Instagram is growing by leaps and bounds. The photo-sharing community now enjoys more than 300 million monthly active users, an increase of more than 100 million since March. Perhaps more importantly, the milestone puts the social service ahead of Twitter’s…

Most of us are familiar with Captchas, those often illegible bits of text and numbers used to distinguish humans from bots when registering for a new service or attempting to gain access to a restricted area.

Reddit is a user-driven community whose business model depends on the submissions of its members. The model works as it should when a Redditor shares something clever, funny or otherwise useful found while surfing the web. Submitting original content, however,…

Apple's iMessage used to be one of the better and safer ways to communicate outside of carrier-based text messaging. But according to security researcher Tom Landesman of anti-spam company Cloudmark, iMessage is now responsible for more than 30 percent of…

Bulk e-mails are a nuisance that everyone with an e-mail account has to deal with. While it is possible to remove yourself from most mailing lists, the unsubscribe link is often buried within the message and takes longer to locate…

A number of AOL users claim their e-mail accounts have been hijacked and are being used to send spam. AOL is on the case although preliminary reports suggest some of the accounts are being spoofed, not hacked.

Facebook announced yesterday that the company is planning to cleanup the News Feed by reducing stories that users report as spam, or dislike. The cleanup targets three categories of News Feed spam: Like-baiting posts, frequently circulated content, and spammy links.

Based on a patent filing, Apple appears to be interested in developing a new email system that will help to better filter spam mail, among other things.

Skype users beware: Kaspersky has discovered a new trojan that's spreading through Microsoft's chat service. Revealed late last week, the malware campaign is believed to have only began on March 1 but has grown rapidly and the infection is essentially…

The Federal Trade Commission recently wrapped up a contest designed to find an effective solution to combat robocalls – spammy automated phone calls that deliver a pre-recorded message to unlucky recipients. The annoying messages account for roughly 200,000 complaints each…

The US Federal Trade Commission has charged 29 individuals who allegedly sent millions of spam text messages to phone users promising "free" prizes. The defendants are reportedly responsible for sending more than 180 million unwanted messages to random phone numbers,…

Tumblr says it has addressed a vulnerability which allowed hackers to force visitors into unwittingly reposting an offensive, expletive-ridden message condemning the "tasteless" and "bourgeoisie" blog site. More than 8,600 users were affected -- Cnet, USA Today and The Verge were…

It seems that no matter what medium people use for communication, spammers always find a way to make it a little less attractive. Junk mail, telemarketers, email spam and now even SMS spam have all likely been experienced by most…

Twitter has warned an unknown number of users that hackers have potentially compromised their accounts. Spam-like tweets seem to be originating from at least some affected users, including TechCrunch's own Twitter account. "Make $250 A Day From Home", one tweet…

YouTube has begun “encouraging” users with pop-up boxes asking those commenting on video uploads to do so using their real name, rather than their online handles. In addition to this, Google is offering the option to link accounts with Google+,…

Security researchers announced they’ve dismantled the world's third-largest botnet, known as Grum, which is believed to have been responsible for 18% of the world's spam. The shutdown was a joint effort between California security firm FireEye, the British-based Spamhaus Project…

File hosting service Dropbox was hit with a brief 20-minute outage yesterday afternoon but the bigger story is the discovery of what appears to be some type of internal or external email address leak. The downtime and security concern are…

Update (7/6): Researchers at Sophos are backtracking their previous claims, saying they're not so sure anymore about the source of the spam and if Android devices are indeed involved.

I’ve owned the same email address for over 10 years so it goes without saying that I’ve seen my fair share of spam messages. Even with various email rules and spam blockers in place, I typically wake up to nearly…

In an effort to penalize evil webspammers and reward those who utilize their SEO powers for good, Google announced that it will be adding new anti-webspam measures to its search algorithm. The changes are expected to roll out over the…

Although folks are currently fixated on the Flashback botnet, Sophos draws attention to the fact that one in five Macs harbors some kind of Windows-oriented malware. The company gathered results over seven days from 100,000 Apple machines using its free antivirus program...

Twitter has taken a stand against those spamming their popular micro-blogging service by filing a lawsuit in a federal court in San Francisco against five of the most prolific spam tool providers, and the people that use them to flood…

The Stanford team that developed "deCaptcha" to bypass audio and text versions of NuCaptcha's anti-bot scheme has cracked the video prompts too. In detailed article, security expert Elie Bursztein explains how he and his colleagues defeat video Captchas with a…

Industry heavyweights including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and several others are joining forces to combat phishing and make email more trustworthy. Forming an initiative called DMARC -- short for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance -- their aim is to…