At the moment it seems (according to PC Mag) that Branded3 has been contacted by Path and that his social life has been repaired, so to speak. But the resulting clash between Path and Facebook is still in a bit of a battle heat. Facebook’s current dealing with the situation includes blocking Path from using its full contact search abilities – this having never been true for Path up until this point.

At the moment it appears that Facebook is either limited or completely blocked from Path depending on the build you’ve got on your device. If you’d like to retain access to Facebook on Path, you may want to stick with the version you’ve got. We’re currently awaiting word from Path on the subject to confirm their side of the story while this situation remains in flux.

Dave Morin, CEO of Path also spoke with AllThingsD this week about the app ecosystem.

“Invites on Path are never sent without a user’s consent — any allegations to the contrary are false. … We certainly hope that Facebook allows users to connect with their friends on Path and with any other partner applications in the future.” – Morin for Path

If you’ve used Path in the past with Facebook onboard, please feel free to send in your comments and/or suggestions on how the two might live in harmony from this point on. As Facebook is not in the business of wanting to be associated with Spam in any way at all, it’s not like the big blue social network to bend over easily when it comes to negative press such as this. Path may be in for a big cut-off for the time being.

Earlier this week, Path was in boiling water after many users complained that the app was spamming text messages to all of their friends. The text messages were sent around 6:00A.M. last week, disrupting a lot of people’s sleep. After a series of complaints, Facebook decided that it’s in everyone’s best interest if the service no longer had access to their friend’s personal information.

Unfortunately for Path, losing access to Facebook’s social graph will be detrimental to its growing user base. It was just last week when Path announced that over 10 million users have registered for its service. It may have trouble reaching its next milestone if it doesn’t find another way to entice users fast (without the need of spam of course). It can still let people invite others through their Gmail accounts, contact books, and Twitter accounts, but even then, it still may not generate nearly as many new additions as when it was able to let users “Find Friends” on Facebook.

Path isn’t the only service to be banned from Twitter. Facebook has also blocked MessageMe’s access to its social graph, as well as Voxers. It’s speculated that Facebook blocked MessageMe because it poses a threat to Facebook’s own Messenger service, however Facebook stated that it was because the service copied Messenger’s core functionalities. Facebook’s social graph is important in helping these apps obtain a huge user base, so being forbidden access to it can spell danger for their futures.

[via TechCrunch]

Path, which has seen monumental growth, uses a tactic similar those annoying Facebook apps that post things to your Facebook wall and, worse yet, your friends’ walls without your permission, hocking answers or stickers or secrets that are only visible if that friend downloads the app. Such is the way Path has decided to work, selecting all of the user’s contacts by default for a stock message.

If the user isn’t paying too much attention during the sign-up process or misunderstands that part, the app will take it upon itself to send a mass message out to the user’s contacts. Such was the case with Stephen Kenwright, who The Verge reports had his contacts mass spammed with a message reading, “Stephen Kenwright has photos to show you on Path. Download the free app:”, followed by a link. Other users have complained about the same problem in recent time.

Utilizing these tactics, it’s not hard to see how Path is raking in a million new users every week, as well as more than a few disgruntled one who uninstall the app after finding out that coworkers and friends were spammed with text messages. Path has a different take on the issue, saying that it isn’t spam, but is instead a feature that helps users get the most from the service by having friends and family sign up. If a user doesn’t want the text messages to be sent out, they must remember to unselect their auto-selected contacts on the sign-up page.

[via The Verge]

The arrest made this week was made in response to the DDoS attack made in March and took place in Barcelona based on a warrant that covered what appears to be the entirety or Europe. The capture of the man who is at the moment remaining anonymous is a 35-year-old Dutchman and is expected to be transfered to the Netherlands relatively soon.

The attack in March has since been claimed by several companies that’d been previously flagged by Spamhaus in association with spam or otherwise unfriendly hacking activities. According to a source speaking with PC World, the arrest has been made on the top spokesperson for the group said to be responsible for the attacks, the Stophaus Movement, created to protest Spamhaus’ authority in Europe. At the time, this spokesperson said that his involvement in the project was non-existent, suggesting Stophaus members from China and Russia were to blame.

