Hi everyome!

I am currently out of the country on vacation. Posts will resume on July 25th. Thank you for your patience and have a great week!

Notorious spammer Robert Alan Soloway is facing 25 years in prison after pleading guilty to one count each of mail fraud, email fraud, and tax evasion. He also faces nearly $300,000 in fines. He was originally indicted on over 40 criminal charges including wire fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft. From 1997 to 2007 Soloway ran Newport Marketing, which sold spamming services and software that enabled others to spam. Among the services he offered was a $495 package that promised the purchaser that their ad would be sent to 20 million email addresses in 15 days. Soloways attorney is arguing that his client deserves leniency and that the medications he takes for several mental disorders including Oppositional Defiant Disorder are at least partly to blame for his actions.

The Storm Worm's latest campaign wants you to believe the U.S has invaded Iran. Its newest spam messages spread malware using the following text:

"Just now US Army's Delta Force and U.S. Air Force have invaded Iran. Approximately 20000 soldiers crossed the border into Iran and broke down the Iran's Army resistance. The video made by US soldier was received today morning. Click on the video to see first minutes of the beginning of the World War III. God save us."

The video is actually a link to a malicious site that downloads a trojan onto the visitor's computer, turning it into a zombie. Check out more info here.

Popular anti-spam vendor AVG has come under fire for it's Link Scanner feature, which offers real time scanning of search engine results for suspect pages before the user clicks on them. The problem is AVG does this by faking it's user agent to fool sites into thinking it's a real human clicking. This has resulted in a flood of fake traffic, wasted bandwidth, and many irate webmasters. The backlash was so severe that AVG modified the feature so it no longer scans search engine results and released the modification as an update. Can you say busted??

Happy 4th to all our American readers! Take a minute away from the fireworks, food and fun and give thanks for the freedoms you enjoy thanks to the brave men who fought for our independence all those years ago, and to the ones who continue to defend this great country! This is a great country to live in, and the 4th is a wonderful summer holiday, but don't forget that freedom doesn't come without a high cost.

We've all gotten at least one in our inbox-an email from a foreign aristocrat of some sort, begging for your help in getting their multi million dollar fortune out of the country. In return for letting them use your bank account, they will give you a hefty cut. It a scam, a huge scam and one of the most widespread on the internet-and now the scammers have added a new twist. They use phishing tactics to take over web based email accounts and then send their spam to every address in the compromised account's address book. Read more about this new twist in Symantec's latest report, found here.

Here's a great documentary from SophosLabs that examines botnets from the inside out. Very interesting stuff!