Information Technology Security

By Lawrence Abrams, Bleeping Computer AT&T's email servers are blocking connections from Microsoft 365 due to a "high volume" spam wave originating from Microsoft's service. Starting on Monday, AT&T customers began reporting they could no longer receive email from Microsoft 365 email addresses. When Microsoft 365 customers attempted to email an address at @att.com, @sbcglobal.net, or @bellsouth.com, AT&T servers would refuse the connection and not accept the email for delivery.

By Sergiu Gatlan,  Bleeping Computer Microsoft has confirmed that some Outlook.com users are experiencing issues with emails being blocked and marked as spam when trying to email Gmail accounts. This known issue only impacts users with Outlook.com country domains, according to a support document published by Redmond on Tuesday. Affected Outlook users are being told in follow-up emails from Gmail's servers that their messages were suspicious and have been stopped from reaching the recipient's inbox. "Remote server returned message detected as spam [..]. Gmail has detected that this message is likely suspicious due to the very low reputation of the sending domain. To best protect our users from spam, the message has been blocked," the replies from Gmail's mail server (mx.google.com) explain. Google's support website says that it's very likely that only a subset of these messages are being blocked because they have "a strong likelihood of being spam....

By Irina Ivanova,  CBS Fraudulent text messages are soaring, deluging Americans with scams ranging from false claims that a person's bank account has been frozen to online orders not being delivered, a consumer advocacy group has found.  Over the last year, the number of robo-texts in the U.S. has soared from about 1 billion per month to 12 billion, the Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit research organization, said in a new report.  The flood of robo-texts comes as regulators finally make headway against robocalls, which for years have been the No. 1 complaint among phone users. Between June 2021, when new laws for phone carriers took effect, and June 2022, robocalls fell from 2 billion to 1 billion a month, PIRG found. "Especially the scam robocalls, the ones that are most dangerous, have dropped about in half from a year ago. That's definitely good news," said Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog at PIRG. "There are some things that are finally being done ...

By  Krebs On Security At the outset of their federal criminal trial for hijacking vast swaths of Internet addresses for use in large-scale email spam campaigns, three current or former executives at online advertising firm Adconion Direct (now Amobee) have pleaded guilty to lesser misdemeanor charges of fraud and misrepresentation via email. In October 2018, prosecutors in the Southern District of California named four Adconion employees — Jacob Bychak , Mark Manoogian , Petr Pacas , and Mohammed Abdul Qayyum —  in a ten-count indictment (PDF) on felony charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, and electronic mail fraud. The government alleged that between December 2010 and September 2014, the defendants engaged in a conspiracy to identify or pay to identify blocks of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that were registered to others but which were otherwise inactive. Prosecutors said the men also sent forged letters to an Internet hosting firm claiming they had been authorized by the...