Have a peek at the timeline below for more information on the attacks from earlier this year ans stay tuned to SlashGear as we follow the fallout through the future. And make sure you’re safe from all the spam and the hacks as well – they’re nothing to mess with.

The New York Times states that Kamphuis asked for support from hackers to launch attacks against Spamhaus. He wrote on his Facebook,

“Yo anons, we could use a little help in shutting down illegal slander and blackmail censorship project ‘spamhaus.org,’ which thinks it can dictate its views on what should and should not be on the internet.

Kamphuis later stated that he had no direct roles in the attacks against Spamhaus, and that it was actually the work of Stophaus, an anti-Spamhaus group, that was directly to blame. He states that Stophaus was also at fault for causing the internet lag that affected many consumers in the past week. Dutch authorities, however, have discovered evidence that contradicts Kamphuis’s statement. Greenhost, a Dutch internet hosting service, discovered the digital footprints of one of Kamphuis’s companies, CB3ROB, in the digital attack against Spamhaus.

A security specialist at the University of Amsterdam, J.P. Velders, stated, “It’s very clear that he has a big role in this, even if there isn’t 100 percent airtight proof that he is behind it.” Velders says that authorities need to figure out how much he was involved in these cyber attacks, and how they can take action against him.

Kamphuis worked at XS4ALL, a Dutch ISP, where one of his ex co-workers stated that he was constantly reprimanded for hacking into his boss’s computer system. The ex co-worker also stated that Kamphuis was a very eccentric person, and that he “hates authority in any form.” Erik Bais, owner of A2B-Internet, a company that used to work with Kamphuis’s company, stated that Kamphuis is “like a loose cannon” and that he doesn’t have “regard for repercussions or collateral damage.”

Kamphuis is currently discussing his distaste for Spamhaus publicly on his Facebook. There he states that he is an internet freedom fighter who is along the same lines as Julian Assange and that what Spamhaus is doing is censorship. He stated that Spamhaus as acted “without any court verdit, just by blackmail of suppliers and Jew lies.”

[via The New York Times]

A couple of security experts have stated that cyber attacks, like the one on Spamhaus, are a sign of many similar attacks that will show up in the future. Kaspersky has stated that the attack is the largest DDoS attack to date. It stated that the scale of the attack was speculated to be operating at speeds of 300Gbps. It also states that attacks like these will be occurring more in the future due to the “development of the Internet itself” as well as two major motives. The first motive being “monterary profit”, where cyber criminals use DDoS attacks to disrupt a corporation’s services in order to extort money from them. The second motive revolves around cyber criminals launching DDoS attacks against companies to satisfy their own personal agendas.

Joakim Sundberg, part of F5 Networks, stated that he expected to see an attack like the one on Spamhaus for some time now. He called the attack “domain name service reflection”. He states that DNS Reflection attacks will start becoming more mainstream in DDoS attacks in the future, especially as more cyber criminals and hacktivists need to come up with more new, and better ways to launch their attacks.

Sundberg also states that while the Spamhaus attack may be the largest DDoS attack right now, it’s “just one among many that we will see throughout 2013.” He says that a DDoS attack is “just a smoke screen for a more sophisticated attack that can potentially cost the company even more money.” Whatever the attack may be, Spamhaus is confident that they will be able to withstand it. The group says, “We can’t be brought down. Spamhaus has more than 80 servers around the world. We’ve built the biggest DNS server around.” Whatever is going on between the two companies, it’ll just end up hurting innocent consumers in the end.

[via The Telegraph]

What we’ve got going on here is a battle on several tiers. The first is the blocking of Cyberbunker by the powers that be – with Spamhaus, that is. The second is the retaliation that a variety of hacker groups are taking on Cyberbunker as well as a collection of other sites for having blocked Cyberbunker in the first place. Cyberbunker is being accused of hosting SPAM websites and sources that Spamhaus has dedicated themselves to kicking out of the web.

Spamhaus is a non-profit group that helps email providers filter unwanted content from users across the web. They do this with a collection of block lists of known Spammers and malicious organizations. Spamhaus recently blocked servers maintained by Cyberbunker and said that the business was working in cooperation with “criminal gangs” of the Eastern Europe and Russian variety in their retaliation for the blocks.

