Apparently the Police have recently arrested six men and seized 14 laptops, 23 mobile phones, multiple memory sticks and lots of fake documentation and cash. This may not sound like a lot, but spam spreads very quickly so if the six men arrested only made up for 0.5% of the World’s spam and phising scams millions of people will see less spam in their inbox as a result of this. This means that less people will have their identities hacked, credit card details stolen and so on.

The six people arrested were all Nigerian, they traveled to India to operate because the laws there are so lenient, in fact at the time of this post nothing in India’s Information Technology Act (introduced in 2000) addresses spam – as you can imagine experts are calling for a change in the law.

The fact that these arrests have taken place shows that the Indian government are listening to advice from security firms and finally taking action against such criminals, let’s hope that they continue with their crackdown and ultimately make the World a less spam-filled place. It is thought that South America is another place where such scammers are safe from cybercrime legislation, therefore even if spammers are eradicated from India (which is impossible) new spammers will arrive in countries such as Brazil.

If you head over to BBC News you can find out about the recent arrests and the legislation in India and Brazil – do you think governments should do more to combat spam and phising scams?

Gareth Halfacree over at thinq is reporting that an unknown third party has stolen a ‘portion’ of its customer email database. The travel site has warned its users that they may see an increase in spam. TripAdvisor does not collect member’s details such as financial information or credit card details, or passwords.

Users have also been warned by TripAdvisor to be vigilant regarding phishing attempts, as the people responsible may try emailing users and trick them into revealing personal information. The site has told members it would never ask for such details.

TripAdvisor said in a statement that they have “shut it down and are vigorously pursuing the matter with law enforcement“. They added they will be improving security to prevent it happening again. The situation while embarrassing for the company, is not as bad as it could be as they do not store member’s personal information, so the attackers have less to play with.

Are you a member of TripAdvisor? And have you received the warning email from the company?

Naked Security has more details on this, as well as a few example screenshots of what you are likely to see. The website decided to take a sample of an offending piece of malware to give you an idea of what to expect, which they then opened up with numerous versions of Adobe reader.

Adobe Reader 8 did try to open the file, but did try to download as well as run the code from what was said to be a Colombian TLD. We are sure that people with more experience with this sort of thing will know what that means. We cannot stress how important it is to have Adobe Reader X, as this latest software did not suffer any such attack.

There was an error message, which you can see for yourself on the Naked Security website. Knowing that the latest version of Adobe Reader was able to stop this attack surly has to be reason enough to download it now.

You can get the latest version of Adobe Reader X here, you are advised that you might have to pause your antivirus software why it download and installs. Have you been a victim of the attack mentioned above?