Certification Magazine - October 2007 - (Page 8)

DATA STREAM News & Notes for Certiﬁed Professionals is to try and inflate the stock value of penny shares in almost all cases,” Wood said. “They target stocks and buy a bunch of those shares, wait a few days or weeks and then send spam, saying, ‘Watch this stock code because it’s going up.’ “What you’ll find is that people, just because it’s been spammed out, will buy those stocks because they know it’s been spammed out and, therefore, lots of other people are going to do the same thing.” In this sense, the image spam is functioning similarly to playing the lottery — recipients know they are encountering a scam, but they still respond to it merely because it indicates a scam is being perpetrated, and they can get in on it if they so choose. Image spam is the preferred mode of communication for this scam because it doesn’t need to direct anyone to a URL or sell them on anything. Rather, it merely conveys the message and avoids detection by anti-spam technology. The scam is largely effective but more for the perpetrator than the spam recipient who looks to get in on the action. A survey published this year by Social Science Research Network looked at 75,000 unsolicited e-mails sent over 18 months. It concluded spammers could make up to a 6 percent return on their investment by engaging in pump and dump, and recipients who act on the message typically lose between 5 percent and 8 percent of their investment. Size and Speed of Data Transfer Increasing Indiana University (IU) is looking to widen lanes and raise the speed limit on the information superhighway. The university has introduced the Data Capacitor, a file system designed to store and manipulate large data sets. It has a single client transfer rate of 977 megabytes per second across the TeraGrid network. TeraGrid is an infrastructure that combines large computing resources at nine sites (such as supercomputer centers and universities) partnered with the National Science Foundation to create a geographically diverse computational resource. Work on the Data Capacitor began with a grant of $1.72 million from the National Science Foundation in October 2005. Steven Simms, Data Capacitor project leader, said the idea behind it was to create a facility that would do three things: provide large storage, provide fast storage and provide researchers with a way to find large data sets after transfer. “The premise is that digital instruments these days, including machines that are producing simulation Image Spam Used for Stock Fraud A recent Intelligence Report from MessageLabs noted growth in image spam in 2007. This sort of spam is generated when botnets take a text message from a command to a control channel and turn that into an image that contains text. The botnets have a template that can generate code and an image, and that image will be different every time the e-mail is sent. The content itself is the same, but the code in the botnet engine makes slight changes such as altering one pixel in the background of the image, adding extra lines or making the text slightly distorted. This allows image spam to avoid detection by optical character-recognition anti-spam technology. Paul Wood, MessageLabs senior analyst, said this type of spam almost always is used to “pump and dump” low-valued shares on the stock market. “They’re not trying to sell you Viagra or lure you to a Web site or anything like that — the sole purpose 8 CERTIFICATION MAGAZINE October 2007

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Certification Magazine - October 2007

Editor's Letter Contents Data Stream Tech Careers Dear Techie Academic Connection Virtual Village Rebooting Your Career Development Inside Certification Forensics Investigators: Cybercrime Fighters Interface Building Your Skills Through Security Tools Ad Index Endtag

Certification Magazine - October 2007

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