Users getting spammed big time

Mar 4, 2008 20:46 GMT  ·  By

It was just last week when a security company noticed that Gmail captchas had been cracked, or should I say, a way to crack them had been found. The percentage of the successful attacks is pretty low, about 20 percent, but the number of attempts makes up for it. Once one of the most spam-free email services, Gmail is now slowly sinking into the pool of never-ending treacle that unwanted messages create.

And it's not only Gmail having turned into a successfully bombarded target. Cyber criminals penetrating the allegedly secure walls of the Google fortress are taking advantage of the capital of trust that the Mountain View-based company has accumulated over the years just because of its protection against spam. Google Groups have been found to present links to fake porn - actually infected websites, pushing Trojans horse malware disguised as video codecs.

The latest service to have seen its security breached is Google Calendar, that brings forth the traditional by now email from the grieving widow that cannot come into possession of her late husband's fortune, deposited at a bank abroad. "Dear Beloved, I am Mrs Katarzyna Stanislawa Chec, from Poland. I am married to Mr.Fred Chec who worked with Kuwait Embassy in the Netherlands for nine years before he died in the year 2006. We were married for eleven years without a child. He died after a brief illness that lasted for only four days. Before his death we were born again Christian. [?] When my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of $5.5Million with a bank in the Netherlands. Presently this money is still in the custody of the Bank in Amsterdam." The message goes on like this, you can read it in the picture on the left, a photo by Andrew Huff, under a CC-license.

The variation from the traditional widow spam is that the bank is not in a war-torn country in Africa, and the money will be donated for Christian charity purposes. Other than that, only one thing stands apart from the others. It's Google. It's not safe anymore.