Amir Lev

If you've been glued to the World Cup, you'll know that there's more to the matches than soccer (football for our international audience). I'm talking about those incessant horns -- the vuvuzelas. They're really catching people's attention, for all the wrong reasons.

It got me thinking . . . In this week's Security Levity, how is a vuvuzela just like spam?

"You Could Save up to 50% on Your Phone Bill!" screamed an email from voice-over-IP vendor Vonage. Naturally, users complained this unsolicited, bulk e-mail was spam. But some spam filters weren't having it -- a surprising number of these messages reached user inboxes. Vonage's marketing agent sent the e-mail from a list of "nonsense" domain names, including the unpronounceable urgrtquirkz.com. Surely that's illegal? Let's find out, in this week's Security Levity...

The U.S. CAN-SPAM Act defines illegal e-mail behavior in several ways. The relevant one relates to falsifying e-mail headers. California law has a similar provision against sending e-mail with falsified, misrepresented, or forged header information.

In this week's Security Levity , I want to talk more about zombies and botnets, sharing the results of some research we've been doing into this problem. I'll also pass on some encouraging recent news that hasn't gotten the attention it deserves.

I've mentioned zombies and botnets a few times over the past six months of blogging here, but let's first have a very quick refresher...

In this week's Security Levity, I want to talk about spam again -- not email spam, but spam sent via SMS. Also known as text message spam. I want to get to the bottom of whether SMS spam is as big a problem as email spam -- and if not, why not?

The situation varies around the world -- some of this is due to the different views on spam in various cultures, similar to email spam. For example SMS spam in China is much more prevalent than it is in the West, but the locals are far more tolerant of it than Westerners are.

This week on Security Levity, a sneaky trick that some spammers are trying, in an attempt to stay on the right side of the law.

When we think of 'spammers', we usually picture an offshore group of criminal individuals, pushing fake pills from websites that are outside the direct reach of U.S. law. But there's another group of spammers, who are closer to home. These are the home-grown, shady direct marketers who have crossed the line from legitimacy to spam.

This week in Security Levity, I want to talk about domain registration fraud. We're seeing various patterns of come-on for this type of fraud. I'm going to describe two such spam samples today.

As the name suggests, domain registration fraud is a catch-all term to describe types of fraud connected with the registration of Internet domain names. It often involves shady registrars, whose aim is to part you from your money in some deceptive way. (A registrar is a company authorized to sell domains by ICANN, or by a country's Internet domain authority.)