A man in the U.S. who have made themselves known as the Spam King was sentenced yesterday to nearly four years in prison. The court hopes that the judgement sends a strong signal to other criminals on the Internet.

Robert Soloway in the United States has made itself known as the Spam King because of the massive volume of spam he sent out. He was yesterday sentenced to 47 months in prison for fraud, spamming and tax fraud. Soloway acknowledged guilty on all points.

The case has been watched intensively by the media when very few cases of similar nature reaches the courts in the United States. Earlier this year, however, was sentenced Jeremy James in the United States to nine years in prison for spamming.

However, it is not the first time Soloway asks as an excuse. 1999, he was under investigation for spamming. He then moved to another state and continued with his activities.

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This is actually the first time I have seen a spam message with a link to a document at docs.google.com get past the spam filter.

If you click the link you’re taken to a document at Google Documents with a link in big letters followed by a nonsense text.

Could it be that the spam filter didn’t react because the spam was sent to my Gmail account and the link included was a google.com link? I don’t know for sure, but I hope the spam filter will learn to stop these thing. Otherwise we will see a lot more of this type of spam

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Trend Micro is writing about spam with random subjects not relevant to the actual content in the email. The content in the spam emails in this case are usually on line of text and a link that ends with r.html. The dangerous part of all these kinds of spam is that if you click on the link a file called video.exe will try to install on you computer. The file is actually a malware that will send spam via your computer.

The subjects you should look out for are:

• Hiliary admits past failures
• Star Trek star dies at age 79
• Find out about Harry Potter’s last novel
• Turner Empire poised for bankruptcy file
• Obama suffers setback in polls due to sex secrets
• Nokia unveils revolutionary new phone design
• Ford unveils latest 2 door design hatch
• Italy knocked out of Euro 2008
• Britney found hanged in locker room

Trend Micro writes:

The spam-malware tandem is a common tactic, and most spam does lead to malware.

So the advice here is to look out for spam and never click on links in spam!!!!

Read more at TrendLabs.

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One of the largest bot networks today is Srizbi which will turn your computer into a zombie that wil flood Internet with spam. According to Marshal Trace the network has increased it’s spamming from about 3% of all spam to 9.9%.

The thing with this network is that it’s tricking it’s victims to install the bad software by requesting a special plugin to view a video for example. Another example is an email looking like someone want you to check out a page at Classmates.com, but when you visit that page you’re requested to install a special browser plugin to view the entire message. Therefore you should stay alert for anything that require other plugins then the plugins from known developers like Sun and Adobe.

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