, image spam contains nonsensical, computer-generated text which simply annoys the reader. However, new technology in some programs tries to read the images by attempting to find text in these images. These programs are not very accurate, and sometimes filter out innocent images of products, such as a box that has words on it. A newer technique, however,

6052-414: The misuse of AOL's trademark, he was sentenced to serve 70 months. Goodin had been in custody since failing to appear for an earlier court hearing and began serving his prison term immediately. Email spam Email spam , also referred to as junk email , spam mail , or simply spam , is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email ( spamming ). The name comes from a Monty Python sketch in which

6141-518: The most spammers are ChinaNet , Amazon , and Airtel India . The U.S. Department of Energy Computer Incident Advisory Capability (CIAC) has provided specific countermeasures against email spamming. Some popular methods for filtering and refusing spam include email filtering based on the content of the email, DNS-based blackhole lists ( DNSBL ), greylisting , spamtraps , enforcing technical requirements of email ( SMTP ), checksumming systems to detect bulk email, and by putting some sort of cost on

6230-658: The name of the canned pork product Spam is ubiquitous, unavoidable, and repetitive. Email spam has steadily grown since the early 1990s, and by 2014 was estimated to account for around 90% of total email traffic. Since the expense of the spam is borne mostly by the recipient, it is effectively postage due advertising. Thus, it is an example of a negative externality . The legal definition and status of spam varies from one jurisdiction to another, but nowhere have laws and lawsuits been particularly successful in stemming spam. Most email spam messages are commercial in nature. Whether commercial or not, many are not only annoying as

6319-412: The next as the host ISPs discover and shut down each one. Senders may go to great lengths to conceal the origin of their messages. Large companies may hire another firm to send their messages so that complaints or blocking of email falls on a third party. Others engage in spoofing of email addresses (much easier than IP address spoofing ). The email protocol ( SMTP ) has no authentication by default, so

6408-406: The number of phishing emails that reach their addressees' inboxes. These filters use a number of techniques including machine learning and natural language processing approaches to classify phishing emails, and reject email with forged addresses. Another popular approach to fighting phishing is to maintain a list of known phishing sites and to check websites against the list. One such service

6497-437: The outgoing mail server and large swaths of IP addresses are blocked, sometimes pre-emptively, to prevent spam. These measures can pose problems for those wanting to run a small email server off an inexpensive domestic connection. Blacklisting of IP ranges due to spam emanating from them also causes problems for legitimate email servers in the same IP range. The total volume of email spam has been consistently growing, but in 2011

6586-560: The phishing pages each in the third quarter of 2009. Phishing in the 2010s saw a significant increase in the number of attacks. In 2011, the master keys for RSA SecurID security tokens were stolen through a phishing attack. Chinese phishing campaigns also targeted high-ranking officials in the US and South Korean governments and military, as well as Chinese political activists. According to Ghosh, phishing attacks increased from 187,203 in 2010 to 445,004 in 2012. In August 2013, Outbrain suffered

6675-440: The problem of phishing sites impersonating a victim site by embedding its images (such as logos ), several site owners have altered the images to send a message to the visitor that a site may be fraudulent. The image may be moved to a new filename and the original permanently replaced, or a server can detect that the image was not requested as part of normal browsing, and instead send a warning image. The Bank of America website

6764-553: The public's lower awareness and trust in voice telephony compared to email phishing. SMS phishing or smishing is a type of phishing attack that uses text messages from a cell phone or smartphone to deliver a bait message. The victim is usually asked to click a link, call a phone number, or contact an email address provided by the attacker. They may then be asked to provide private information , such as login credentials for other websites. The difficulty in identifying illegitimate links can be compounded on mobile devices due to

6853-466: The respondents had opened spam messages, although only 11% had clicked on a link. According to Steve Ballmer in 2004, Microsoft founder Bill Gates receives four million emails per year, most of them spam. This was originally incorrectly reported as "per day". At the same time Jef Poskanzer , owner of the domain name acme.com, was receiving over one million spam emails per day. A 2004 survey estimated that lost productivity costs Internet users in

6942-408: The sender via a proof-of-work system or a micropayment . Each method has strengths and weaknesses and each is controversial because of its weaknesses. For example, one company's offer to "[remove] some spamtrap and honeypot addresses" from email lists defeats the ability for those methods to identify spammers. Outbound spam protection combines many of the techniques to scan messages exiting out of

