UK’s worst spammer loses appeal

The Register has a story about Peter Francis-Macrae, 24-year-old, who was convicted on a variety of charges ranging from fraud and blackmail to making threats to kill and sentenced to six years imprisonment. He has failed in an appeal court bid to quash two of his convictions.

He made an estimated £1.6m from a series of domain name scams, promoted through spam email.

Virus infections drop, spam on the up

The number of viruses hitting Irish inboxes has fallen but spam continues to rise, reports Ciara O’Brien for The Register.

The Irish email monitoring firm found that the rate of virus infection in the mails that it filtered for its customers fell to 11.65 per cent in September. This reverses the brief rise seen in August 2006, when the rate of infection rose to 15.15 per cent.

On the other hand, the US was still at the top of spam tables, generating 44.13 percent of the spam filtered. This was followed by the Republic of Korea, with 13.75 percent.