Security News

Microsoft has disabled a bad anti-spam rule flooding Microsoft 365 admins' inboxes with blind carbon copies of outbound emails mistakenly flagged as spam. This false positive issue affected Exchange Online users worldwide, with many reports saying that all emails sent to external addresses were being tagged as spam.

Microsoft is investigating Exchange Online mail delivery issues causing "Server busy" errors and delays when receiving emails from outside organizations. According to user reports online, the Exchange Online problems started this morning, affecting Microsoft 365 customers worldwide, across the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

Microsoft 365 email senders were warned by Microsoft this week to authenticate outbound messages, a move prompted by Google's recent announcement of stricter anti-spam rules for bulk senders. "By setting up email authentication for your domain, you can ensure that your messages are less likely to be rejected or marked as spam by email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Outlook.com," the Microsoft Defender for Office 365 team said.

To keep Gmail users' inboxes "Safer and more spam-free", Google is introducing new requirements for bulk senders. "Last year we started requiring that emails sent to a Gmail address must have some form of authentication. And we've seen the number of unauthenticated messages Gmail users receive plummet by 75%, which has helped declutter inboxes while blocking billions of malicious messages with higher precision," said Neil Kumaran, group product manager, Gmail Security & Trust.

The Flipper Zero portable wireless pen-testing and hacking tool can be used to aggressively spam Bluetooth connection messages at Apple iOS devices, such as iPhones and iPads. Apple devices supporting Bluetooth Low Energy technology utilize advertising packets to announce their presence to other devices.

85% of phishing emails utilized malicious links in the content of the email, and spam emails increased by 30% from Q1 to Q2 2023, according to a VIPRE report. Information technology organizations also overtook financial institutions as the most targeted sector for phishing in Q2 as compared to VIPRE's previous quarterly report.

Every website owner or webmaster grapples with the issue of spam on their website forms. CleanTalk Anti-Spam is a cloud-based tool designed to block various types of spam that website administrators encounter daily.

Forget crypto spam accounts, Twitter's got another problem which involves bots and accounts promoting adult content and infiltrating Direct Messages and interactions on the platform. In a tweet, security research group, MalwareHunterTeam exposed multiple Twitter accounts that are spam bots injecting themselves within interactions in the form of likes.

Websites of multiple U.S. universities are serving Fortnite and 'gift card' spam. BleepingComputer confirmed the malicious campaign was live, and had targeted additional scholastic websites including that of the University of Michigan.

A recruitment business that sent out an eye watering 107 million spam emails is now nursing a £130,000 fine from Britain's data watchdog. "It's an issue many of us face - opening up our email inboxes and it being filled with emails we did not ask for or consent to," said Andy Curry, ICO head of investigations.