7031-454: The server. Page hijacking can also involve the insertion of malicious inline frames , allowing exploit kits to load. This tactic is often used in conjunction with watering hole attacks on corporate targets. A relatively new trend in online scam activity is "Quishing". The term is derived from "QR" ( Quick Response ) codes and "phishing", as scammers exploit the convenience of QR codes to trick users into giving up sensitive data, by scanning

7120-531: The signature record. This separation is important for the security of the system just as web browser certificates are separated from web server certificates in TLS . Phishing Phishing is a form of social engineering and a scam where attackers deceive people into revealing sensitive information or installing malware such as viruses , worms , adware , or ransomware . Phishing attacks have become increasingly sophisticated and often transparently mirror

7209-406: The site being targeted, allowing the attacker to observe everything while the victim navigates the site, and transverses any additional security boundaries with the victim. As of 2020, it is the most common type of cybercrime , with the FBI 's Internet Crime Complaint Center reporting more incidents of phishing than any other type of cybercrime. The term "phishing" was first recorded in 1995 in

7298-513: The spammer can pretend to originate a message apparently from any email address. To prevent this, some ISPs and domains require the use of SMTP-AUTH , allowing positive identification of the specific account from which an email originates. Senders cannot completely spoof email delivery chains (the 'Received' header), since the receiving mailserver records the actual connection from the last mailserver's IP address. To counter this, some spammers forge additional delivery headers to make it appear as if

7387-757: The status bar when the mouse is hovering over it. However, some phishers may be able to bypass this security measure. Internationalized domain names (IDNs) can be exploited via IDN spoofing or homograph attacks to allow attackers to create fake websites with visually identical addresses to legitimate ones. These attacks have been used by phishers to disguise malicious URLs using open URL redirectors on trusted websites. Even digital certificates, such as SSL , may not protect against these attacks as phishers can purchase valid certificates and alter content to mimic genuine websites or host phishing sites without SSL. Phishing often uses social engineering techniques to trick users into performing actions such as clicking

7476-417: The trend seemed to reverse. The amount of spam that users see in their mailboxes is only a portion of total spam sent, since spammers' lists often contain a large percentage of invalid addresses and many spam filters simply delete or reject "obvious spam". The first known spam email, advertising a DEC product presentation, was sent in 1978 by Gary Thuerk to 600 addresses, the total number of users on ARPANET

7565-401: The user to the example section of the yourbank website; this URL points to the " yourbank " (i.e. phishing subdomain) section of the example website (fraudster's domain name). Another tactic is to make the displayed text for a link appear trustworthy, while the actual link goes to the phisher's site. To check the destination of a link, many email clients and web browsers will show the URL in

7654-610: The victim. Early phishing techniques can be traced back to the 1990s, when black hat hackers and the warez community used AOL to steal credit card information and commit other online crimes. The term "phishing" is said to have been coined by Khan C. Smith, a well-known spammer and hacker, and its first recorded mention was found in the hacking tool AOHell , which was released in 1994. AOHell allowed hackers to impersonate AOL staff and send instant messages to victims asking them to reveal their passwords. In response, AOL implemented measures to prevent phishing and eventually shut down

7743-434: The visited URLs to a central service to be checked, which has raised concerns about privacy . According to a report by Mozilla in late 2006, Firefox 2 was found to be more effective than Internet Explorer 7 at detecting fraudulent sites in a study by an independent software testing company. An approach introduced in mid-2006 involves switching to a special DNS service that filters out known phishing domains. To mitigate

7832-400: Was 2600 at the time though software limitations meant only slightly more than half of the intended recipients actually received it. As of August 2010, the number of spam messages sent per day was estimated to be around 200 billion. More than 97% of all emails sent over the Internet in 2008 were unwanted, according to a Microsoft security report. MAAWG estimates that 85% of incoming mail

7921-512: Was one of several that asked users to select a personal image (marketed as SiteKey ) and displayed this user-selected image with any forms that request a password. Users of the bank's online services were instructed to enter a password only when they saw the image they selected. The bank has since discontinued the use of SiteKey. Several studies suggest that few users refrain from entering their passwords when images are absent. In addition, this feature (like other forms of two-factor authentication )

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