There’s a new version of Wordpress available and you need to upgrade ASAP due to some important security fixes.

Read more at www.wordpress.org

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Have you tried to access Digital Points forum today or yesterday, then you’ve most likely noticed a series of database errors and network time outs .

From what it looks the errors may have some connection to the spamming in the Introduction part of the forums. The messages in the spam posts are clear: I will destroy Digital Points and This site under hack attack.

I can’t figure out any reason for someone to be so pissed at any webmaster forum (or any forum at all) so they fil the forum with useless posts…….

I’ve seen two user names posting thee messages, so from my point of view it should be easy for the moderators and admins at Digital Point to block this spam. But there could also be some kind of DDOS attacks at the same time or the server could be at an extreme load due to many spam bots trying to register new member account to spam from.

I hope they can solve this problem and get their site up and running like normal again soon.

EDIT: While writing this it looks like they’ve taken their forum offline since I can just see a white blank page.

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A few days ago McColo Corp in San Jose (Californa) was disconnected from the Internet. According to some sources McColo Corp has been responsible for as much as 75% of the spam in the world!!!!! Hurricane Electric and Global Crossing cut off the Internet line sometime on Monday or Tuesday and already on Wednesday a decrease in spam could be detected

In some articles credits for the shutdown are also given to HostExploit, an alliance of volunteers who work at Google, McAfee and Arbor Networks.

McColo Corp didn’t send any spam them selfs but their servers was used by cyber criminals sending the spam, hosting malware and child pornography.

Unfortunately this will not last for long since the spammers will soon find someone else to host their servers , but a recent research report has shown that only one of 12.5 million spam emails results in a sale. That means that spam is soon not profitable any more since more and more spam is needed for a single sale. If spam gets even less profitable they hopefully give up

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We have  anew blog spammer online and this one is most likely trying to figure out if your blog got a spam protection of not.

Most comment spam in blogs got at least one link to the spammers web site (in some cases they try to post up to a thousand links ), but this spammer hasn’t included any link at all. The comment in fact only contains a string of what looks like random characters and that may be the reason for Akismet not to flag it as spam .

However these random characters is most likely some sort of key the spammer will search for later. If a search engine has found the key unique to your blog it means that your blog is open to spam. Therefore it’s important not to approve any of these posts because then your blog will be hit by all kind of spam bots.

Luckily the posts are from the same range of IP addresses (94.102.60.0/24) assigned to Ecatel LTD in Netherlands so it’s quite easy to blog the IP addresses used in this “attack” in your servers firewall.

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RSA has been tracking a trojan called Sinowal Trojan since early 2006 (almost three years) and they’ve estimated that this evil piece of software have stolen over 300,000 logins to online banks ! Since this number is just an estimate the actual number may be even larger.

The trojan has also been used to steal credit card numbers, FTP passwords and email passwords

Three year is a very long time in our computer age so how has this trojan been able to stay alive for this long time? Well the trojan is evolving, making it almost impossible for security companies to find it again after each update. The creators release new versions all the time, registers multiple domain names and do everything they can to keep the grip of infected computers and to cause even more fall victim.

RSA don’t know for sure who’s behind this trojan, but they believe the trojan is connected with a russian group known as Russian Business Network.

Read the full story here.

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