Cyberbunker is known for being a server of all manner of web content, with only a couple of choice exceptions. Spam is not one of them. Speaking with the BBC this week, Steve Linford, chief executive for Spamhaus, noted that the retaliatory attacks happening now have been unheard of in scale.

“We’ve been under this cyber-attack for well over a week. But we’re up – they haven’t been able to knock us down. Our engineers are doing an immense job in keeping it up – this sort of attack would take down pretty much anything else. If you aimed this at Downing Street they would be down instantly. They would be completely off the internet.” – Linford

Speaking about the effect this attack has been having on the rest of the web, Prof Alan Woodward also let the BBC know that the internet was, indeed, slowing down as a result. Woodward is a cybersecurity expert at the University of Surrey.

“If you imagine it as a motorway, attacks try and put enough traffic on there to clog up the on and off ramps. With this attack, there’s so much traffic it’s clogging up the motorway itself.” – Woodward

According to Spamhaus’ Linford, Google and a variety of other helpful companies with the capacity to assist have been making their resources available in an effort to “absorb” the traffic this event is generating. Linford has also added that they’re quite confident that they’ll prevail eventually.

“They are targeting every part of the internet infrastructure that they feel can be brought down. We can’t be brought down. Spamhaus has more than 80 servers around the world. We’ve built the biggest DNS server around.” – Linford

Sound like a fun battle to you? We’ll be following this story with a close eye as it continues to affect us all. Let us know if you’ve felt the impact yourself – or if you think it’s all bullocks, instead insisting that your internet is just slower than everyone else!

Aside from the annoyance factor, some of the recipients of the spam messages had to pay for them, with the FTC stating that up to 12-percent of mobile subscribers do not have a text messaging plan. In some instances, the information collected via the prize and gift card websites, which the text messages linked to, was sold to third-parties.

Those who went through with the process were subjected to a variety of conditions to get the gift card or prize that weren’t specified upfront, such as completing offers and getting friends to participate. Because of this, the defendants are said to have violated the FTC Act, which requires consumers to be informed about the various conditions that need to be satisfied to receive the gift. The agency seeks a restraining order that will keep the defendants from continuing with these activities.

The FTC’s Acting Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection Charles A. Harwood had this to say: “Today’s announcement says ‘game over’ to the major league scam artists behind millions of spam texts. The FTC is committed to rooting out this deception and stopping it. For consumers who find spam texts on their phones, delete them, immediately. The offers are, in a word, garbage.”

[via FTC]

Many users took to Dropbox’s support forums and stated that many of their Dropbox-exclusive e-mail accounts were compromised. They are receiving phishing e-mails from fake LinkedIn and PayPal e-mail addresses, as well as “offers” from casinos and gambling sites. The PayPal phishing e-mails are more frightening because they appear very similar to real PayPal transaction e-mails, and to the unaware user, could result in their computers being infected by malware.

Dropbox states that this attack may have been a long, postponed effect from its previous security compromise last July. The attacks doesn’t seem as widespread as they were last year, but then again, more affected users can come forward and post their own reports soon.

If you believe you’re one of the affected users, Dropbox encourages you to forward the spam emails to their support e-mail address. A spokesperson for Dropbox stated, “If you’ve received spam to an email account you only use for Dropbox, please send the message (including full headers) to support-security@dropbox.com to help our ongoing investigation.” It is also suggested that you change your e-mail password as well as your Dropbox password.

[via Dropbox]

Windows Phone 7.8 will be hitting handsets in early 2013, though we’re not sure of an exact release date at the moment. A couple of unlucky SMS spammers have been hit with a hefty fine after their company was accused of sending out millions of annoying text messages, but they claim that they had permission to send all of those text messages to the recipients. Google announced today that it has purchased Incentive Targeting, a company that focuses on helping advertisers deliver coupons to consumers more effectively.

Apple parts providers will be increasing their yields in Q1 2013, which should help with those stock shortages we keep hearing about, and today we got our first glimpse at Will.i.am’s new line up of iPhone accessories. There’s a new Facebook bug that is adding users to groups they left long ago, and HTC has brought on a new CMO to retool the company’s marketing efforts. TSMC might not be able to keep up with demand once Apple starts relying on the company for its CPUs, and Ballistic has a new line up of cases for the iPhone, Nokia Lumia 920, and Samsung Galaxy S III. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said that the Grand Theft Auto series is still special because it doesn’t release annually, and Sharp unveiled its new IGZO 32-inch 4K display today.

Finally tonight, we have a couple of reviews for you check. First up is Craig Lloyd with his review of the HTC Windows Phone 8X from Verizon, while Chris Burns gives us his review of the T-Mobile Nexus 4. That does it for tonight’s evening Wrap-Up, we hope you enjoy the rest of your night folks!

The two gentlemen ran a company called Tetrus Telecoms, which sent out hundreds of thousands of spam text messages per day. The text messages, which were sent on behalf of claims management companies looking for compensation cases to pass on to lawyers, read, “CLAIM TODAY, you may be entitled to £3500 for the accident you had. To CLAIM free reply CLAIM to this message. To opt out text STOP”.

In order to make it possible to sent these hundreds of thousands of spam text messages, Niebel and McNeish used up around 70 mobile phone SIM cards per day, but they brought in over £7,000 (almost $11,200) in sales every day, but the company’s directors were earning thousands more than that. The SIM would be inserted in a card reader that was connected to a computer, and text messages would be continuously sent until each SIM card’s text message limit had been reached.

In their defense, Niebel and McNeish claim that the company had permission to send out the texts because the users on the lists they were using had given their consent to be contacted, and Niebel said he provided evidence to the court to prove it. Needless to say, the two gentlemen will be challenging the fine.

[via Android Community]

This situation is being reported by multiple sources who speak on the fan count of large pages like Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker which TechCrunch says lost 96,000 fans in less than 24 hours. Facebook has noted that most pages will not experience any gigantic changes in their amounts of likes and “real” Facebook fans, but they should expect some manner of change or another in numbers. Do not be afraid though, these changes are not in the number of actual users, but robots and accounts created just for likes instead.

In other words, if you’ve got a page that’s liked by nothing but accounts with single photos of a strangely promiscuous lady who has little to no information up about herself, only a note about how she’s “new to this Facebook thing”, you’ll be seeing some drops. This is part of Facebook’s big plan to give another new wave of legitimacy to the social network universe – with the cuts of the unreal masses, investors will be able to have a much more accurate view of how Facebook is doing (with real humans.)

Have a peek at a few more recent Facebook bits and pieces in the timeline below to see how the company has been changing since they went IPO earlier this year. As a public company, their initial offering did not do so fantastically well. Now that they’re a few months down the road, they’re staying tough about everything, even the knocking off of their own huddled robots.

It looks like the majority of the spam reports came from European countries, those including Germany, the UK and the Netherlands. For some, the spam run hit them pretty quickly, with one user claiming that they received five spam messages within a span of 11 minutes. You can have a look at what people are experiencing at this point on the Dropbox forums.

There was a 20-minute outage yesterday afternoon, which Dropbox says was not connected to the spam. So far, the outside team of experts has found no evidence of unauthorized activity on Dropbox accounts.

[via PC World]

Google+ is now taking all the spam comments and grouping them together and then hiding them behind a small indicator beneath the comment count. If you think some normal comments could have been caught in the spam filter, you can click a button titled “show comments removed as spam.” The cool part is that you don’t have to interact with the spam or ever see these posts once you trust the filter.

I would assume that the Google+ spam filter would be at least as good as the filter Google used in Gmail. I long ago stopped looking at that spam marked Gmail because they were very rarely anything that didn’t deserve to be there. It’s nice to see Google adding new features to improve the social network.

[via TheNextWeb]

Microsoft and Kaspersky Lab were able use some sort of technical means to get the 45,000 computers that make up the botnet to communicate with what they called a “sinkhole” which was a computer that the two firms controlled. The problem was the computers that were infected with the software for the botnet were still unclean. It was known from the get go that eventually that the nefarious sorts in command of the botnet would regain control.

Microsoft and Kaspersky could have used the communications with their sinkhole computer to force the infected machines to clean their act up, but in some countries, that act would have been illegal. Apparently, there are also new variants of Kelihos using new forms of encryption to hide the mass communication between the slaves and the botnet controllers. One researcher has also pointed out that there are two different RSA keys being used, indicating that two nefarious groups may be controlling the botnet. All this really means for normal Internet users is that we can probably expect an increase in spam.

[via Techworld]